Hey everyone. We had mentioned earlier that we were going to be up-front with both the technology part and business part of our A La Modern shop.

With any web business, there’s always a lot of variables that you can’t really predict – you mainly just have to go for it and see how it works out. You can try and forecast sales and whatnot, but a huge part of the flexibility and ease of launching a web shop versus a mortar and bricks store comes at the cost of not knowing exactly how things will turn out.

We had launched an Etsy component for our A La Modern shop to make use of the social network aspects of that site. We had intended it to be a repository of some of the A La Modern items that didn’t really “fit” with the rest of the shop. We planned to only list some of the “cuter” items, per se.

Now, we know that the economy has been in the dumps. As such, we expected that sales across the board would be slow to non-existent for at least the first 6-9 months, as we got up to speed promoting the shop and search engines began to index the listings. We were completely fine with that.

What we didn’t expect was the amount of sales that came through our A La Modern Etsy Shop. Without getting into the hard numbers, we can safely say that a majority of our sales have come in through Etsy.

That is pretty impressive, to say the least.

I think the kicker was the FIVE people who contacted us about the above Arabia of Finland Strawberry jar that we listed. Granted, this was a desirable piece – but any time you have five people interested in one item with the economy the way it is, you’re definitely going to take notice.

We understood that there was a larger than average amount of customers interested in vintage items on Etsy, and just having your store connected to the network was a huge plus. I think what we didn’t expect was just how important the social network aspect was in getting potential customers to your door.

Originally, we were skeptical that the 20 cent listing fee and 3.5% commission for each item on Etsy would be worth it. I mean, it’s completely free to list things on our own site and we had spent a long time perfecting the site so everything looked exactly right. But if these Etsy sales numbers continue, we’re going to take a hard look at the number of things we’d like to list on our own site versus Etsy. As it is right now, the listing/commission fees are easily made up for with the sales we’ve been having.

Oh, we’ll definitely continue to list items on our own site – our listings can stay up forever, whereas Etsy has a lifetime of 4 months. But it’s just a matter of following the money. Being a flexible business is good business – it just doesn’t make any sense not to shift priorities to the areas that actually bring in sales.

What we will definitely be experimenting with is moving items into Etsy temporarily from our own shop. You may notice items in the A La Modern store that occasionally say “Sorry, this item is currently only available through one of our partner sites.” If that’s the case, then we’re currently selling it through Etsy – you can find that item if you go in through our Etsy shop and do a search. We’re also considering doing the same thing with Ebay – though we don’t have as much confidence that we’ll be able to sell things for a decent value through auctions like that.