Hi, it's Veronika here!
I'm going to talk about the work behind a running a shop today.

But before we start, please note my Language Disclaimer (no, it's not about profanity) =)

As you may know, I'm running charity-oriented shop Magicful Home which sells certified cruelty-free vegan eco-friendly beach home decor (at this moment that means rainbow pillow line and soon also a wall art, yay!) under Veronika Honestly.
And I wanted to share with you how this works.

I have opened Magicful Home about a year ago solely as an eshop with the idea that I'd like to be giving some profits to marine conservation (beach-themed shop - ocean charities). Firstly it was only a smaller percentage, later I added an extra category where products sold would bring 50% profits to charities. Lastly, I decided to apply this to the whole shop and since then, from all of the products I sell, half of the profits goes to charities.
My shop's purpose also changed. From the idea of helping me to boost my income in the future, it has been transformed into what I call charity-oriented business. As I'm not a charity nor non-profit, but I split half-half my efforts between myself and the charities.

Half to me, as I need to compensate the time and energy spent on running a business, which otherwise could've been spent on taking even more maths students (yes, as you may also know, my main job is maths tuition) and half to charities, as they are always in need of money for the good cause.

As the purpose of the business has been changing, the way of running it has been following.

I have started Magicful Home, as mentioned above, as a pure eshop powered by Shopify. Which is a great feature, if you want to run a professional eshop. And if you run it for high profits (and know how to do it), then the monthly cost of it is ok.
But there was little choice for adjusting the whole website - just shop and one blog category, the most exciting way to customize stuff was on the homepage. And the cost, yes, not the best thing when you are not an aggressive seller with a lot of advertisement pushing your products to customers in their face to make it up for the running costs of selling through eshop platform like Shopify. Err... that's a long explain-it-all-in-one-go sentence...

With the further stronger orientation towards raising funds for charities, my ideas of what I want to sell and how I want to sell it changed. I have ditched re-selling things known as drop shipping of already made products (that is simply not holding inventory, just having an agreement with manufacturer/wholesaler who ships directly on your behalf) and started designing my own products (such as my Rainbow Sea Turtle Pillow) or alternating and branding some of my favourite products from the previous eshop stage (such as my Vegan Mermaid Keyring where I use vegan eco-friendly glue and change some problematic parts of the original keyring).

With my first pillow design idea, my joy for creating designs grew and I wanted to unleash my other interests such as maths and veganism & animals. And some random fun stuff. And later more. I just couldn't keep it all only beach related, even though having a beach eshop was my dream for a good couple of years.

So Veronika Honestly blog was born. About the same time when I've switched from Shopify-powered website, creating my own one - for Magicful Home shop as well as for Veronika Honestly blog.
I have moved everything I'm selling to Etsy marketplace after researching the best way where I can feel free to list what I want the way I want, with actually pretty good analytics considering it's all free. Well, there's a fee for each listing, every 4 months to be renewed. But the fee is practically nothing. And you can actually get 40 free listings if you are about to start selling on Etsy when you click on my Etsy New Seller invitation link: https://etsy.me/2OeLgLY - and I will get them too. That's called cooperation =)
So besides tiny listing fee, I only pay a small percentage after I sell there. That's fairly cheap running cost. Unlike quite high monthly fees on a full e-commerce platform with no support of an already existing strong marketplace, so efforts of being found without spending ridiculous money on advertising are using less energy with better results.
(Well, there's more to it, to run a shop even on Etsy successfully, but let's talk about that some other time to keep this focused on the main topic.)
Now I grew over the stage of being an independent shop (back to this perhaps in the brighter future). I'm who I am and I don't mind to sell on Etsy instead of on my own website. I care about expenses because the more profits I'll get, the more will go to charities.

Talking about expenses, the biggest profit eater is the advertising. I always was, I was prepared for it, so it's not a problem, but I'm not ashamed of asking for help from every one of you - to spread the word, to help me lower the costs and therefore help me raise more funds for charities.
I want to go even further. I'm happy to reward those who would want to help me to spread the word.
In a form of a freebie, cooperation (especially if you are also an entrepreneur) or some cash-back (I don't have my own affiliate program yet, but good news - Etsy does!).

I'd be happy for you to ask me for more details - simply send me an email (below in the footer) and let's talk business. And charities =) And all the good stuff!