Candle Business PRO
The Candle Business Pro Podcast is your go-to show for turning your passion for candle making into a thriving business. Hosted by Sabastian Garsnett — co-founder of Garsnett Beacon Candle Co. and creator of Candle Business PRO — this podcast shares the real strategies that helped us grow from small-batch pours to three storefronts and 140+ wholesale accounts.
Whether you're just starting or ready to scale, each episode dives into practical, proven tactics around branding, markets, product launches, email marketing, pouring parties, fundraisers, and more — all through the lens of a candle business.
New episodes drop weekly. Hit subscribe and join a growing community of makers who are ready to go pro.
Candle Business PRO
Etsy vs Shopify: The Best Choice for Candle Makers?
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#009 Today I break down the advantages of each Shopify and Etsy based on business goals, sharing specific strategies for leveraging both marketplaces effectively.
• Etsy provides immediate access to millions of potential buyers with built-in traffic
• Competition on Etsy is fierce with thousands of candle sellers competing for visibility
• Etsy's total fees can reach 21.5% per sale (listing fees, transaction fees, and offsite ad fees)
• Shopify offers complete control over branding, customer experience, and data collection
• Shopify requires driving your own traffic through SEO, advertising, or social media
• Personalized items and seasonal candles perform particularly well on Etsy
• Building your own website takes time for SEO to gain traction (14-21 days for Google to crawl updates)
• Including business cards with discount codes in Etsy orders can help transition customers to your Shopify store
• Third-party apps can sync inventory between both platforms for simplified management
If you found this episode helpful, we'd love it if you'd leave us a rating and a review. It really helps us reach more makers like you.
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Platform Choice Dilemma Introduction
Speaker 1All right, candle makers, let's talk shop literally Etsy or Shopify which one actually deserves your time, money and precious candle making energy?
Etsy Pros: Built-in Audience & Setup
Speaker 1I've tried them both and today we're diving into the honest pros, the real cons and my unfiltered opinion on which one I would choose if I started all over again. Grab your notebook, because this decision might just change your candle business forever. So, etsy versus Shopify, we get asked this question pretty often. Of which one should I start with? Are they both oversaturated? Where can I start getting some candle sales at? So today we're going to dive into the pros and cons of both of those. Let you know where we're at, what our experience with both of those are and what we would decide to go with if we were to start all over again. So I'm Sebastian Garzant, the co-founder of Garzant Beacon Candle Company with my husband, chad, where we have passed now $1.2 million in candle sales. I'm also the founder of Candle Business Pro, where we help makers go pro.
Speaker 1So let's dive into this first. So let's break this into different segments based on the platform, and then also the pros and cons. So let's start off with some positivity. So what are the pros of Etsy? Well, one you have a built-in audience with Etsy. So that is probably the most attractive thing about Etsy is it has an audience. People, millions of people are going to Etsy every single day looking to purchase something. Now it's instant traffic potential for you. You can make a candle, you can list it out there today and you can get sales today. So that is the pro, the top pro of Etsy is that it can bring you sales when you have no audience.
Etsy Cons: Competition & Branding Limitations
Speaker 1There's a few other things that are really nice about Etsy. So it's very easy to set up. There's no technical experience that you need to set it up. They walk you through the setup process. It's very, very user-friendly. There's also a very low initial investment. This is going to be ideal for if you're just getting started on a product, you're not really sure if you have a market fit for your product. If you're making a candle and you don't have that niche or that target audience that I always talk about, almost every episode just seems to come up, because I am such a big proponent of knowing exactly who you want to sell to and what niche you're in so that you can always communicate and talk to that customer Right. But if you don't have that figured out right now you're not quite sure who your ideal customer is, but you already have the product ready to go. Putting it out on Etsy can go ahead and start generating you some sales can go ahead and start generating you some sales, but you still need to have that target audience figured out because of some of the things that we're going to talk about with setting up Etsy and making sure that you're using the right tools that are built into it to be successful. Okay, so it's a low investment, it's easy to set up, it's easy for anyone to get on there and it's pretty good with having its own built in SEO, which is going to connect potential buyers with you as a seller. So those are some really good things about Etsy.
