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It seems as though today almost everyone is working one or more side hustles. Either to supplement their income because of a less than desirable economy or because they are tired of the daily 9-5 and want more freedom to do the things they want to do. And a lot of these entrepreneurs use Etsy, the global online marketplace for creative goods.
If you are one of these go-getters and running your own Etsy shop, you quickly realize the problem with the marketplace – the competition. Etsy reported that there are over 7.5 million active sellers on the platform in their 2022 Integrated Annual Report.
With this many sellers, even with the best product descriptions, imagery, and all the other search optimization, just because of sheer volume of products on the marketplace, it can be next to impossible for your products or store to show up in the search results.
To combat this, you need a way to present your products outside of the Etsy platform to increase your odds of being found. This is where the Etsy Shop Integration module comes in; it allows you to display your products on your website to take advantage of all the other tools that you use to promote and run your business like social media followers and your site's well-honed SEO and analytics that you have already established.
What Is It
The Etsy Shop Integration module is designed to import the product listings as nodes from a single Etsy shop, including listing images, categories, tags, and most fields within Etsy.
What It Is Not
The module IS NOT designed with any e-commerce capabilities to comply with the Etsy API Terms of Use. The module also has no functionality to create or edit Etsy listings. This is to simplify the module code as well as keep Etsy as the central location for maintaining product and inventory information.
Requirements
The Etsy Shop Integration module was designed to require a bare minimum number of other community modules to be used. The only hard requirements are the OAuth2 Client and Image Cache External modules.
OAuth2 Client
To use the Etsy Open API v3, an application ID is required by Etsy and this is obtained by setting up an API application with Etsy and authenticating the application using OAuth2. The OAuth2 Client module simplifies this process to just a few steps.
Image Cache External
The Etsy API results contain the URLs for images associated with each product listing. The problem is, because they are remote URLs, it's difficult to use standard image features in Drupal like image styles. The Image Cache External module manages these images for you by downloading them and giving the images a path in the Drupal file system that can be manipulated like any other image that you were to upload.
Installation and Configuration
To install the Etsy Shop Integration module, using Composer is the recommended method as it installs all of the requirements automatically.
Before you can use the module, you will need to first create an API application with Etsy to obtain the credentials that allow you to use the API itself. You can follow my short tutorial on setting up an Etsy API application and configuring the Etsy OAuth2 Client in this blog post.
Features
This module has been rewritten from the ground up to use the latest Drupal architecture and the Etsy Open API v3. Here is a detailed list of the module features.
- Etsy Open API Service - All API calls are now abstracted into a Service interface and concrete class so you can add the Etsy API anywhere using the various Drupal methods including dependency injection.
- Etsy Listing node type - A specialized node type that contains the fields for an Etsy listing. This allows the listings to be searchable using the various Drupal search modules as well as indexing by search engines.
- Etsy Shop View - This view is the base for your "shop" providing a landing page with your products. This view can be modified to your liking or you can disable it and build your own.
- Customizable Templates - There are various templates for the Etsy Listing node type view modes that can be overridden in your theme just like any other node type.
- System Utilities - There are two cron functions to support keeping the API OAuth2 token alive and synchronizing your Etsy listings with your Drupal site.
Conclusion
Running your own business or side hustle with Etsy is difficult and time consuming enough without having to worry about how to get your products in front of as many people as possible. The Etsy Shop Integration module is designed for Etsy shop owners to help free up some of their time by automating their store integration to their existing Drupal website and free up some time to let them focus on running their business.
I'd love to hear your feedback! Drop your questions, comments, or suggestions for feature additions, in the comments!
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