I have been thinking about starting my own website with my own domain name since the beginning of this venture. It just seemed soooo overwhelming to me. I know very little about html and I am not really web-savvy. Because of that fear, I had been putting it off for some time. Then... THEN.... I found bigcartel.com! So exciting! It is a stand alone site, so you are not competing with other vendors like on etsy. You do have to drive your own traffic to the site, but that seems like an interesting challenge to me. I am researching how to do that now.
Big Cartel is a site that hosts your shopfront, provides a shopping cart and allows you to have a custom url (http://www.stucktogethermagnets.com). But, it is easy to format! Trust me, if I can do it, so can anyone. The only tricky thing is that you need to find a host for your domain (godaddy.com or networksolutions.com). You buy your domain name and then point it to your Big Cartel shop and there it is. I used Network Solutions and I called them to get help with the technical details of redirecting my domain. Took all of 10 minutes.
As a result, I now have my own website! I will not leave Etsy because that is my bread and butter. But, another basket for my eggs... can't be a bad thing.