Speaker 1So high competition is going to be probably the highest con of Etsy, because now they are allowing others that haven't actually made the product themselves to sell products on there, so it's even getting more saturated. So you really have to stick out. The competition is fierce out there, right? We all know thousands of candle makers out there exist and on top of that, you have now the ability for makers all across the world to be putting products onto Etsy, so you can literally buy in bulk from overseas candles or any product, receive it and then put it onto Etsy yourself and sell that now. That used to be something that was banned, but now they are allowing that. So that is something that is contributing to the competition on Etsy being even higher than ever. So that is one of the downsides.
Speaker 1One of the other downsides of Etsy is going to be the limited branding opportunity. So you have less control over your customer's experience. So a person that we don't know is going to go on to Etsy. They're going to be searching for a product. Your product may show up in the results. They like it, they buy it, but you don't have a direct access point to that customer, meaning any of the communication you have with that customer is going through Etsy. So you don't have access to their email address. You don't have access to anything. You'll have access to an address to send that product to, but without having a phone number to put them on SMS messaging or their email address for you to collect that information, for you to continuously market to.
Speaker 1That's one of the downsides. You just don't have that availability anymore. You are able to obviously sell to them. You can message with them if there's any questions or concerns throughout the transaction with them through Etsy's app, and that's all built really well. But once the transaction's over with, so is that relationship with them. Now you are able to send coupons to people that have liked your store within a certain amount of period or to previous buyers. So there are some things built into Etsy that really helps to have a ongoing relationship with them. But if at any point, you decide that Etsy is not for you anymore and you want to go with Shopify or another marketplace to sell your products on, you're not able to take those customers with you. So keep that in mind. That is one of the downsides of Etsy, because we should all be trying to grow our business, and growing our business Isn't going to just be in how many actual sales or transactions that we complete in a certain amount of time, but how many people are coming into our atmosphere, how many people are coming into our world that now when we are running a promotion when it comes to Etsy.
Understanding Etsy's Fee Structure
Speaker 1So let's talk about the fees. Etsy is going to have higher fees when it comes to a percentage that they're going to take from you than other places. So there's a listing fee. Now the listing fee is very, very minimal. So the listing fee currently it's 20 cents, so very, very minimal. That listing fee is for six months. So you can put a product out there on Etsy for 20 cents. Say, I've got a hundred candles, that's gonna be, I can put a hundred candles out on Etsy, and you know, for $20. So every time you sell the product it gets relisted. If you have the inventory and if you have it to automatically relist, so it's gonna charge you that 20 cents every time you sell it. So just you know, build that into your cost of that 20 cents there, into every transaction that you do. So that's very, very, very, very minimal. That's going to be the least expensive fee, probably in any venture. We go on with selling candles, no matter what platform. So that's that's very nominal. I'm not concerned about that whatsoever. Now there's a transaction fee of 6.5%. Okay, so if you make a $100 sale on Etsy, they're going to take $6.50 from you right away. So that's their transaction fee. So it is definitely higher than Shopify. It's higher than any other marketplaces. It's definitely high, but we'll discuss why it's not so shocking here in just a moment.
Speaker 1Additionally, on top of just that transaction fee of six and a half percent. They have an offsite ads fee. This fee, based on whichever plan you have. There is an Etsy and there's like an Etsy pro or an Etsy plus is what they call it. So based on which level you're at, one costs $5 a month and it just gives you some more features. So they swear inside of their handbook that you do not get any preferential treatment by being in the plus side but and paying that monthly fee. But you do get some features on your homepage and some other listing features that may help you out. We do not use it, but if you want to check that out, you certainly can. But just keep in mind that you are not going to get a better chance of selling just because of that. Now, if they are allowing you to control how the homepage for your store looks, um, and it's going to be built a little bit differently, that possibly can contribute to the customer's experience being better, which may lead to a sale for you. But it's something that we we don't spend the five dollars on it. We just it's just not something that we feel is going to bring us additional sales.
