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MikeG.

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I know one or two people here have "shops" on Etsy. I'm interested in your experience. Is it worth your while? What sells? Are there hassles? How much site traffic do you get? Does it work by itself, or only in conjunction with Facebook etc for promotion?
 
Hi Mike,

Amazon also have a 'Handmade' category - an Etsy competitor. I have no experience not either, but I do remember someone mentioned the Amazon handmade fees were higher.

Just FYI.

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
 
I had one for about a year selling straight razors and japanese waterstones.

But it wasn't really to make money. I was letting some of the air out of the tires on the japanese natural stone market where sellers were getting $50 stones from japan and then selling them to people in the states and europe for $225 or some such thing and over describing them.

I got bulk picked (used - like from barber shops) stones, sorted them and graded them. It wouldn't have been hard to make it mildly profitable.

For anything else where you're making something that you want to sell, it would need to be unique. Otherwise, my experience with most things on there is that etsy gets less traffic than most other sites and they charge recurring listing fees and their sellers fees are going up. You can have a lot of stuff that's just sitting there, and the format is more conducive than ebay to messaging back and forth, so you can end up with people sending you dozens of messages.

My mother is a maker of things - folk art stuff. She is retired from her day job, but managed to make her folk art business a side income of about $25-$30k a year, and then something she could continue doing that in retirement. It's not my taste, but she is creative and needs something to do, and she's good at repurposing materials so that the cost isn't too high. She tried selling on etsy for a while, and she did have luck selling several items a day, but the amount of time that it takes to service a sale (listing, corresponding, shipping) means that it's really a waste of time for the $8 to $15 type small items she was selling there.
 
Etsy looks like it might be the cheapest, but not necessarily the best

16p to list, 5% transaction fee, 4% +20p payment processing

Amazon,
No hidden fees
Joining Handmade, creating your shop, and listing products is free. When you make a sale, Handmade will deduct a 12% referral fee.

Doesn't mention transaction / paypal fees.

Looks like I'm being ripped off on ebay, where I've just had a nice sale.

£240 sale inc postage
£9.32 (about 4% to paypal)
£9 for royal mail
£24 + 36p for ebay 10% and listing fee

£240 - £42.68 = £197.32

Now imagine I'd sold 10 things at £24 each inc postage
£9.32 for paypal again
£40 royal mail (10 x £4, 2nd class recorded)
£24 + £3.60 for ebay

£240 - £76.92 = £163.10 ouch, plus all that horrible packing.

Have you considered Farmers markets, artisan and especially as I've heard wonderful things about them Xmas markets. Guess you book in advance pay a flat fee for a stall, turn up and sell your wares

Al you need is the right items and the right market. Get researching and if you do go down that route I'd get a card machine.
 
Mr_Pea":2v0kb0jg said:
Etsy looks like it might be the cheapest, but not necessarily the best

16p to list, 5% transaction fee, 4% +20p payment processing

Amazon,
No hidden fees
Joining Handmade, creating your shop, and listing products is free. When you make a sale, Handmade will deduct a 12% referral fee.

Doesn't mention transaction / paypal fees.

Looks like I'm being ripped off on ebay, where I've just had a nice sale.

£240 sale inc postage
£9.32 (about 4% to paypal)
£9 for royal mail
£24 + 36p for ebay 10% and listing fee

£240 - £42.68 = £197.32

Now imagine I'd sold 10 things at £24 each inc postage
£9.32 for paypal again
£40 royal mail (10 x £4, 2nd class recorded)
£24 + £3.60 for ebay

£240 - £76.92 = £163.10 ouch, plus all that horrible packing.

Have you considered Farmers markets, artisan and especially as I've heard wonderful things about them Xmas markets. Guess you book in advance pay a flat fee for a stall, turn up and sell your wares

Al you need is the right items and the right market. Get researching and if you do go down that route I'd get a card machine.

Ebay is a bad place to list things, yes. Typically about 15% when all is said and done after you pay for the 13% typical fee, but have to pay for the fees on shipping, etc, and add close to 2% if you get a foreign buyer who uses global shipping.

Etsy is a little better but you'll still be approaching 10% when all is said and done.

Moving volume in my experience from watching my mother means getting away from those types of sites and having a central site of your own (which will cost just as much unless you're really moving volume), or finding a local market of buyers. The latter is what my mother has done. Her setup fees (she's now in her 70s and finally fully retiring) are probably in the 10-15% range, but the key in those places is she may go somewhere for a day and dump $5k worth of stuff if she's been at that location. If she's at a duller show, it may be $2k. It's taken her time to learn which places are the $2k-$5k of stuff in a day (which means she only needs to do about half a dozen shows a year -one is a big zinger that she dumps $10-$12k a year in in four days) and which are better to not attend.

But she still has fiddled with the online stuff just for something to do. For items that average $15 or whatever her things average, I've no clue how long it would take in time to match the local show.

Point being, if you feel like you've got something marketable on etsy, go ahead and list a few things. You'll find out quickly if they'll sell. Plan on treating it more like a booth at an antique mall where you set your stuff out, and set a lot of it out, and hope a couple of things per week will sell. Etsy is on a revenue increasing drive from what I experienced. They used to be on a market share/growth drive, but that will likely be giving way to increasing gimmicks/ad on costs, promotions and higher fees for listing and selling. It's the classic model for just about every business that starts off with the "home spun" friendly gimmick. It lasts only through the growth period until the business decides they're going to capitalize on the sacrifices that they made in current revenue during the growth period.

The other thing you'll find with etsy if you sell there is that a larger share of the buyers are repeat buyers. I probably sold 50% of the stones that I sold to four people who kept buying more. As repeat buyers become more comfortable asking for your advice, they'll also start asking for advice on things you aren't selling.
 
There's some seriously expensive stuff on Etsy. £20,000 dining tables, and the like. The approach from those sort of sellers surely can't be a quibble about commission rates, so much as a question of success rates. In other words, at that end of the market it boils down to whether or not Etsy is a place to successfully sell stuff, rather than whether the cost of an individual sale is high.
 
At 16p - 36p to list items it's a very cheap advertising for a business.

If it generates 1 commision a year , happy days if not, doh better luck next year.

How much for a tiny ad in a Sunday Newspaper glossy suplement ?

How do you search ebay ? sometime I search with highest price on top
 
MikeG.":3hxym5y0 said:
There's some seriously expensive stuff on Etsy. £20,000 dining tables, and the like. The approach from those sort of sellers surely can't be a quibble about commission rates, so much as a question of success rates. In other words, at that end of the market it boils down to whether or not Etsy is a place to successfully sell stuff, rather than whether the cost of an individual sale is high.

Yes, and for those folks, it may be a matter of finding the few clients, or the fact that they probably don't expect to sell anything they're listing, but it costs little to list there and they can.

Those same tables may be listed in 100 different places.

I don't know what the average item sale price is on etsy - $100? Something like that? It varies from items that are a couple of dollars (that are intended to sell in volume) to the solid brass prototype ibanez artist that sells for mid 5 figures.

Anyone selling a table like you're mentioning would never get away with as little as 5% selling through any other venue, but I think those folks are just looking for contacts, and not actually making sales through etsy. I'd bet the success rate is fairly low.
 
I've been using Folksy and find I need to direct people there from other social media - passing trade really hasn't amounted to anything so far.
 

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