It`s December 2021, around two years ago a pandemic hit this earth and we are still in the middle of it. Right now I have the feeling that it`s getting worse than it ever was.
In the beginning, when there were lockdowns in a lot of countries, people turned to online shopping, and my Etsy shop for stickers, StickersSwissMade, really worked well. Shipping from Switzerland was still ok to Europe, the orders arrived in a reasonable time. It took longer to the States but no wonder, with no airplanes flying between the continents, how should mail travel between the continents?
There were ups and downs, in the summer time of 2020 and 2021 it looked like the world returned to (nearly) normal, but still, shipping to the States took sometimes 4 or 5 weeks. Sometimes I had the feeling that envelopes were transported fairly fast over the Atlantic, but then got stuck somewhere in the postal system in the US. I have no idea why, I do not know the situation of any postal system in the States but I began to understand why people did not order anymore. Why wait for 4 weeks for a simple sheet of stickers when you can buy similar ones within your own country and receive it within days.
stickers versus printable inserts
The States were a big market for me, most of my orders from Etsy and Amazon Handmade were coming from the States. But with all of the postal delays my orders nearly went down to zero.
This made me thinking about an alternative. What would work in the planner world without sending out a physical object? Well, printable planner inserts!
PDF files which can be downloaded and printed at home, ready to use in seconds after ordering. The idea grew on me, because I myself liked to print out any inserts, using them in my discbound or ringbound planners.
A few thoughts later, my second Etsy shop was born:
A shop for printable inserts, in various sizes, in a very minimalistic style.
I want to offer "clean sheets" so that everyone can decorate it in their own style. Already premade planners with a lot of colors or patterns always made me stop using them. Because I want to bring colors into my planner through my inks and I found it better to have a simple black/white/grey layout with maybe a dash of color to bring out the best of all my colored inks.
When you go to my shop you will see that I (want to) offer various sizes, I have already created my menue with the planner sizes but I`m not fully there yet. I`m still creating inserts, and creating+listing them takes some time. But I will get there.
When you see an insert but not the size which you are looking for, please do not hesitate to contact me on Etsy, I can easily resize any insert.
why 2 Etsy shops and no more Amazon Handmade or my own shop?
Maybe you have already ordered from my sticker shop, maybe from Etsy, or Amazon Handmade, or even from my own website. And maybe you are wondering why I only have Etsy shops anymore?
Well, Amazon now really has some strange rules in place and I have the feeling that the handmade section on Amazon is not really their first priority anymore. In the beginning they really wanted to create that special handmade feeling and support small shops, they gave you freedom in creating nice pictures to show off your items. But now every item must be pictured on a white background, it now looks like every other item on Amazon, not handmade anymore but massproduced and sold in so many shops.
So no more Amazon for me.
My own shop on my website? Well, this is more a set up problem. The laws for tax collection in the European Union have changed a lot. Switzerland is not in the EU, therefore I`m delivering into the EU from outside of the EU. Before, any order below a certain threshold was tax free, mostly a treshold of about EUR50/USD50. If your order was higher then the tax was collected at time of delivery. Now the online shop owner is responsible for collecting and filing taxes, and this from the very first cent of any order.
The amounts of any orders from my shop are very low due to the low price of a single sticker sheet, therefore nobody had to pay any taxes on orders from my shop. Now everyone who is ordering from the EU has to pay taxes and I would need to collect them. Setting up this tax collection system including ordering an IOSS number for tax filing comes with a fee every month and, as I`m only a small shop owner, this fee would be too much for me.
Etsy is doing all this tax collection and filing for all of their shops, I don`t have to do anything, this is all automatically calculated and collected. I can be sure that all tax rules are abided by and don`t have to worry about doing something wrong or maybe missing something. Therefore all of my items are exclusively available on Etsy.
Yes, my stickers and inserts are now more expensive than in the past but you can ask the EU governments why they created these rules, I guess they were missing out on too much tax income....
And the best part:
I can offer you the best of both, the physical sticker and the printable inserts for your planner or bullet journals.
two Etsy shops
blog posts for the future
In addition to my two Etsy shops I want to revive my blog here on my website.
I would like to give you information about my planner world, my planners, the paper, any fountain pens and inks, paper tests, notebook tests, ideas about set ups and whatever comes to my mind.
As before I will not post every day, but I will try to do it once a month for sure or maybe more often, depending on what my "planner peace" tells me to change in my set up :-)
I hope you have fun reading my blog posts and whenever you have questions or inquiries please do not hesite to contact me, either on Etsy or here on my website.
Thank you to all, stay healthy and (planner) peace to everyone!
Andrea