Would you be willing to share the reasons for the switch? I'm debating setting up my own store for anime merch and I was leaning toward Storenvy over Etsy. I would love to hear your thought process if you wouldn't mind sharing it (even though I know it's a different type of art.)

I loved storenvy when I first started using it, back when I first started selling I wasn't making enough to justify all the listing fees on Etsy, and they've gotten so full of cheap chinese goods the marketplace doesn't seem to offer a lot of potential for being discovered.

I always wondered how many sales I might be missing out on by using an uncommon platform, I mean... a lot of people have Etsy accounts, but not everyone wants to sign up for an account on another shopping website. But I sold stuff every once in a while so I didn't worry too much.

Storenvy started changing a lot though and I started to worry about how that would effect my shop in the future, they tried to get everyone to switch to Stripe for payments (older stores could keep paypal though, so I could still accept it) and there were lots of bugs there. They started charging people 10% if they made a sale through the marketplace, which isn't unfair because they don't have a lot of fees otherwise, but a lot of people were being charged the marketplace fee even when they shouldn't.

They've given up on the forced switch to Stripe, but I think there are still a lot of bugs with people having problems with trying to disable it. The last straw for me was a couple customers telling me they couldn't check out when trying to order from me, a lot of people are having this problem now and the staff are kind of ignoring it. I contacted them and they told me to have my customers clear their cache and try again but didn't acknowledge it as something they were working on, which is kind of a shit answer because I don't know how many of my customers are even contacting me about it as opposed to just giving up and not purchasing from me. I'm not going to deal with a selling platform that's going to make my customers jump through hoops before they make a simple purchase.

Etsy has its drawbacks but they've been around long enough that at least they should be a fairly stable selling platform. My customers seem happy to hear it, one of them mentioned that even before the recent issues she found storenvy to be a pain in the ass to use.

I never sold much on Storenvy but I've sold a few things on Etsy already despite just recently switching. I don't know how much of that is due to the holidays driving more sales right now vs being on a different platform. I think people are a lot more comfortable with Etsy in general though.

I like etsy's coupon options more as well. You can pay a little extra to get more coupon options on storenvy, but i still think etsy's work for me better.

Sorry for the giant ramble! There are lots of factors to consider and it was sort of a long time coming. I kind of feel like Storenvy's circling the drain right now to be honest, they have so many problems that aren't being addressed and I don't think they even have the resources to fix it any time soon. It's possible they'll get their shit together one day but for now I really can't recommend them.

oh! i just remembered etsy does a thingy where you can earn free listings if you get someone to sign up. if you want to go with etsy and don't already have an account there, i can email you an invite and we both get 40 free listings, which is like $8 usd each.

I appreciate the detailed response, you've given me some real food for thought. I'll have to talk it over with my sister, since I was going to share the store with her for our similarly themed merch, but now I'm leaning a bit more toward Etsy.

I do have a buyer's account already but I was going to get a new one for selling - I think I'll note you my email in case we do go with Etsy, thank you for the offer.