Speaker 1I don't think a lot of people are going to our actual like stores page. They're going to be searching for something and then there's a whole. There's tons of results that are going to show up and hopefully they're going to select one of our products. They're going to go to go to that product specifically, probably not going to go and shop the rest of our store, but it does depend on what they're looking for, of course. If it's a very specific keyword that they're looking for let's say they want a vanilla scented soy candle, right, and they land on my page and they go to it I don't see them going to my page to look at whatever other items I have, necessarily unless they've already decided that they like that product. If they like that product that the results showed them, then sure they may go and buy more things. So that might be one of the reasons to invest and do an Etsy plus, but we don't do that.
Speaker 1The other thing that I was referencing of why it could be 12% or 15% is the offsite ads. So what happens is Etsy will run ads on Facebook, on Instagram, on Google, lots of different places all over the internet that Etsy is actually running ads for you if you have this turned on, and what's really nice about this is that you're not paying for those ads. If you opt in to offsite ads with Etsy, you don't pay anything unless your item sales. And if your item sells then you're paying either 12% or 15%. And again that the difference there is based on if you are opted into that a monthly fee to be part of the Etsy plus program, then you'll be paying a less percentage. There we have this turned on.
Speaker 1A lot of candle makers I do see complain about the fees of Etsy and especially this offsite ads fee. But in reality that fee is very, very small compared to if you're going to go and run your own ads on Facebook or on Instagram and trying to sell your products that way, because you're not guaranteed any sales when you're spending money running ads. But if Etsy picks your product and they're going to run ads for it, you're not paying anything unless that product sells. So in reality, if you look at, say that, 12 to 15 percent let's just say 15 percent to be on the higher side and you look at that six and a half percent transaction fee, so now we're at 21 and a half percent. Ok, so 21 and a half percent is the maximum fee that Etsy will charge you for a sale. Now that seems high, but from our experience we know that if you go and spend a hundred dollars running Facebook ads at 21 and a half percent, that means if you spent $100 on Facebook, that means you're getting over $500 in sales.
Speaker 1If that was the case, everybody would be running ads. Okay, everybody would be running ads because you're getting more money back than what you're putting in. Also, when you factor in your cost of goods and your margins for your candle, for your candle making you, you know you should be close to five X, right? So if I have a $26 candle, you know, such as just our classic candle, that are $26 and we are making these for like five, five, 50. So we are over a five X. That's what we're aiming for with our brand. Um is getting at least a five X or very close to a 5X margin.
Shopify Pros: Control & Analytics
Speaker 1So as long as you're doing that and you're pricing your products correctly, etsy, taking that 21 and a half percent plus that 20 cents for the listing fee, of course, we're still making good money. We're still making money that we would not be making if we were trying to sell them on our own with just trying to run ads, because you're not going to get that type of success running meta ads. We run ads on Facebook for our brand, but we're definitely not getting a five to one, you know, a dollar and $5 out result. That's just not reality. Okay, so the transaction fees might seem high, the fees in general on Etsy might seem high and that might persuade some people to not get on Etsy or want to complain about Etsy. But those fees to bring you a sale are really good. And remember the worst case scenario you don't get a sale and you have wasted 20 cents for your listing fee, plus the time and effort and energy that goes in, of course, to putting your products out there.
Speaker 1All right, so let's now move over to Shopify and talk about the pros and cons over there. So the pros you're going to have full control over the branding and the customer experience. You can design your Shopify website almost in any different theme that you possibly want and in fact they give you a dozen different theme options just to start with. It's a clean slate. You get to decide what to put where and how you want your customer's experience to flow, not just from them being on your website, but then also afterwards from the follow-up emails from the receipts. You're going to collect their email addresses, so you're going to be building your own audience. You can even set up an email sequence afterwards to start sending them coupons and start sending them follow-ups and start sending them emails to get reviews, right.
