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Is ETSY worth it?
Philip Peak

As the subject line says, is etsy worth doing. Is anyone here selling on etsy?

Larry Glaze
Have a friend who does well on Etsy.

However, be prepared when you sell something to someone in California and when they get it they decide it's not what they thought it was and want a refund.

It is an entirely different ball game compared to selling in person.

Larry & Nancy Glaze


Chris Hayes

Short answer -- no.

Etsy -used- to be a very good venue for selling handmade items. They used to be a b-corp (which meant their corporate mission was to help small crafters/makers grow their business by having that one-of-a-kind "thing"... They are not a straight up money maker for their investor-funds and don't care how money is made).


Fees used to be reasonable (4% of total if I remember correctly), now they nickel and dime you on everything...and those nickels and dimes add up quickly. Now they take a flat 6% off the top, then another #5 (plus something) for credit card transaction, 2% for PayPal/Venmo...etc... (The sales fees are a moving target). They auto enroll you into their google advertising campaigns and charge -you- for anything they think was a click-thru to your account (I once had a monthly statement/bill for over $22 for "outside marketing"...which is what got me to pay attention to how they are now operating.)


Add to this they really don't monitor who's selling what and what pictures are being used. They only want all those dimes and percent of sales. Etsy is now, generally, an Alibaba resale site. (Meaning someone has gone and purchased a thing in quantityt on Alibaba on alibaba and is now reselling a smaller quantities to general consumers at a markup of some sort.) You will find people being successful and having something that others truly want (or so they'll claim), but there's a mega fandgo like dance that needs to happen to keep the algorithms happy and your product top of search. A LOT OF WORK on that dance...


If you do go and sell on etsy, you will most likely have about a 6 to 8 month window where your sales are great. (no dancing needed) Then something goes click and you're either paying fees out the wazoo, or you get nill on traffic. (only then do you figure out the needs on the dance moves) I would highly recommend keeping close track of fees, marketing, and traffic, for those first 6 months as it'll be interesting to see what your overall true net profit looks like. If you have over 120 sales (or 10K in sales) you will get 1099'ed for taxes. They tend to send those extremely late in the tax season (I had to refile a couple years ago because they sent it in early April and my taxes were done in late February...talk about a headache). Be very careful on how you track things you've sold along with fees and COGS and and and...because if you get audited, you'll need your evidence being extremely clear to an auditor (with almost no explanation for that person as they're just trying to get thru the day with people who thing they are out to 'get' them...I've talked to more than my fair share here)


My overall recommendation-- find some craft / art fairs and be a vendor there--or set up a website that can take sales (and then get a meta business group going for that business). Craft fairs may be bit more work, but you know exactly what your take is at the end of the day/event. Website sales are more work to get going, but again, you know what your take is immediately. No additional fees that will switch or are on a sliding scale with the gamification of the reviews and searches that come along with etsy.


I may sound like a bitter ex-etsy person...and I am to the current regime of executives on that platform. But I've had over 3200 sales over 12 years that really kept me moving and happy with the returns. Knowing that I've sent stuff to every continent (minus Antarctica...penguins aren't good customers) is really fun to track. Having generated enough revenue on the site to have paid for my wife's car there, also a good thing. However, since about 2022 they just made the site unbearable and tacky (worse than ebay or scamazon).

I truly hope your journey is different and you can teach -me- a thing or two to get around the obstacles I found...

CH

Philip Peak

Chris Hayes do you mind if I ask what you were selling?

Chris Hayes

I'm always happy to share that...

We did a lot of wooden buttons (it was then first set of things I sold there..and a lot of them) -- as we got more proficient at making things, we added them to our etsy store --and people seemingly liked what we were offering.


If you were to look at my online shop, it was pretty much the same there -- Wood lined coffee travelers, pizza cutters, bottle openers, wood bowls, the various styles of pens/pencils, wood cocktail shakers, things we repurposed into other products (sold as x, but people like the idea of y...which is what we sold). So it wasn't necessarily 1 product line that we offered and ran with --at my peak I think it was around 40 classes of items..all done here in Fishers, in my spare time.


Until big trade barriers went up around 2015, we happily sold around the world. (it wasn't tariff related but more a paperwork and global shipping nightmare that caused us to stop shipping outside North America) Even after we stopped shipping around the planet, we still had a big following stateside.


Somewhere during the pandemic is when we really started seeing a downturn in views and a raise in the fees. I know that much of what I was offering any of us (CIWW Types) would/could be doing -- all by hand, all locally.... What I was seeing while looking at things was the same pictures from Alibaba that I'd run into while looking for source materials and suppliers. Like --literally-- the cocktail shaker set from Ali was being promoted by no less than 10 different people on etsy as "hand made" or customized...(which would be very difficult with a metal cocktail shaker set) -- and the knockoff Stanley's...eeesh... even worse.



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