Etsy is a great place for crafters to get started selling their products
online. Everyone has heard about it.
So it's an obvious choice and it's known for being handmade or so we
think, but it is easy to get set up.
And Etsy gives you a lot of tools for getting your products in front of
potential Etsy is a marketplace.
It's like eBay or Amazon.
There are thousands of different shops on the platform and it's powered by a
search engine.
So what that means is you get the benefit of a built in audience who are
looking for stuff to buy.
You don't have to worry so much about how to get customers because Etsy's
already got them for you. I love using Etsy.
I have been on there for over a decade since they first came out.
And it's nice because I get to make somewhat passive income sales from there,
which means I can make sales without any active effort on my part.
There are a lot of benefits for being on Etsy,
lots of beginners start there.
And now that I've made selling on Etsy sound so great.
I'm going to tell you all the reasons why you should get off of Etsy as soon as
possible. And here's why.
Hi there. My name is Mei and I help makers,
artists and designers make a consistent income selling their handmade products
online. Firstly, I like to joke about this,
but I don't think it's even that far off as he's kind of like
an abusive relationship.
I really hope you've never had the bad luck of being in a really relationship
like that before,
whether it's with a parent or a family member or a friend or a partner,
or maybe you've seen this on TV, okay.
Hollywood loves to showcase the drama of abusive relationships like this.
I'm talking about a relationship where you have no control. You have no say,
nothing you say will actually matter or change anything.
It's completely dysfunctional. You're forced to play by their rules.
One day they might be in a good mood and the next day,
the total opposite and they're in a terrible mood.
Doesn't that all sound like I'm describing Etsy.
They changed their algorithms all the time with their most recent one that's
hurt a lot of sellers is they force people to give free shipping.
And if you don't, your products will get lower priority in search.
You have no choice, but to play their game. And if you don't,
you will just lose out.
You have no idea how many times people have come to me to say,
they've had a great year with Etsy last year, but this year,
their sales totally tanked and they're barely making anything anymore.
It's so unstable and it's not because of anything you did.
And it's hard to leave Etsy because you've invested all this time to get your
shop set up and maybe in the beginning, it even treat you well.
It is so uncanny and ironic that there are so many
similarities between Etsy and a terrible boyfriend.
I could keep going on and on about this, but we're going to move on.
Otherwise this is going to turn into some kind of soap, opera drama. Okay.
So with Etsy, you also can't really control your brand.
I was asked the other day when I was joining a Facebook group,
it was one of those questions that pop up. When you request to join,
it asked what is your definition of a brand? And I was like,
Hmm, this is a good question. I thought about it for 30 seconds.
And it came to me because for a long time I had trouble finding what a brand
was. I thought about it first 30 seconds.
And it came to me because for a whole long time,
I had trouble defining what a brand is. And here's what it is.
A brand is the experience of your shop that you give to your customers.
So it's the feelings and thoughts your customers have after they've been to your
website, Etsy is sterile. It's static.
You can't make it your own.
Besides changing out your shop banner and making your product photo stand out
and shot in a different way or different background.
It's so easy to accidentally click over to someone else's shop.
And the customer wouldn't know any different because everything is using the
Etsy brand. And you know how under your own product listings,
there are links to other people's products in your own shop.
There are so many levels of unfairness happening around
Etsy and just think about it.
How does Etsy make money?
Listing fees and transaction fees when you've made a sale, right?
So it's an STS best interest to push as many sales as possible.
And that means they're going to keep favoring those sellers who are already
doing well and making a lot of sales because Etsy knows,
they're proven if you're a shop with 50 sales and you have a competitor with
1000 sales and you sell a similar product that one customer is shopping
for who do you think Etsy will promote more on Etsy
the rich get richer.
It's really difficult to break through or to make a consistent income on Etsy
these days you used to be able to,
but not with all the competition that's happening on there today. Okay.
So Etsy fees are about 15 to 20% of your sales.
Honestly,
I think the fees are justified considering they do give you the tools to make
sales and you wouldn't have made those sales otherwise.
So it's all take a moment and be grateful for that.
But joking aside,
what makes Etsy actually more expensive than the other great alternatives out
there? Is their 5% transaction fee.
That's not the credit card fee because to sell online,
no matter what platform you're on, you have to pay credit card fees.
Etsy has a transaction fee, which is different from the credit card.
You can look at that as being a commission for helping me make the sale and
having a place online to host your products and your shop.
So the more sales you start to make, the more fees you have to pay.
And it doesn't take long before selling on Etsy actually becomes more expensive
than other places, but it doesn't stop there.
Etsy's 5% transaction fee takes out of your shipping fee
too. I don't know about you, but I don't profit.
From what I charged with shipping.
All the money goes straight to shipping supplies and USPS for postage.
So that's a direct hit on my bottom line when you're just starting out that
15 to 20% cut of sales that you have to give them may not seem like a
lot, but once you start making $200, $300 in sales,
it ends up being the same cost as being on something like Shopify.
And if you sell a more expensive product,
it doesn't take very long until you reach that threshold.
Which brings me to my next point, because there's an added,
hidden cost that you'll never find on Etsy's pricing or help pages.
And that's the cost on your sanity. Etsy shoppers
are notorious for being impatient, unkind, and very hard to work with.
You can have all the details of your product in the description of your listing.
But I guarantee you'll come across many customers who haven't read them.