Speaker 1So Shopify is the gold standard for an online platform. That's why we are looking at Shopify and Etsy not Etsy versus Wix or Squarespace or any other place that you can build a website. The only place you want to build a website of your own is going to be on Shopify. It's just a gold standard. Everything is built in and packaged all together, from the actual website itself to your CRM, which is gonna be like your customer relation manager, right, where you have all of your customers' information to the checkout phase All of these things. You actually have to build each individual area if you want to go and try to build this out on Wix or like on a WordPress site, right? And so while Shopify may be more expensive on the front end than those other website builders, by the time you use all the plugins and the add-ons needed on those other website builders, it's gonna end up being more expensive than Shopify. So you might as well, just start where it's a standard.
Speaker 1There's thousands of apps that you can use that are compatible with Shopify Um, in fact, they are shipping. So some of the some of the apps that we use, we uh, we use pirate ship, which is the shipping platform that we use to get the best rates. Um, we use a subscription box, a software, um, now, because we have a candle of the month that we send out to all of our subscribers that have signed up for that. It's fantastic for the holidays as well. Shopify actually has its native function of doing a subscription now as well, so we might not even need to be paying for that app anymore. There's so many more apps that they have the the review apps, right, so, where you can get them to your customers to leave a review and then it's posted on your website. So there's so many good things within Shopify built into it, right. So there's that extensive app integration and that's going to include email marketing, getting reviews, reward programs, all of those types of things.
Shopify Cons & Fee Structure
Speaker 1They've also have a really robust and detailed analytics to track. So I go into my Shopify every single day. I live in my Shopify, in fact, people that are in our inner circle membership. They actually see the sales that I'm getting every day, because I'm showing them during my office hours, which is our live session we do every week with our members. I'm going in there and showing them the backend of my Shopify. Whenever there's a question whether it's about emails, shipping, average order value, any of the analytics that we want to dive into I just show them my store and so they can see all of what's being captured. So the analytics are super robust. So, like, for instance, this weekend, I want to know do I have the proper staffing for my store? Is it busy, is it not? So I can go and look at my last couple of years and see what the trends are, just to make sure that I'm running my business properly. I also have the ability to obviously know what my inventory is, and then I can also do a forecast to see hey, based on how many of these are selling, how many do I need to make to get by for the next 60, 90, 120 days? Right? So it is a lot more robust. It's a very robust. It's going to be the best website to build on out there. So these are some of the pros of Shopify. Is that you're going to have all of these analytics as well.
Speaker 1Some other good things is there is going to be a lower transaction fee, and we'll talk about the fees here in just a moment but the overall transaction fee is going to be lower than it is on Etsy or any other of the platforms out there that you may be building off of, and this is because you're using a Shopify checkout that is its own checkout system that has an agreement with the Visa, the MasterCard, american Express, apple Pay and all of those, so they can get that transaction fee pretty low. So we'll talk about the fees here in just a moment. Let's dive into those cons of Shopify. So the downsides of Shopify the biggest one, the most glaring one to anyone that has opened up a Shopify store is you must drive your own traffic from scratch. This is going to be really challenging for most new candle makers that are turning this into a business. So, even though there's millions of candle buyers in the world, they aren't just waiting around for your store to open so they can just run right in and start buying from you. Now, if you have a really good social media following, you already have kind of a sphere of people that are in your space that are wanting to buy from you. Absolutely Send them to your Shopify store to make that transaction. It's going to be a lot less of a fee than going to, let's say, etsy, but you still have to drive them to your website and you have to drive those strangers to your website as well.
