I argued with myself over the title of this post because if I don’t sum up all the reasons I’m “ditching Etsy” in one, this blog will become a series of “and another reason why” posts and that, while emotionally cathartic, sounds boring. So I’m covering much more, and may still add more later.
Fees. Fees. Fees.
Yeah, it costs money to make money. If you’re just starting out, you may not realize how much money it actually takes…even if you’re doing it all ‘bare bones’ style.
If you’re like me, then you always try to figure out how much a marketplace actually costs to sell your items. I mean, that’s just smart business! On the surface, it appears that Etsy costs roughly 12% of your revenue, but this number fluctuates widely depending on a lot of different variables. The primary one, of course, is the amount you actually sell your items for because many of Etsy’s fees are percentages based on subtotals and totals.
The other big factor is sales volume, how many items at your various price points are you moving each week or month? What I noticed is that inexpensive items have a much higher Etsy to my pocket ratio than more expensive ones. E.g. one of my Etsy shops sells items that typically range in price from $1.99 to $3.99 with a couple of items at $19.99 and one at $29.99. Selling many $1.99 items drive the percentage in Etsy’s favor, and selling many $30 ones puts the money in my favor. This is because while some fees are percentage based, other’s are flat, and those ones take a larger chuck of $2 than of $30. This shop’s actual Etsy fees as a percentage of revenue often tops out at over 50%. Yes, that means that Etsy is getting half the money it brings in!
Surprise! We Changed Something!
“Yep, we already did…we may or may not explain the changes, their benefits, or how to navigate this completely new way of running your business we forced onto you. Also, we now have a new ‘plan’ which gives you pretty much the same stuff you used to have, but it’s $10 a month. Interested?”
I know, when I write it like that I sound bitter. And why shouldn’t I? Perhaps it’s a mismanaged expectation on their part, but I feel that I’m paying for a platform to run my business on not just a marketplace to sell my items in. So when there are changes which fundamentally alter how I run my business on the platform, I should be notified beforehand.
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Some of the biggest changes which have happened in the past year or so include a complete revision of both the shops main page, and the product page. So many dumb choices like swapping the description text and other per listing text to a thin collapsed column on the right, which the on-every-listing boilerplate stuff is given 2/3 of the whole screen now. Another big one was when they moved the announcements bar beneath the product listings on the shop page, and pushed all shop branding to the bottom third of any product page. One positive revision that happened in October of 2019 was putting product image thumbnails to the side of the main image rather than the bottom.
Free Shipping is where it’s at. No, seriously, do it.
A paraphrasing of the new free-shipping campaign that Etsy has pushed hard this year: Offer free shipping because we polled some shoppers who said they prefer free shipping. To promote it, we’ll cover your shipping costs for a while. This has nothing to do with all the China-based vendors drop shipping stuff with free shipping from websites we think we’re competing with, even though all the sellers in the forums tell us we’re not and they don’t want us to.
A few weeks later.
Wasn’t that fun? We know you didn’t see any increase in traffic to your site or revenue, but we promise, it’ll happen! Oh hey, fun fact, we’re going to start charging a transaction fee on shipping so you might as well do the free shipping thing.
A few weeks later.
Hah! So here’s a fun thing…not at all planned, just one of those happy coincidences, but if you don’t offer free shipping your shop won’t be included in our new algorithm changes which actually promotes and prefers to display shops that do offer free shipping…even if you’re total price would be cheaper or even if you make the item instead of reselling a cheap knockoff. Fun!
Basically, shops that offer free shipping get preferential listing positions in search results. This is another case of a fundamental change to the way I operate my business without an honest warning about the final plan–they may have presented these changes over a short period of time as coincidences, but I can promise you that the entire project was road-mapped and planned at least six months ago from start to finish and went according to plan.
The kicker of this one is that the FTC clearly states in their rules for commerce that a business cannot legally raise their prices just to cover the costs of shipping items while claiming they now offer “free shipping”. Etsy has in multiple emails and site pages told it’s shop owners to do exactly that, with clear verbiage explaining how to do it. How do they get away with it? The same way they do for all the rules they punish you for not breaking, they have a disclaimer against any liability that basically says: “Decisions about running your shop ultimately fall to you and not us…no matter if we explain how to break the law…or punish you for not doing so.”
Fee Avoidance
This policy has always bugged me. The fact that even in the early days of Etsy, they felt the need to police people in this way blew my mind. Essentially, Etsy views your customer has their customer…exclusively. It doesn’t matter how you met your customer, if they contact you via Etsy, even for a custom item that you don’t normally even sell on Etsy, they expect you to follow the entire process on Etsy so they can get their “cut”.
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Etsy Branding All Over The Place
You simply can’t escape their branding. Even if you pay them for their Pattern fancy website, you’ll still be greeted with their name on every page. On each of your product pages, the only branding you see unless you scroll toward the bottom is theirs. On the front page of their website, they show your product listings, but they hide your business name, meaning that all products look like they come from Etsy. All of their marketing (advertising, banners, sales copy, website copy, and most social media posts) are designed to associate the work you do with their brand, even showing competing products from other sellers in your listing pages. Finally, although they recently removed their branding from the shipping labels–yes, even your package used to look like it was coming from Etsy–they have a clever line at the very bottom praising themselves for doing carbon neutral shipping. It’s our money they’re doing it with, but they’re taking all the credit for it! So frustrating when you add all these little things together.
So do you think I’m being too critical? Do you have your own gripes with Etsy? Do you unequivocally love Etsy? Let me know in the comments!
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