My Beginnings With Etsy
I've been selling on Etsy since 2014. That's over a decade. A lot of it has been great. I have over a thousand 5-star reviews (and one 3-star review that I'm still sour about). I've made almost 4,500 sales on the platform. That's not shabby.
Sometime around 2016, Etsy began featuring my pet portraits, and business boomed. I could hardly keep up. My art was picked up by a couple distribution companies and suddenly prints were available at HomeGoods, Bed, Bath, & Beyond, Target, and others.
Without Etsy, I would never have been able to achieve these accomplishments.
BUT (You knew I was getting here sooner or later, right?) Etsy and I aren't as close as we once were. We've become frienemies--something many Etsy sellers will admit to. Over the years, the fees and requirements have become more and more burdensome. And the amount of mass-produced products and AI creations being sold on the platform has skyrocketed.
As my miserly grandpa used to say, "Here's how they get you":
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"FREE SHIPPING"
- Etsy all but forces sellers to offer "free shipping" for any purchase over $35. Without agreeing to that guarantee, your listings will be suppressed in searches. The issue is that shipping isn't free. In fact, it's gotten really doggone expensive lately and eating that cost is painful. On top of that, when the shipping cost is built into the cost of your product, that means Etsy is also taking fees from your shipping costs.
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INCREASED SELLER FEES
- TRANSACTION FEES: When I started selling on Etsy, their cut of every sale was 3.5%. That's pretty standard when looking at other options (Square, Shopify, Stripe, etc.). Now, Etsy takes 6.5% of every sale I make,
- LISTING FEES: Every time an item sells, I'm charged $0.20 for that item. Every time I list a new product, I'm charged $0.20. Every 3 months that an item is still inventoried in my shop, I'm charged $0.20.
- PAYMENT PROCESSING FEES: Etsy takes an additional 3% + $0.25 for every transaction.
- OFFSITE ADS: This is a compulsory program for all sellers. You can't choose to opt out or to refuse to have some (or all) of your products excluded. Etsy, at its exclusive discretion, can advertise your products on other sites. If someone clicks on that ad, then makes a purchase in your shop within 30 days of clicking on that ad, Etsy will take 12%-15% of that sale.
Between the fees and shipping costs, combined with my frequent donations to animal welfare groups, my sales on Etsy have rarely been worth the effort I put into this business. It's disheartening and defeating.
Examples
Are you feeling skeptical? Even if you're not, I'm still going to give you a couple actual examples of how these fees and requirements have hurt my business this year alone.
In February, I sold a 24"x30" poster of a German Shorthaired Pointer blueprint. My customer paid me $64.04. For ONE poster. I hate charging that much for a poster because I'm apparently still stuck in the '90s, when teenagers wallpapered their rooms with posters, which were both plentiful and affordable.
Believe it or not, I didn't walk away from that sale with $64.04. I didn't walk away with half that much. That sale cost me money.
Let's break it down here:
| Customer Sale Price | $59.99 | $59.99 |
| Customer Tax Paid | $4.05 | $64.04 |
| My Printing Cost | ($36.00) | $28.04 |
| My Shipping Cost | ($13.95) | $14.09 |
| Etsy Transaction Fee (6.5%) | ($3.90) | $10.19 |
| Etsy Payment Processing Fee (3% + $0.25) | ($2.17) | $8.02 |
| Tax | ($4.05) | $3.97 |
| Etsy Offsite Ad Fee | ($7.20) | ($3.23) |
| Donation to Erie Humane Society (10%) | ($6.40) | ($9.63) |
That one poster sale COST ME $9.63. In the end, Etsy took $13.27 from that sale. I hate raising my prices and I don't want it to come to that, but I can't continue to lose money on sales.
A few months later, in May, I sold another blueprint--an 8"x10" wrapped canvas blueprint of a golden retriever. The total paid by my customer was $64.79, but I walked away from that sale with just $1.80.
Let's break this one down:
| Customer Sale Price | $59.99 | $59.99 |
| Customer Tax Paid | $4.80 | $64.79 |
| My Printing Cost | ($33.95) | $30.84 |
| My Shipping Cost | ($10.95) | $19.89 |
| Etsy Transaction Fee (6.5%) | ($3.90) | $15.99 |
| Etsy Payment Processing Fee (3% + $0.25) | ($2.19) | $13.80 |
| Tax | ($4.80) | $9.00 |
| Etsy Offsite Ad Fee | ($7.20) | $1.80 |
The New Website
By opening up a new website entirely independent from Etsy, I hope to avoid raising my prices. My new site is powered by Shopify and the fees are lower, which is hopefully going to help me be able to continue providing the same products at reasonable prices.
In the meantime, I will continue to keep my Etsy shop up and running, but I will be directing my customers to my own website. That way I can still be found on Etsy organically, but hopefully my returning customers will be happy to support my art business here.