An Update on my Etsy Shop
I’ve decided to shut down my Etsy shop (www.etsy.com/shop/CascadeVistas). The amount of sales I make really doesn’t justify the effort it takes to keep up with the shop. From pricing updates, to new fees, to troubleshooting orders, it takes too much time.
The Good:
Etsy is a large website which gets indexed frequently by search engines. You automatically get a boost in SEO just by being on the platform.
The Bad:
Etsy frequently increases its fees, which comes out of your profits. You have to constantly be on the lookout for these increases, otherwise, you may sell your items at a loss without knowing it.
The fees on Etsy are endless too. There’s a listing fee to simply list on the website; a transaction fee once a sale occurs; a payment processing fee to collect from the customer; and a shipping processing fee (not shipping, but a fee as a percentage of shipping). Rather than nickel and diming sellers, the pricing models should be simplified.
This last fee makes the least sense to me, since I ship the models from Shapeways, which is the entity responsible for shipping. Etsy has nothing to do with this process, so why are they charging a shipping processing fee here?
The sales tax is getting charged twice here too. I get charged by Shapeways when the order is processed on their side, and the customer gets charged when they place the order on Etsy. There’s only one sale, so one of those is unnecessary.
The “Etsy to Shapeways” order API fails silently, which means I’m not notified when a problem occurs. This winter, my credit card number was stolen. I forgot that this card was the one used by the API too. A customer placed an order, and the API failed silently. I had to track this down weeks later and manually place the order to resolve the problem.
Speaking of SEO, Etsy will sometimes bid on keywords to drive sales to your items. You think this would be a good thing. However, if a sale happens, Etsy will turn around and charge you for the keyword bid. If you already have a low margin on your items, you’ll end up selling at a loss on these items. It seems the fair thing to do would be for Etsy to take the SEO bid out of their own transaction fee, since they’re the ones that decided to bid to begin with.
To work around all these issues, I’d have to sell my models for a much higher price to make it worth dealing with all these problems. I’d rather pass savings on to customers instead by keeping the prices low, and spend my spare time enjoying the short summer here.
I’ll continue selling the 3D printed models off of Shapeways, as they’ve proven to be reliable and easy to work with.