Speaker 1Right Now, you can do this through Google. You have to have your SEO, which is your search engine optimization, set up completely. It has to be done really, really well. In fact, for our Inner Circle members, we actually have a workshop where we showed you what are we ranking in the top 10? What are we on the very first front page of Google for? What have we done well? And then where are the opportunities for us to do better? And then what we'll do is we will make the changes, tell you what the changes are and then go back and see what the improvements did as far as our ranking goes. So we talk about this a lot inside of the inner circle, which is our community of other candle business owners or makers that have turned this into a business. So I would highly recommend you check that out if you are interested in growing your Shopify store or any other area of your business.
Speaker 1One of the other pros of the inner circle is I actually walk you through. One of the other pros of the inner circle is I actually walk you through. It's a really robust three part workshop on how to build a Shopify store. So if you're struggling with Shopify, I totally get it. We were originally as well. You don't want to pay someone to build your Shopify store because what's going to happen is you're going to spend a lot of money on paying someone to build it for you.
Speaker 1But if you don't learn the ins and outs of it yourself, as soon as you need some SEO changes, you need some optimization to happen. You need to swap out images, you need to put something on sale. Anytime you got to make any changes, you're going to have to go back and pay that person again to do that. So you want to learn how to use any of the softwares that you're using, but you definitely want to learn how to use Shopify. So, again, if you are in the inner circle or if you sign up for it, you can go through our how to build a Shopify workshop, where we actually built an entirely brand new brand, separate from our Garcin and Beacon Candle company, just to show you how to build a store. So we went from completely from scratch so that we didn't miss a single step, including like going out to making sure that trademarks weren't already taken and setting it up and connecting it with our bank accounts all of that stuff we show you how to do. So that would be one of the cons of Shopify is, you've got to build it all out. You got to build it all out, but then you can. You own everything, right. You own all the customer data and you can reach out to your customers at any time. So those are some really good things about Shopify.
Speaker 1Let's talk about the transaction fees, though. Shopify has a monthly subscription fee, so $39, I believe, is what it is at now. I'll put a link for our Shopify affiliate link in the in the notes below that you can get uh, it will sometimes fluctuate. Right now they have where you can get the first three months for only a dollar a month, so that would give you time to build out your store. See if it's going to be a place where you're going to want to invest. Invest a lot of your time and resources into building it out and you know even more. You know for a dollar for the next. You know $3 for the next three months. That's a pretty good deal there. So open up your Shopify and then the transaction fees you're going to see after that are going to vary. So the credit card fees for the transaction we call them credit card fees is the transaction that Shopify is going to take. It's going to be between 2.4 and 2.9%. That's going to be based on which plan of Shopify you're on. So we're on the $39 plan.
Speaker 1We do not do Shopify Pro or any of the higher tiers that get really expensive. We do not use any of those. We use the basic Shopify. That's $39 a month. We use Shopify in all three of my stores now and they really try to encourage us to upgrade to what's called the POS, which is point of sale upgrade, but that's an additional $79 a month and we have not found that we would need it. So it does little things like we can change what it says on the receipts. You know that we're printing out of the register for each individual store things like that. There's a few other inventory things that come along with using that.
Speaker 1But we run three stores. We have an online store, we still have markets still. And then, obviously, our website. We have not found the reason for it to be beneficial for us to upgrade and justify that cost. So just keep that in mind, because you're going to see a lot of these upgrade opportunities that they are going to give you or present to you. We haven't needed to take them up on that, so just keep that in mind. So we're paying $39 a month and then we're paying between 2.4,.
Platform Recommendations Based on Goals
Speaker 1Well, we're paying the higher in the 2.9% on the transaction, but there is a 30 cent transaction fee as well. So every time there's a card swipe, there's 30 cents. Kind of think about it like the listing fee over on Etsy. That's 20 cents. Right, it's 20 cents to put a product out there. When it sells. You got to pay 20 cents for it to replenish out there On Shopify's side, per transaction, so it can be multiple items. So you're not paying per item, you're paying per transaction. It's 30 cents. A swipe and then that 2.9% transaction fee. Of course, that transaction fee, as I mentioned, can vary as well, but you do have that $39 or whatever it currently is fee to have a Shopify store. That's going to be the biggest hindrance for a lot of people besides, just the.
