Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. We give you a rich text editor so you can modify the pages whenever you like. You can upload photos, format text, hyperlink to things, even embed video files. And you can add as many your plan allows; they'll appear in your site's primary or secondary navigation automatically.

No. If you don't need or want one of our standard features -- like a store, or a photo gallery, or an event calendar -- simply don't use it, and it won't appear on your website.

For example, until you add a product, visitors to your site won't see any Store-related options. Until you upload a picture, they won't see anything about galleries. And so on.

Probably.

We can import blog postings, comments, and sometimes images from WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, and Live Journal. Just log into your existing blog, export the posts you want to keep, and then open a technical support request with us using the contact form. We'll do our best to import what you have into your IndieMade site.

If you use a different blogging system, you may still be in luck, as the WordPress format is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the blogging world. Just poke around and see if you can find a way to export to that format. We'll help you if we can.

Yes, our standard and higher plans allow you to use your own URL to "point to" your IndieMade site. You don't have to own the domain before you sign up, but if you do, you can get your new site ready before redirecting traffic from your existing site.

You can purchase your domain from just about anyone, but most of our customers appear to use GoDaddy, because they are inexpensive and because the online instructions on setting it up with IndieMade are good.

Our handbook pages on using your own domain with IndieMade explains the process in more detail.

Your IndieMade site takes care of many traditional SEO tasks automatically for you. It creates search-engine-friendly URLs, structures your HTML pages properly, generates canonical tags, submits nightly a list of your pages to Google and Bing, and so on. It also automatically creates meta keywords and meta descriptions from the content you've added, and it generates FaceBook's open graph tags as well.

As site owner you also have control over meta keywords, descriptions, and <title> tag if you want to go that far -- but many of our customers just use the defaults.

All our plans are payable monthly, in advance, via PayPal. When you first sign up, you'll be emailed an activation code in the form of a hyperlink. When you click on it, you'll be forwarded over to PayPal to authorize a monthly payment starting in 30 days. Cancel during the trial period and you won't owe a dime. You can cancel anytime after that without penalty -- but you are responsible for the charges incurred up until your cancellation.

All our payment is done through PayPal, which automatically transfers funds from you to us every month. You can pay from your PayPal balance, from your bank account, or from a credit card. We never see any of these details -- so you can try out IndieMade without worrying about the privacy of your payment information.

Nope. All of our plans are pay as you go, a month at a time. You can cancel whenever you want and you'll never be billed again.

Note, though, that we don't offer pro-rated refunds. For example if your billing cycle starts on the 5th of the month and you cancel on the 15th, you don't get a credit for the 20 days you didn't actually use.

Sure. Just contact us and we'll take care of everything.

We're sorry to see you go! But of course you can cancel whenever you want without penalty.

The easiest way to cancel is simply to log into your account and select "Cancel site" next to the site you no longer want. We'll take down your site and cancel your PayPal subscription for you. But you can also cancel by visiting your PayPal account and stopping the flow of funds from there.

Note that in both cases, your site will be taken down immediately upon cancellation. We do not offer pro-rated refunds on the unused portions of subscriptions -- sorry.

Sorry -- no.

Maybe. Your site is not actually destroyed when you cancel, so you may be able to restore it to exactly the way it was before.

Visit your account pages at http://www.indiemade.com/user. If your site is marked as suspended, just click on the link reading "authorize a new monthly payment" to restore access immediately. You'll have to OK a new payment through PayPal, but your site will be turned on immediately. If you see the text "Site no longer exists," then you'll have to create a new site from scratch at the signup pages.

No, your customers are yours.  They do not need to have accounts with us in order to shop on your site.

No, all you need is a PayPal account. Your customers can pay for your products with their credit cards, with transfers from their bank accounts, or from their PayPal balances. PayPal takes a small percentage of your sales, but IndieMade doesn't take a cent.

Yes, it's a fully functional shopping cart and order database. The IndieMade system keeps track of your orders, customers, and taxes for you. You can look at reports (including end-of-year taxes), reprint order or resend invoices, add or remove line items to existing orders, send notifications to customers, and so on.

