If you have an Etsy shop and want to branch out to add a website, you might not be ready to run two completely separate shops.
An in-between solution for this would be to link to your Etsy shop from a website, so that people can find your website and then check out on Etsy.
The easiest way to link your Etsy shop to your website is to simply use a “shop” tab on your website. Customers who click on the tab will go directly to your Etsy shop, where they can purchase products. Another way is to use a plugin that lets you integrate an Etsy shop on the website itself, but the available plugins have spotty reviews, so you would need to research them before deciding to use one.
There are advantages and disadvantages to linking your Etsy shop to a website, and I’ll go over some of those in a bit.
Table of Contents
- How to link to your Etsy shop from your website.
- When is linking an Etsy shop to a website a good option?
- When is linking your Etsy shop from your website a bad idea?
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How to link to your Etsy shop from your website.
To link your Etsy shop to your website, all you need to do is to put a link that goes to Etsy. This can be a specific page that links directly to the full shop, or individual listings that link to the Etsy listing for that item.
Shanna, owner of The Mediocre Witch, has a link on her website that specifically says “Shop on Etsy.” She says that she did it that way to let people know where the link would take them, and so that people would trust shopping with her.
In this example the link takes you to her Etsy shop homepage, and you can see all of her merchandise there.
Another way that you can set it up would be to have a page that has pictures and a short description of your individual listings, and link those to the listing on Etsy. Clicking on the link would take customers directly to the Etsy listing, and they could check out there.
On Jan Schmuckal’s website, she adds the link in a text form and tells the customer that they’ll be going to her shop so that they know where the click will take them.
It’s important to let people know what clicking on the link will do, or they won’t trust it!
When is linking an Etsy shop to a website a good option?
Linking an Etsy shop to a website is a good option if you don’t want to manage two distinct selling platforms, or if you want to start building the domain authority of your business url without having to set up a second shop. You’ll also be able to let Etsy do the work of collecting and remitting sales and VAT taxes by linking from your website.
Building domain authority.
When you buy a domain name it sits on the registrar’s site until you point it at a website.
Once you do that, it starts getting “credit” with Google for just existing, and also for traffic that’s sent to it.
The more traffic it gets, the more authority it builds up. The more authority it has, the better it will perform in Google search results.
The benefit of registering a domain name even if you don’t have a full-fledged website is that you’ll prevent someone else from taking your business name. This happens pretty frequently, because there’s no law against registering a name that you don’t own in another capacity.
I know of one business that registered a competing business’s name and pointed it at their own website. So when you type that more well-known business name in, it takes you to the lesser-known business.
Once you register a domain name, you can set up a simple site using WordPress or another website service, or you can point the url at your Etsy shop. Your customers will be able to find you by typing in your business name with a dot com.
By setting up a website, even if it’s only two or three pages, you’ll start building the domain authority for that site. When you expand the website later it will be easier to get more traffic from Google with that history behind it.
Streamlining your workload.
Another reason to link an Etsy shop to your website would be to streamline your workload by only having to manage one shop.
I have a separate website and Etsy shops, and it’s definitely more work to coordinate more than one point of sale.
The way that I do it is to use an outside shipping company for my shipping labels, which pulls in all the orders from both platforms.
That way all of the orders that I have are in one central location so that everything’s in one place.
If you’re not quite ready to manage two separate shops, or if you have one-of-a-kind merchandise that you can only list once, it might be easier to use Etsy as your selling platform. In that case, linking to your Etsy shop from your website makes sense.
Letting Etsy collect taxes for you.
Because Etsy is a selling platform, it has to follow marketplace sales tax laws, so they’ll generally be collecting and remitting sales tax for you. The same goes for VAT and other international taxes.
If you sell on your own website and ship internationally, you’ll have to do that on your own.
The benefit of having Etsy do it for you is hard to overestimate. Whenever I start getting irritated about Etsy’s fees, I think about how they collect sales tax for me, so I get over the fees.
Jennifer, owner of Upcycle Quilt Artist, lets Etsy do the tax collecting work for international customers. Her link to Etsy is specifically aimed at international buyers since she doesn’t ship internationally from her website.
That’s what I do for my digital keyword lists, too. Since digital listings can be sold worldwide, they’re subject to VAT taxes, so I list all of those in my digital Etsy shop and let Etsy so the work.
Bill, who owns Holidays Lane, links to Etsy from his website because he sells his products in craft fairs in two different states. That means that he has nexus in both places, so he has to collect and remit sales tax to both states.
By letting Etsy collect the sales tax because he uses the Square payment reader, he can avoid that part of it entirely, and that’s worth something!
When is linking your Etsy shop from your website a bad idea?
There are definite disadvantages to linking to your Etsy shop, including the possibility of your customers leaving your shop to buy from a competitor. You’ll also still be paying Etsy’s fees, so you won’t be saving money. You also won’t have the option of using Google’s Merchant Center as a way to gain visibility for your site.
Customers leaving your shop for other ones.
The main disadvantage of linking to your Etsy shop is that you’re leading customers away from your dedicated site to what’s basically a shopping mall.
It’s very possible that people will leave your shop if Etsy throws enough distractions at them.
Because of this, it’s important to make sure that you put incentives to buy from you in front of people on your website before they leave it for Etsy, like discount codes for signing up for your newsletter. This will help to keep people in your shop and prevent them from wandering.
You’ll still be paying Etsy’s fees.
That one is self-explanatory.
The advantage of having your own website is that you don’t have to pay Etsy’s fee. If you lead people back to Etsy to shop, you’ll still be paying those fees.
You’ll have to decide whether the convenience of keeping everything on Etsy is worth it, and for some people it will be.
If you’re not interested in dealing with setting up payments on your website, it might be well worth it.
You’ll have to decide that for yourself, but it’s something to keep in mind.
You’ll miss out on one part of building Google authority.
If you don’t have a separate website, you won’t be able to take advantage of Google’s Merchant Center, which is a way to help your website to get indexed faster. By submitting a catalog to Google you can get your listings on the Shopping tab in search results, but not if you only sell on Etsy.
This isn’t something that you can’t make up later, though. It will just extend the time that it takes for Google to find your website and start trusting it.
If you do decide to add a shopping component to your site, or you move to a shopping template website like Shopify, you can keep the domain name and its authority and start with the shopping feed then. It’s not a dealbreaker for Google search placement by any means, it will just slow the process for your website.
There are pros and cons for both keeping your sales on your website or sending customers to Etsy. You’ll have to decide for yourself which option has the most value for you based on the goals that you have for your website.
I would suggest keeping customers off of Etsy if they started on your website, mostly because of the fees and the possibility of them being hijacked by Etsy directing them to different shops.
If you don’t have a shop set up on your website that’s one thing, but if you do, you always want people to check out there!