Speaker 1You got to build it out. You got to build it out. You got to put all the work into it. So let's talk about what my personal recommendations would be for you. So what's the goal? What is your goal with your business? Do you really just like creating a few of this item and then you want to sell it and then you're going to switch and create a few of this item? Do you like to switch up your sense all the time? The reason I ask that is because, if you're going to be changing things a lot, etsy might be the way to go to get traffic and putting something in front of a massive audience of people.
Speaker 1Right, people are looking for stuff that are just trending. There's always trends going up and down on Etsy and they share that information with you. If Bohemian is in right now or Chic is in right now, they tell you, they put out newsletters and they explain what's hot and you can actually make things that are on trend and you can do really well. You can also do really well on Etsy with personalized items. So you can have personalized candles that are something where you're going to put someone's name on it or you're going to put a custom label on the candle or even just on the back of the candle, because a lot of people on Etsy are gifting right. They are buying for other people and not just themselves. In fact, most of the orders that we get spoiler alert were on both Etsy and Shopify. So most of the orders we get on Etsy are those personalized candles and that is why we still have an Etsy store. This is my Sugar Lemon, my basic, my number one, selling candle in our store.
Speaker 1This right here does not do well on Etsy because people aren't necessarily looking for it. It's not something that is the latest trend, it's not the hottest thing out. It's not personalized, not something that is the latest trend, it's not the hottest thing out, it's not personalized, it is. It does well on Shopify from people searching online for that. But generally people searching on Etsy are looking for something super unique or something that they can gift for someone. So my recommendation for Etsy is do you like to switch gears a lot? If you like to switch gears a lot, you're going to be putting out the latest since the hottest craze a crave out there. It's definitely worth exploring, because putting those super trendy things out on Shopify, your website needs to be around a while for that SEO to start working for you.
Speaker 1Now you can go ahead and put stuff on Shopify, like what we do, and then we'll run ads for it, right? For instance, last year, santal was like the hottest summer scent. We built out a couple of Santal candles. We can run ads all over Google to our Shopify store. We can also do the same thing on Facebook, right? So we're running Facebook ads for that Santal candle and when someone clicks on that ad it's taking them to that product, which is on my Shopify store. So that is one of the pros of the Shopify you can run your own ads to it. But if you're not wanting to go down that road of running ads, it's going to take just a little bit of time for some of those trending keywords to be picked up by Google and driving traffic to your website. So SEO is pretty robust. It's a lot to take on, but you got to do it for your website to stick out and just know that it's a long game, right?
Speaker 1Whatever you update on your website today, on your Shopify store today, google's not even going to recognize those updates until they it's called crawl, until they crawl your website again. They're not even going to know about it yet, right? They crawl your website every 14 to 21 days, okay, so they don't tell you exactly when they're going to do it, but it's. It's for e-commerce stores. The average is 14 to 21 days. So when you make changes to your website, google may not even know about that for two to three weeks, and then Google has to see people go to your website. Google may not even know about that for two to three weeks, and then Google has to see people go to your website and look at the decisions they make. Do they click on it? And then they leave right away. That's called a bounce and that's that's not a good rating. If they go to your website and they hang out there for a little bit, that's a good rating in Google's eyes. So then you go higher up on the rankings within Google.
Speaker 1Again, we go into this pretty deep inside of an SEO workshop, inside of our inner circle, but this video and episode for the podcast is all about Shopify versus Etsy, so let's get back to that. So if you have a very unique product, etsy is a fantastic place for you to put it, if it's something you're going to keep around for a long time. If it's something that you're going to keep around for a long time, you're going to have seasonal candles that you're going to want to bring back. Or if it's, you have a brand and if you're wanting your brand to go places, you definitely want to go with Shopify. So if you are planning to do wholesale or if you're planning to do private label, if you want to establish yourself as a serious brand, you got to have a website. You got to have a Shopify store. Any of our wholesale outreach that we do so we've got like 140 ish wholesale accounts.
