I've been setting up my new shop with the intention of leaving Etsy...Indie Made is not for me. I'm in the Trial period and I've been having technical issues from the start, with no help from customer service. One Star: It is very easy to set up and you don't need any experience, even though I have plenty of experience in website building. You can do a lot more with it than with Etsy, but that old saying applies...You get what you pay for and for the most part you get less than what you're paying for. I'm not sure why I'm seeing all these good reviews unless they hired someone to write them...I don't recommend this site builder. Save yourself time, work, and frustration!
After years of dealing with half butted websites(talking the one I myself made) I set out to get hosted with an eCommerce more automatic site. I looked at several do to the prices I went with indiemade.
Well? Im THRILLED with indiemades set up. Love that it connects my items to my etsy shop and I dont have go back and remove things from places when stuffs sells or risk selling a one of a kind item Twice.
Indiemade was easy to use took only a few hours to get it up and running, talking all set up with google, pin, fb whole works!
Plus my page looks wonderful now! http://www.untamedrose.com
OH and the customer service was top notch... I've actually talked to people there! Amazing :)
Oh my goodness, where do I start. I decided to build my website using IndieMade. At first glance, everything looked amazing; the web builder is user friendly and I really liked the themes on offer. However, after I'd spent weeks of hard work building my website, everything went horribly wrong.
The web forwarding for my domain name wouldn't work properly with their platform and the site wasn't secure, despite them advertising that they provide SSL certificates. I wasn't receiving notifications that I'd received orders or messages from customers, and customers weren't receiving notifications that they'd placed an order.
When I contacted their technical support I was repeatedly told that I hadn't set up the web forwarding correctly, despite Fasthosts (my domain host) confirming that it was set up correctly. Their answer to the fact that I wasn't receiving order or message notifications was that all 3 of the email addresses I'd used during testing, from different email providers, were blocking emails from Indiemade. In fact, they maintained that one of the email providers was blocking emails for all of the 3 email addresses, which is impossible.
So now, I am currently paying for a website that is not secure, the links do not work properly, I'm not receiving any notification emails and Indiemade support has gone radio silent. My emails are not being answered and they do not provide telephone or chat support.
Let this be a warning to those of you, especially Etsy sellers wanting to set up their own website (Indiemade claims that they are the answer to integration with Etsy) - do not waste your time or money on Indiemade, you will be left disappointed and out of pocket.
Answer: James IDK why it emailed me to answer your Q, but I can try to answer dont mind helping out other artist types :) (which I'm going to assume you are) For MY biz, FB etc is really important and I would caution strongly against totally ignoring them all. Dont have to do them all either, but least a few maybe? Something like IFTTT (yes thats the name of the place IDK) might help, auto posts stuffs like you stick something on twitter and it will post everywhere else for you. Less painful maybe? (Though if you mean have the buttons up there so Others can share, pin, etc dude. Those are good and you really dont have to do anything once box is checked) But no it's not your only option... If you like to write can "blog" or write up expert how to's history offs etc several sites will even pay for such and include links. Perfect SEO, Building lots of strong backlinks and making google really really happy with your site is another. Being able to upload my own products to google merchant(vs etsy doing it with my products photo but then shows the potential buyer stuff like too...) Has been a big advantage. There are several artsy forums, where talking about showing off are exactly whats intended.:) Paid advertising, there is no shortage of places happy to take funds for ads... some work, some work when perfect, some dont at all. I put to this list together a few weeks ago... ya it's got FB etc on there but also a lot of other sites you can promote advertise on. Maybe it will give you some ideas. http://www.untamedrose.com/blog/roses-big-list-places-promote I like indiemade B/C I wanted a clean simple site that I could build, that was mobile ready without all the drama of fighting with wordpress. How I advertise it... vs how you do... isnt really up to IndieMade no?