If you have an Etsy shop, then you understand the “Yo-Yo” reference.
You decided to sell your products via Etsy because:
- It’s pretty easy to set up
- Plenty of others are on there so you believe plenty of others will find your shop.
- Etsy takes care of the taxes and processing of your payments received.
But then months into it you realize:
- They charge you for every little thing: Transactions, Processing, Listings
- Etsy strong-arms you to offer free shipping
- Once you think you’ve figured out how to set up your listing so it shows up in searches, they change the algorithm and suddenly you can’t even find what page your listing will show up on.
- Etsy basically owns your content and therefore can decide to shut you down on a whim or force you to provide a refund (i.e., that ONE bad review out of hundreds of good ones)
These are just some of the frustrations that Etsy sellers have had, but you get the point. This is exactly why I no longer recommend selling on there.
What if:
- You controlled how people found your products
- You only had to worry about paying standard merchant fees as opposed to all the other incidentals that Etsy charges
- All the content on your website is owned by you and no one can police it or strong-arm you to change your prices, offer free shipping, or any other changes that don’t align with you.
These are the results of having your very own website. Now you’re thinking “but isn’t having your own website expensive?”.
Let's look at the numbers
Go ahead and look at all the fees you paid out to Etsy over the course of a year. When I had my shop, I maintained an average of 15 listings and over the course of one year I paid $2200 in fees for a gross income of $9700. So I paid them 22.68%! That’s crazy!
Now let’s look at what it costs to have your own website.
Domain (url): $15 per year
Hosting Service $75 per year
Merchant fees: Both Stripe and Paypal are currently 2.9% plus .30 per transaction
I think the math speaks for itself. With a little education and strategic changes you can actually get off that Etsy Yo-Yo and keep the money you have earned. This is what I call working smarter not harder.