Plenty of small craft businesses start the same way. You make something, somebody asks to buy it, and you give them the email address you've used since school. There's no plan and no business account, because at that point there is no business. Just you, a person who is good at making things and a slowly growing pile of requests to make those things.
Then it grows properly and the email address you set up at 15 is now handling invoices, customer details and your entire order history (and it is still the same address receiving newsletters and messages from your aunt).
Nothing has gone wrong. That's exactly why now is a good moment to think about a proper business email.
What a free email account really costs
A free inbox is a perfectly reasonable place to run a small shop from. It costs nothing, it works on every device you own, and the search is usually good enough to find an order from eighteen months ago in a few seconds.The trade-offs are subtle. Many free services scan message contents to some degree, storage fills faster than you expect once you are sending pattern files, and if the account is ever suspended you lose your customer list along with your holiday photos. None of that is cause for panic. It is a reason to know which account is holding what.
Where small sellers get caught out
The problems are boringly consistent. A reused password from an old forum breach. A convincing note about a suspended payment account, arriving on the day you happened to be expecting a payout. A shared family laptop where the browser stays signed in.The NCSC publishes free advice for self-employed people and sole traders that is refreshingly light on jargon, including a toolkit you can work through in an evening. It assumes no technical knowledge at all, which is about right for most of us running a shop out of a spare room.
Choosing a free email you can grow into
If you are separating shop from personal, this is a good moment to look properly at what you are signing up to. A free email account with end-to-end encryption keeps order details and customer addresses private by default, and costs exactly the same as the one you are using now.Set it up with a password manager from day one. Switch on two-step verification before you have customers depending on you, rather than afterwards.
Keeping the running costs sensible
Small makers tend to be good at this already. The same thinking behind keeping your hobby affordable without cutting corners applies neatly to the admin side of a shop. You do not need a paid plan, a custom domain and a support desk to sell thirty patterns a month.What you do need is a clean separation between shop and self, one strong password on each, and the habit of backing up order records somewhere that is not only an inbox.
Set an hour aside
Use a quiet afternoon to set up the new address, forward the old one to it for 6 months so nothing slips through, and tell your regular customers once. The tidiness alone is worth the time.On the day something does go wrong, you'll find the damage stops at one small corner of your life rather than spreading across all of it.
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