Woohoo! (sim’s pun intended) – I started an Etsy shop/Brand on August 31st, 2026. If you are here in 2026, then you are crazy early in this Journey with me!
Both my kids have started school now, one full time , the other for half the day and I was sitting around avoiding all adult responsibilities, messing around on Canva because I enjoy it. I had an idea in my head for a cup that stated “Crawl to me”. The weather was changing, Halloween was whispering in my ear and I was looking up new Romantasy books to read so this cup seemed to be calling to me. Wow that sentence was very descriptive, go me!
Anyways, I made the cup idea – loved it and it snow balled from there. I was having fun to be honest and decided that I might as well put it on an etsy shop and if other people enjoy it then great! If not, made I create a few gift ideas for upcoming birthdays.
I researched, “how to start an etsy shop” on youtube (like you do) and was bombarded with titles like “make 100k in 30 days”, “my first million” or something crazy like that. I honestly barely believe youtube influencers anymore. I watched a few different people and took the general advice that you need to just keep pushing, researching, tweaking and adding to your store and here I am.
As of Sept 18th, 2026 (todays date), I have 27 listings, tariffs are messing everything up and I started a Pinterest business account to hopefully generate traffic. I have went down the rabbit holes of, how to create good pins, move traffic, add advertising to your blogs and affiliate links. My brain is overwhelmed honestly. But I am going to keep creating some fun ideas, focus on having them shipping from inside Canada to cut down costs for my fellow Canadians where I can and keep on trucking because its kinda fun when you step into it with a, “lets see what happens” attitude.
5 Random things I have learned so far:
Ok, its not a blog post with out some sort of title like this! *killin’ it*
1. Etsy is hard to get views.
I have been about 3 weeks now and feel like I have barely gotten any views. I haven’t used Ads yet – I do think I will try them soon but was hoping for more then 1 view a week without them. I know its a lot of research for key words and Etsy trying to figure out my shop etc. But I was still a little hopeful that it would bee seen by more then 1 person in a search. I added keys words I saw on Etsy trends but still don’t seem to have much movement there. Again this is where I could find out that mugs and tumblers are not great items to move – whose to say! If this shop fails, I will be totally transparent and keep this post up regardless. Maybe I can add to it later and talk about my mistakes or how I changed it? *makes notes to review every 3 months*
2. Pinterest is easier for views
I uploaded my pins on pinterest and I know that it is not much! I am just starting that research as well, but at least 325 people have already seen my items. So that feels better then Etsy for sure. I know they are 2 different platforms, so as I get more into researching and optimizing keywords, photos etc I hope I can get my head around it a bit more.
I also learned that Pinterest does not like Canadians to claim their etsy shop as their website, so to claim a website, I started this blog. To be fair, I was thinking of starting one anyways because it would be fun to have something I can use to document all this but either way Pinterest will trust your business account more if you have a website to claim and that will result in them showing more of your pins.
3. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are 2 different things
When I went to start this blog, hoping to loophole traffic from Pinterest to Etsy, I clicked the first wordpress I saw, which is wordpress.com and started my blog. Boy oh boy was that confusing. I was looking up how to do things because it is not beginner friendly and all the youtube channels I found were showing homescreens that looks nothing like what I was doing. Come to realize I am on the “not free, kinda bad to use” one. I looked up transfering it over and that also looked complicated so I have dedicated my time to figuring out how to use this one.
It has not been fun and I normally love doing things like this. I used Hostinger before and I definitely feel like that one is easier to learn for a beginner for sure but I can’t ell you which one out of wordpress.org or hostinger is better since I apparently am on the word one..
I am learning and as you can see, kinda getting it. If you see issues, please let me know! It is a work in progress.
4. Using ChatGPT
I have used Chatgpt for help with descriptions or titles on my Etsy shop, as well as a few product imaging. I try to create alot of my own as well on Canva until I can build enough of a product sample to take some of my own ad photos.
I am kinda loving and hating it at the same time. I want to use it to make things a bit quicker or brainstorm with, maybe let it do some quick profit math for me. That stuff has been great. It does make cool ad photos but I just feel like as a society we all kinda love and hate it. We crave a bit of realness to connect to, we aren’t sure if the AI images are trying to scam us to buy something so trust level is not great.
If you use AI things, you can start to see the pattern with it on other ads, posts or descriptions and I don’t know about you, but I kinda get annoyed at them. So I am hoping to move away from it as I get some traction, but maybe I need to do that sooner for people to trust my products?
Either way, I promise all blog posts are made and created/typed by me. I am currently sitting at my kitchen table writing this and I hope you can appreciate the fact that I gave my kids tablets so I could finish this blog post before we head outside again. If you don’t, well my kids do because they don’t get the tablets unless they are sick or traveling so I am the “best mom ever” at the moment. *hair flick and smirk*
Well, that is basically all I have learned so far.
Few extra tidbits – Yes, it costs money to start. I bought a monthly etsy plan ($10 – optional ), a monthly Canva plan ($22), and unfortunately a monthly WordPress.com plan ($22) – that last one, totally my fault.
I bought some sampler items from printiful, costed about $50 roughly. to see some items and make sure it looks good – spoiler – it does. *wink*
If you have any tips or questions, let me know below!
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