Yes, this can save you lots of time. First, download your products in a CSV file from Etsy:

1. Log into your Etsy store
2. Go to Shop Settings > Options
3. Select the Download Data tab
4. Under Currently for Sale Listings, push the button reading Download CSV

Then, in your IndieMade dashboard, visit store > products and click on Import Products from CSV.  (Are your products one-of-a-kind? If so, check the one-of-a-kind box and it'll automatically be removed from your store when it sells.) Upload your file and IndieMade will take care of the rest. We'll make copies of your product photographs, adapt the description, set the product price, and so on. You'll have a fully stocked store in only a few minutes.

We'll also automatically categorize your products using the most valuable tags. Sometimes you'll want to rename or delete categories after the import. To do this, visit store > settings in your dashboard and scroll to the bottom to edit the categories.

Finally -- are you on the pro or plus tier? If so, you can "link" these products to your Etsy store. Read this handbook page for more info.

No. There are no fees of any kind beyond the monthly subscription fee.

No, we have customers from all over the world, in a variety of countries.

Only those countries that have been enabled on your site appear as options in the country pulldown. You can enable your country, and as many others as you like, from the store settings page in your dashboard.

To learn more, read our handbook page on working with shipping.

You can pick from any of the following currencies for your store:

• United States Dollar
• Canadian Dollar
• Euro
• British Pound
• Japanese Yen
• Australian Dollar
• New Zealand Dollar
• Swiss Franc
• Hong Kong Dollar
• Singapore Dollar
• Swedish Krona
• Danish Krone
• Polish Zloty
• Norwegian Krone
• Hungarian Forint
• Czech Koruna
• Israeli New Shekel
• Mexican Peso
• Philippine Peso
• New Taiwan Dollar
• Thai Baht

Your customers can purchase from anywhere in the world that PayPal supports, using their native currency. PayPal will automatically do the exchange for you.

You can sell anything you want on your IndieMade site, so long as it's legal to sell it. IndieMade isn't a marketplace and it isn't curated. You don't have to be independent, or an artist, or even create what you sell. It's your site and you can do whatever you want with it.  (Just don't break any laws, OK? We're serious about that part.)

Yes. We provide you with a number of high-quality themes for your website, and you can switch between them whenever you like. You can upload your logo or banner, pick a color scheme, select from a variety of fonts, and so on.

And of course you can change the content of your pages whenever you like -- there's a fully functional, rich text editor that makes editing a breeze.

For products, galleries, and news mentions, don't resize your images. The IndieMade system will automatically create appropriately sized copies of your images for you, so they look great in whatever theme you pick. Switch themes, and your images will automatically get resized to match.

If you're adding pictures to a blog post or a page, though, you have more flexibility. Scale them down to whatever size fits your design using your image editor of choice -- this is better than using the rich text editor's scaling functionality, which can result in pixelated images.

See our photo sizing handbook page for more details.

Any content can be edited in your dashboard.  Any sections in which you have content will appear in your navigation.  Should you choose later to remove any section -- blog, store, galleries, news or events -- just delete or hide the section’s contents in your dashboard, and it won't appear in the navigation.

To prove to Pinterest you own your IndieMade site, you need to upload a file to it. Follow Pinterest's instructions to get a verification file. It will have a file name like pinterest-abc123.html. Then just email this file to us at support@indiemade.com and we'll get it uploaded to your site on your behalf. Once we're done you can verify with Pinterest. Easy peasy.

We verify sites for Google using the HTML file method. First, read Google's instructions, but instead of uploading it to your site, email it to us at support@indiemade.com. We'll get the file uploaded to the right server, after which you can finish the verification process.

Yes. All your data is written to multiple disk drives instantaneously, and data is backed up nightly in case of emergency. Even if a server or a disk fails, your material is safe.

No. Our servers are hosted and professionally administered by Rackspace, a recognized leader in hosting services. They manage and monitor the hardware for us, in a secure facility that's staffed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It's much more expensive than running IndieMade on our own servers, but this way we can give our customers world-class service.

Yes! If you decide to move, we'll be sorry to see you go, but your data is yours.

Just ask us, and we'll zip up all your uploaded images and make them available for you to download. Our software is based on an open-source content management system called Drupal. We'll create a dump of your database for you, as well, which you can use to spin up your site elsewhere. This database includes blog postings, product information, order history, your customer list, and so on.

However, there are some gotchas: first, getting the site running on another host is not a trivial undertaking. You may have to hire someone knowledgeable in Drupal to do that for you, and this may be expensive. And you can't take our Dashboard or Themes with you -- those we can't share, as they are what make our business special. Finally, you have to be paid up. Only fair.