A year on Shopify
In July 2025, we migrated CraftedCharts to Shopify. It was a deliberate move, following earlier experiments with platforms like PayHip and Gumroad, neither of which gave us real control over how our store looked and functioned. The limited ability to customize product pages was, in our view, directly impacting our conversion rates. Add to that the frequent policy changes on Etsy, where we had previously operated, and our desire to grow on our own terms, and we had the main catalysts for the migration. (If you're weighing the same decision, we broke down the trade-offs in detail in our Pros & Cons on Shopify article, and if you're still deciding whether to leave Etsy at all, our piece on why Etsy sales are down covers the platform-side reasons a lot of sellers are looking elsewhere.)
A year later, we have the data to show what that journey looked like from the early weeks when Google was still learning our site, to the months where traffic and conversions grew exponentially.
Why we didn't rush the migration?
We took the migration process seriously. Properly migrating products, optimizing for search engines, choosing the right theme, and fine-tuning our product pages took about three weeks of focused work. This wasn't a process we wanted to rush at the expense of quality, mistakes made at this stage would have dragged down our search results for months. It's worth emphasizing that this optimization never really ended; it's an ongoing process, not a one-off project. For anyone doing this migration themselves, our guide on how to improve SEO on Shopify covers most of what we did during this stage.
Check out our products
For the first two months post-migration, Google was essentially "testing" our site. It's a natural stage, but psychologically tough because you don't yet see the return on the work put into the move. We didn't actively engage in link-building back then, which in hindsight might have been a missed opportunity, our own thinking on this has since evolved, and we lay it out in what makes a high-quality backlink. On the other hand, after about four months of consistent content publishing and updates, backlinks began flowing in organically without a dedicated outreach campaign.
We were visible, so why weren't we happy?
By around September 2025, once the store became fully visible on Google, we were averaging about 800 clicks per month against 187,000 impressions. We weren't satisfied with this outcome, a click-through rate at that level meant our site was showing up, but it wasn't grabbing enough attention in the search results.
The trajectory shifted noticeably in early 2026. Results tripled, and by July 2026, we were hitting around 10,000 clicks per month on 400,000 impressions. That represented a more than twelve-fold increase in clicks compared to September 2025, alongside just over a two-fold increase in impressions meaning that not only our visibility grew, but also the actual appeal of our listings in the eyes of users.
Did any of that actually turn into sales?
Hand in hand with traffic came a shift in conversions. Throughout 2025, our conversion rate hovered around 0.9%. In 2026, it stabilized at roughly 3%, a more than three-fold increase. This demonstrates that moving to Shopify didn't just drive more traffic, but created a store that converted visits into sales much more effectively. It was the combined result of better product page optimization and the greater control over user experience we were seeking when we left third-party platforms.
What were people actually buying?
One of the most interesting takeaways has been the shift in which products perform best. On Shopify, our top-selling categories turned out to be marketing products, specifically our marketing plan template and business plan for entrepreneurs. Personal growth products, despite their lower price point, sold less frequently than expected.
This was the exact opposite of what we observed on Etsy, where personal development items were top sellers, and specialized business templates priced on average 2-3 times higher, moved more slowly. This divergence suggests that audiences reaching our store via Shopify (primarily through search engines and blog content) come with different purchasing intent than Etsy browsers likely clearer business needs and a willingness to pay more for specialized tools.
What was actually running behind the scenes?
Over the course of the year, we tested and deployed several Shopify apps to support store operations: Smile.io, Post Studio - Social Auto Post, Judge.me, and Blockify. Each targeted a different area, but they shared a common goal: improving the on-site user experience (UX). We believe we achieved that goal and the conversion growth in 2026 serves as indirect proof. (Blockify, in particular, ended up playing a bigger role than we expected, it was part of how we eventually stopped a wave of fraud orders on the store.)
Was it worth it?
A year after migrating to Shopify, we can say one thing for sure: it was a decision that required patience before delivering results. The initial months: indexing, establishing visibility, low conversions are the natural cost of transitioning to your own domain. But once the foundation (proper product optimization, consistent content publishing, refined UX) was in place, the growth was clear: organic traffic skyrocketed, and conversions tripled.
The greatest value of an independent store hasn't been the raw click count, but the control over what and how we sell, and the ability to adapt quickly to what our audience is actually searching for, rather than fitting into the constraints of an external platform.
Data sourced from internal Google Search Console and Shopify Analytics performance records spanning July 2025 - July 2026.
