In early May, I was about halfway through updating a tutorial about selling on Etsy when they up and changed their Control Panel again.  Although the new dashboard seems to be pretty easy, I thought that this was a perfect time for me to check out another selling platform that students and friends have been asking about: IndieMade.

You can check them out at www.IndieMade.com

IndieMade bills itself as “Artist Websites Made Easy” and says that it has SEO (search engine optimization) built into each IndieMade store, so I decided to put it to the test.  I heard that you only needed a few minutes to set up a complete shop on IndieMade so decided to dedicate one afternoon to it.  Signing up was simple – pick a store (User) name and hit a button.  After a bit of a kerfuffle with the password, I was in!

I chose the Pro Plan.  I wanted something that I could sell downloadable tutorials (electronic files) and could connect with Etsy for upload since I’ve already done a ton of work on that site.  Adding items one at a time when I have almost 100 tutorials sounded like a real chore.

Under Shop Settings (Options) in my Etsy store I found a button labeled Download CSV.  It was exactly three button clicks to download Etsy items to my desktop and upload almost 200 products to IndieMade!  But it turns out I still had to upload each PDF document by hand.

IndieMade Pros

• ·        Nice website design options with customizable colors and fonts.
• ·        Easy calender option for events.  However, if it is a multiple day event it appears you need to make separate event postings.
• ·        You are not limited to the 10 categories that Etsy gives you
• ·        Reasonable monthly fee without the per-item fees that Etsy has.  All of the Paypal proceeds go directly to you.

IndieMade Cons

• ·        If you are uploading a CSV file, each shop item uploads the title, price and description.  However, I still had to edit shipping information and tags in spite of IndieMade’s claim that pages had “reasonable” search engine optimization for each page.  I can’t see what these tags are, however; I’m hoping that they just uploaded the tags I had on Etsy.  For tutorials I still had to upload each document.

It appears that IndieMade is a great resource for someone who wants their own beginning level website that allows sales directly from the site and has easy setup.  Their interface to add products is easy – especially if you are doing it from scratch.

Although I’ll upload the rest of my PDF tutorials and see how the SEO goes over the next few months, I suspect I won’t be keeping my website with them since I already have a well-established Etsy site with over 4000 sales, a WordPress blog, and also a website that I still upkeep in HTML (and thereby have complete control of the site’s look and tags

You’ve already found my blog!

For my Etsy store, go to http://hannahrachel.etsy.com

For my website, head over to http://www.goodrivergalleries.com