Speaker 1Now the way I do my outreach is when I'm reaching out to new stores to potentially carry our products, I send them to a unique hidden page on my website that I built on Shopify for them to go through my wholesale catalog and they can click through it all, but also that now they're on my website. So now I'm building trust with them. So, shopify, having your own space on the internet is something that's really good for trust. If you tell me that your brand is, you know, um, highly scented candles, whatever, it is right and you tell me the brand if I can't find a website for it, it's kind of like you can't find social media for something nowadays, right, like every brand, whether you like social media or not, every brand has to have social media. Every brand that wants to be taken serious and wants to grow is going to have to have a Shopify store. But you've got to do a lot of work to make it work for you. So my personal experience is we have both On.
Speaker 1Etsy is where we are promoting personalized items. We are also promoting trending items. Any of the hottest thing out right now we are going to put onto Etsy. And anything that is seasonal we're going to put onto Etsy, because there's going to be a fluctuation of traffic on Etsy based on the time of year for certain things. For instance, we created a unique candle for my teacher appreciation right, which is going to be really popular at the end of the school year. We put those out there the next day. We're getting sales. Same thing with, like, mother's Day candles, father's Day candles, different types of holidays out there. Those are gonna do really really well on Etsy, like instantly, instantly they can do really well.
Converting Etsy Customers to Your Website
Speaker 1You can also run ads on Etsy but at the same time, if I'm putting something on Etsy, I am for sure, putting it on my own website, because I want to have it living on that website, for Google to find it and start sending organic traffic to it long-term. Again, building out your own website, you're not going to be getting business come to it right away unless you have a following that you're going to send to it. So let's talk about transitioning from Etsy customers to Shopify customers so you can do certain things, such as put a business card inside of any order that you get on Etsy. So if you're getting orders on Etsy, you want them to buy from you directly next time, so you're not paying those transaction fees. You also want them to see what else you have, because when they're shopping with you on Etsy, they're not necessarily seeing all that you have to offer. So include a business card inside of your order. Include a discount card inside of your order for them to come back and shop with you on your website within seven days.
Speaker 1You always want to put some urgency behind it no-transcript, and then hopefully, you can capture their email address that way so that they'll always be in your ecosystem. So anytime you have a sale, a promotion, something coming up, you can then email them Anytime. I talk about this a lot as far as our own email marketing goes, when I'm talking to people inside of our inner circle or just in our Facebook group. That's free for everyone, so definitely come and join that if you'd like. But I talk about email marketing and how, anytime we're in a lull or it's been a rough month at the shop, we'll just send out an email with a promotion and we're always going to get a good return on that. We're going to get sales coming in, and the only reason we can do that is because we've been collecting these people's email addresses. So that would be the ultimate goal of you.
Speaker 1If you are putting stuff out on Etsy, go and get those sales and try to turn them into customers on your own website. So one of the downsides about Etsy that's not talked about a lot is how their algorithm is deciding what to put in each place, right? So whenever someone is searching for a specific item, they're going to be looking for a specific item. Etsy is deciding which product to put. You know, show up front and algorithms can change dramatically. It's just like on meta, which is, you know, your Facebook and Instagram, where you know you can be getting tons of traffic to your business page and then all of a sudden, it just goes away and then they want you to start boosting and putting money and ad spend behind getting your business pages seen and visible On Etsy. They own everything and the algorithm can change tomorrow and you can go from getting lots of views and traffic to none. It can completely dry up, and we hear about that In a lot of candle groups. We hear people talk about what happened. I had a hundred sales last month and now I got five Like what's going on here. So if you, you know, are thinking about that, send each one of those customers with their order, something that is going to get them to go to your own website, so that you're going to have more control of them as a customer going forward.