Am I making a blanket statement? Yes,
of course you will find nightmare customers everywhere,
no matter where you're selling,
but Etsy in particular is a hot spot for terrible customers that take up a lot
of your time that make you unhappy and stressed.
And there comes a point where you have to ask if it's all worth it anymore.
Everyone, at some point, will go through feedback ransom.
When your customer buys something from you,
they can meet any kind of feedback they want on your shop.
They can be total jerks about it in a whole, your shop rating hostage.
When you don't do what they want,
they might even make totally out of scope demands,
or it may have been a problem that was their fault and not yours at all.
And guess what?
If someone leaves you one-star feedback because they didn't read your product
description, there's very little you can do about it.
And that really hurts your shop. Sure. You can appeal that feedback with Etsy,
but I wouldn't count on it.
And let's not forget all the competition from other Etsy shops.
I don't think having competition from other makers is in itself a bad thing.
I do think that there is enough room for everyone to play,
but I think Etsy made a terrible mistake a few years ago when they allowed
manufactured products from being sold on there.
Etsy used to be a really beautiful marketplace where you could find
unique, beautiful products that you couldn't find anywhere else.
And now that you can sell China made mass market produced products
on, on Etsy. It's really diluted the quality of the site.
I used to shop on Etsy myself. And recently when we moved into our new home,
we had sold all our furniture and I was looking for new stuff to decorate our
really empty house.
I went on Etsy and I was really frustrated at how difficult it was to find
products that didn't all look the same and Etsy in general
has a huge problem of price competition. If you sell anything,
that's remotely a higher price point than the next shop.
Good luck because of just the nature of Etsy,
the customer can see your product right next to the competitions,
all things equal. They're almost always going to choose the cheaper option,
not to mention because it's so easy to start selling your handmade products on
Etsy.
There are a lot of new shop owners who don't really know a lot about how to run
a business. So, many of them don't know how to price their products correctly.
Most are pricing it just based off their material costs.
So they're not making any money. You have to compete with that.
That's impossible.
You can't compete with that while making a living that's sustainable and not
burn yourself out.
So just being on Etsy really pressures you to compete on price.
And that's not exactly a recipe for success. Not to mention,
as we were talking about branding before,
you've heard so many times about how people have shopped on Etsy for something.
And when you say like, where did you get this cool necklace you're wearing?
They're not going to say I bought it from Tiny Hands Jewelry.
They're going to say I bought it on Etsy.
There's just almost zero branding awareness for your brand.
If you're on Etsy, if you're watching this video,
you've probably experienced some of what I've just said yourself.
And you're probably thinking about an exit strategy. Now,
before I talk about that,
I don't necessarily think that anyone needs to quit Etsy, just set up your shop,
the way you would, without any of the Etsy pressures. I just talked about,
get your listings, search engine optimized. And once that work is done,
just set it up and forget about it. If you target the right keywords,
you can make a few sales here and there on autopilot,
just because of that huge built in audience of customers that Etsy already has.
But if Etsy is the only shot that you have.
You need to transition your focus away from Etsy.
We're not going to abandon Etsy completely.
We're just going to shift your focus,
but where or what do you focus on? Now?
Remember I said Etsy is a marketplace, just like eBay or Amazon.
So I believe that the wrong answer is to move over to another
marketplace site because you're going to suffer from similar problems as Etsy.
I mean, I encourage everyone to have an Amazon shop,
but it's not the answer for all the problems we just talked about.
Instead, what you need to do is create your own platform,
understand that your own platform is not a marketplace anymore.
It's a standalone website. It doesn't have its own built in audience like Etsy.
Because of this,
you will need to be prepared to drive your own traffic to make sales.
I have a ton of other videos on my channel that talk about how to do that.
So I'm not going to cover that here now,
but instead walk you through the transition.
There are a lot of platforms you can choose from. I highly recommend Shopify.
I have a video coming out soon that talks about the different sites you can sell
on. So if you want a more in depth comparison, go check that out.
When you're in Shopify,
there are apps you can use to import your Etsy listings over to your Shopify
store. So setting them up will be super easy to do. For your Shopify theme,
which is how your website looks. If you don't have the budget for it,
I recommend using the Minimal theme. That's free to use.
It's simple and clean and converts customers to sales very well.
So don't feel like you need to spend a hundred bucks on a paid theme in order to
do well. That's absolutely not true.
Building your Shopify store is going to take time.
So it's important that whatever you were doing with Etsy,
that you try to maintain that.
So you're not completely stopping sales from there altogether.
As you're building your store,
you can set up a coming soon page for your Shopify site,
where you collect email addresses from people who are on your waitlist to check
out your site. If you have your own custom domain, like tinyhandsonline.com,
but you were directing that to your Etsy shop.
Now's the time to change that redirect to point to your new Shopify store.
Instead,
we want to put every effort we can into growing that email list so that when
your shop is ready to go live, hopefully in one or two weeks,
you'll have several dozen people who are just waiting for your new shop to open.
When you're ready to launch,
I do recommend doing some sort of online party or event like a treasure hunt
giveaway sales, or you could even maybe do, uh,
or coincide your store opening with a launch of a new limited edition
collection. Give people a reason to go to your shop when it's launched.
I've had a lot of students do it exactly like this and get some really amazing
results even with a completely new Shopify store.
So I know it definitely works. So give it a shot.
And if you found this video helpful,
you'll want to check out this next video on here that I know will help your
handmade business too. And you have any questions,
just leave me a comment down below and I'll get back to you.
Don't forget to like this video and subscribe. See you in that next video.