I just closed my Etsy account but not because of fees or lack of sales. In fact, kind of the opposite.

The fees are fine. Less than eBay, and less than agencies (up to 85%!) and then set their own prices. Even less than designer resource agencies who take about 30% but at least let you set your own price.

But the problem is, when your sales start to take off, you are faced with a new kind of problem: buyers. Some of them are wonderful, kind, understanding people, but about 10% are absolute nutcases. They don't read your listings, they mistakenly buy the wrong thing, they expect you to answer their messages immediately (even within an hour is too long for them), they don't take responsibility for their own mistakes, everything is your fault, and they are so full of anger. You do all the right things, you explain everywhere throughout the listing, in both pictures and words what this listing is actually for. But they don't read the listings!

Normally with enough time and patience, you can work through these problems, but I just had 2 in a row, and I feel like I've been hit by a sledgehammer.

The point is, you have to 'man your messaging' 24/7. The more sales you make, the more of this stuff you have to deal with.

Anyway, the reason why I've closed my shop is that I have to go away for a few months to work for my husband's business and I can't have all this drama going on in the background. I think I could have put the shop on holiday mode or something, but for now, it was just nice to close the whole thing for a while, and have some peace and quiet.

So this is what you pay the agencies for. Managing buyers.  Food for thought, everybody!



PS. I loved being on Etsy and loved 80% of the whole 'selling direct/running your own little business' thing, but it can get you down if you have a bad week.

That 'nutcase' buyer problem on Etsy with terrible reviews as a consequence was something my wife had noticed with some jewellery sellers she's been researching. Some buyers are just too lazy to read the description or are simply illiterate.

Quote from: Pacesetter on May 07, 2022, 00:33

.... I actually lost interest before I even got started and with all these fees people talking about, makes my interest wane even further. ....

for all the whinging here about agencies, folk should look at reality before complaining about fees on etsy - these sites are not agencies - you sell your product at your price & they take a small cut (10-15%). you're looking at net $3-20+/sale vs the pittance from MS agencies. FAA has potential, but there's no SEO - i make just enough (barely) to justify their annual 'pro' fee

i've sold (non-photo) items on ebay & amazon for over 20 years & these are my most profitable venues (unfortunately neither allows digital sales). the fees are reasonable for the SEO & other benefits of listing w them.
 as theremy problem w etsy (& zazzle) is the cumbersome upload/listing process so i'm looking seriously at shopify as there looks to be a bulk listing ability

I don't mind fees for something that sold.

"Etsy charges a $0.20 �listing fee� for each item listed which is paid regardless of resulting sales and lasts 4 months or until the item is sold. When an item is sold, you can have your listing �auto-renew� at the cost of an additional $0.20 which will last another 4 months. And if you haven�t sold a single item after the 4-month period, you can have your listing �auto-renew� at the same $0.20 per listing fee which will buy you another 4 months."

How do I afford to list a large number of assorted items and pay the fees up front, and hope that something sells? Etsy makes a good amount on their site by collecting fees for things that will never sell. Including "rare" coins that aren't rare that are listed for $50,000, but aren't worth the cost of shipping. Where's Etsy integrity and how can a buyer trust us, with such obvious fraud all over the site?

https://omniprofitcalculator.com/etsy-fees/

On the other side of that, if I'm selling the wrong things, that buyers don't want, I should stop doing that. But I don't like having to pay to discover the demand or interests?

Looking for ideas and I know that some people do this and do well. I asked Annie after she mentioned promotion using social media. Anyone else with ideas that have worked, please join in?

Well, I managed to replace my stock income with the one coming from POD so Ill share few thoughts if someone find them useful. BTW my portfolio was always to artsy for stock so Im not sure if this would work with classic stock portfolios.
 

1. Building social presence is a long term process and really time consuming

2. Organic reach on some platforms became non existent so focusing on that is a wast of time if you don't do payed promotion ( read FB )

3. Avoid only follow for follow or like for like in a niche cause you will just find yourself in a net of artist liking each others stuff. On the other hand it can be useful to have large following so I wouldn't totally exclude those methods.

4.Get to know more about your buyers...you have to figure that out for yourself

5. Be social, don't just post stuff for sale, you will most probably have to do marketing of yourself, your creative process which sucks for me cause I'm a introvert. If you do a research you will see that most popular artists tend to involve their personal life in their socials big time.

And another thing, one of the most important tools for random sales is SEO optimization of your content. You need to have your keywords in Title and Description. Long descriptions can also help.  Tags on the other hand are internal thing and are not helpful outside the selling platform. On FAA they openly state that 90+ % of sales come from google. Also building a own website that can rank stuff on long tail keywords can help a lot but its extremely hard to achieve in so saturated niche as art . So site hierarchy, ranking categories and serious keyword research is a must but that also doesn't guarantee nothing if the stuff you do is to competitive.

Having a niche is beneficial in my opinion , trying to market a little bit of everything...good luck with that