Speaker 1So that is what my recommendation would be, also, you know, knowing what kind of product you're going to have and is it going to fit with etsy's vibe? Um, in general, right. So etsy's vibe is. It is a handcrafted marketplace and there are some luxury goods on there, but they're going to be the more unique ones. Um, I it's, it's. They are.
Final Recommendations & Apps
Speaker 1People are price conscious when they are shopping on Etsy. You know, our candles that are $26, are probably on the higher end of most candles out on Etsy. So that is you know, that is a factor People do are going to be able to more, more price sensitive out on etsy. Remember, a lot of this is gifting for others, and while we also we all want to give really good gifts, we also want to be mindful how much we're spending as well. Um, so that's one of the things if you have a really high priced item compared to some other competitors in your space, um, if you are considered or consider your brand a high-end luxury brand, etsy might not be where your customer is, but I would still recommend at least trying it, because you may find some unique results on Etsy that might shock you. And it's again 20 cents to put your product out there. You don't pay any of those transaction fees unless it sells, so that's a really nice positive.
Speaker 1One other thing I want to mention as we wrap up here today is going to be there's pros and cons of both of them. I would recommend being on both and then just deciding where you put your effort into. So we have an Etsy store, but we don't give it any attention, we're not out there and updating our product descriptions and that SEO that we do out on Shopify. We just don't. Shopify is where the majority of our customers are coming from. In fact, we received this Shopify plaque here from Shopify when we received 10,000 orders. So we got this last year. It says June 24th of last year when we hit our 10,000th order on our website. So again, we're going to be building out our Shopify store and we're going to continue to do things with that.
Speaker 1But Etsy excuse me does have a nice return for those one-off personalized type of items, like I said, those teacher appreciation type of gifts. Or if you're on a hot trend, if you're doing a bohemian chic, if that's what's trending right now or in style right now, if your vibe is that you can do really, really well on Etsy. So go out and see and just look at the stars right next to the star rating on Shopify stores to see how many sales people are getting, and you're going to be able to notice what types of products do really well. Here's a tip for you there are apps out there that will actually take what you have in Shopify and just move it over and create a listing on Etsy for you and vice versa so you can go into these apps and put all of the product information there and it will send it to Shopify and it will send it to Etsy. So we talk about that in the inner circle often.
Speaker 1If you're in there, definitely ask me. I'll show you which apps we're using. I'll actually show you how it works. But that is really an easy way to manage all of this so that if you need to swap out photos, you can do it in both places. So look at those third-party apps. There is a charge, I think it's like $5 per channel. So Shopify would be a channel, etsy would be a channel. That's gonna be 10 bucks for us for that subscription or us to do it. But then when I need to swap out a photo, or if I had a misspelling or I want to try changing the title, and if I want to do it in both places, I can do it through a third-party app and it makes it really easy. So that's one really nice feature about using a third-party app out there. So hopefully this has helped you kind of decide, okay, which one makes the most sense In reality.
Speaker 1I think anyone starting out should try both. You can start getting some sales out on Etsy and while you're building out your Shopify. But if you're going to be driving any trap of your own traffic, I would always drive them to Shopify. I would not share that link to Etsy. Etsy will give you a link for your products. I'll actually give you a link for your Etsy store, but I would never share that or promote that unless I don't have a Shopify store. But I would just recommend anyone that's going to take this serious. You got to get a Shopify store at some point. You might as well start early, because it's going to take several months for your website to start ranking, but you want to be there and start ranking as soon as possible so that you can start getting your own customer base.
Speaker 1Thank you again for so much for being here today. If you have any questions, drop them in the show notes below. I would love to answer those for you. Let me know what's working for you. Are you finding success on Shopify versus Etsy or are you doing better on Etsy versus Shopify? Let me know if you have any tips and tricks that we can share with other people. Thank you so much for listening to the Candle Business Pro podcast. If you found this episode helpful, we'd love it if you'd leave us a rating and a review. It really helps us reach more makers like you. Again, thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye.
