Goodbye Goimagine, Hello Shopify

So the platform I use for selling my greeting cards and all my other stuff is shutting down.

I’m really sad. It was ethically a good platform with ideals and integrity. I believed in it. I sought it out as an Etsy alternative, and it seemed like the most robust of all the options. It also featured a children’s charity aspect that really appealed to me. I liked the way it worked, and I liked the road plan they’d set up to make it even better.

They had reached a peak of 7200 paid users, but then started to decline. It’s easy to see why: the promise of revisions and updates stopped happening. The weekly Ask-Me-Anything video conferences with the owner stopped. The shipping integrations never happened. The dual back-end uploading and management user interfaces never got reconciled and integrated. Requested features stopped development. A Goimagine-specific community app folded, and the forums that replaced it became a ghost town in favor of Facebook. Things started cracking.

And something happened in the beginning of 2025 that, in part, prompted the ripple effect which cascaded into the platform’s closure. The owners say it was health issues, and it essentially stopped all forward development on the platform entirely. The company stopped posting blogs, creating featured collections, and essentially went radio-silent.

It remained functional. But based on bug reports on the forums, it was clear the only thing happening was putting out fires as they flared up.

The signs had been there for a while. In my gut, I knew it was coming.

And now I have to transition into a whole new world. One that I think was inevitable, but I had resisted.

As some of you may know, my husband Jonathan works in Shopify every day due to his day job. He also has his own Shopify storefront through Killerbunnies.com as well, for whom he illustrates all the playing cards. He is a wealth of knowledge about the platform from two very different levels of corporatization, and I’d be stupid to not draw upon his expertise.

I’ve managed to use a combination of different platforms and tools to represent myself: Portfoliobox, Goimagine, Square, Faire, Zoho Email, MakerTube, Twitch… And in the past I’ve jumped around abandoning platforms that didn’t serve me anymore, like Etsy. And a lot of platforms have disintegrated underneath me, like LiveSpace and Moonbeam.

But I’m getting tired of good intentions being unable to be sustained. I’ve tried so many Free Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms that have folded it’s just exhausting. All were brilliant, forward-thinking, integrity-driven tools. But the stranglehold of big business works against their development. Inertia is a thing, and people are generally unwilling to try new things that take work and time.

So I’m shifting my storefront to Shopify, and leaning into my husband’s experience. It integrates with Faire.com, my wholesale site. It also integrates with my newsletter service, Mailerlite, my email service Zoho, and even has Point-of-Sale tools that might work well instead of Square, which I use for all the fairs and festivals where I do vending. It has inventory tracking tools, the capacity to make bar codes, and literally thousands of other integrations.

AND that means I’ll be using their templates for a new website, as I’m going to take the leap and put everything on the same site. My blog, my portfolio, my streaming embed from MakerTube. Now when you go to CoreyartusImagery.com, it’ll all be in the same place: my web-presence and my store.

You’re going to see a significant visual change within the next few weeks. The Shopify web templates are (in my opinion) stifling and uncreative and repetitively similar, but I am going to work really hard to make sure that my website is visually less “store” and more “creative home”. I’m trying to make sure the parts of my current website that I love are also a part of my new one, like my livestream embed and my RSS feed.

I’m also assured that the AI-tools that Shopify has can be turned off. And there are apps, like the Shop App (which is sort of an aggregator of all Shopify stores and their items) that can be turned off as they use everything listed for AI purposes and blithely fold it into ChatGPT for agentic shopping “assistance” and image generation. No. I won’t be doing that. And I will be working hard to never let AI reach my stuff.

Nothing will change on your end. My web address won’t change. But it’s literally going to be a new site, visually and functionally.

This is a new chapter. My husband and I are already working on it, and we’ll be shifting over very very soon. I’ll be making an announcement with my newsletter probably this weekend.

Oy. I didn’t want this to happen, but it’s forcing my hand, and in the end I think it’s a good thing. I think it needed to happen.

Off we go!