The covid pandemic has made many around the world wanting to change careers and a lot of them opened shops on Etsy. This is awesome and at the same time, a lot of people have the ” I want to start a business” dream or bucket list got checked off. That’s the easy part the hard part is actually listing your first product on the site. A lot of people have this idea that it will be easy to start an online business but for this blog post, the topic will be good old Etsy and some stuff you need to keep in mind. :
Listing an item on Etsy:
It costs $.20 to list say a “bracelet” on Etsy, then there’s a transaction fee of 6.5% as of ( 5/19/2022) once it sells depending on what the item is it could be less than a dollar or even more than a dollar.
Underpricing:
This is a HUGE problem with people starting an online business. PEOPLE need to stop doing this. You need to make a profit to keep yourself afloat and out of debt and you don’t want an expensive hobby do you? No, you don’t.
Listing a sticker for a $1 is not worth the time if you designed it in procreate and you print it house, and you actually make the stickers with your super cute Cricut machine ( /wave to my fellow Cricut owners), you need to count for the time you designed it on procreate, formatting it on say design space, and printing it out, and the time it took the Cricut to cut it. I know these are things most people don’t really think about because you want to make some money on the side. But what you really need to remember is you need to eat and pay bills and stay on top of the fees and I can’t forget about everyone’s favorite stuff.
TAXES!
Businesses need to pay taxes, if you didn’t know that already yes they pay taxes too, depending on where you live, for example in the USA you need to pay state taxes. I would go to good old google and search for
what do you need to start a business in…Search your state or provinces and territories and see what it says, most likely the fee will be under $50 USD.
Other fees on etsy.
Auto-renewed listings
The Auto-renewed listings fee is $.20 Auto-renewed means that Etsy will charge you those $.20 to renew it for you. I would turn that off especially if you are new or have low sales and let the listing expire, you can then go in and edit it and change things up like photos and etc. Gotta save that money yo! ( hehe)
Multi-quantity listing fees
This means you if you list say a sticker and you ten of that same design every time it sells you will be paying you guessed it $.20 or as Etsy words it. ” your payment account would reflect the original $0.20 USD listing fee plus an additional $0.20 USD for the additional item purchased. “while listing the same item a few times on one listing is good you have to make sure that you’re not undercutting yourself and not making actual money.
Paying a fee to ship the product:
I know what you’re thinking what the hell do I have to pay a fee to ship my project, NO SHIT SHERLOCK you do how do you think that bracelet and that sticker will get to Molly in Hawaii?
Payment Processing Fees for Etsy Payments
OMG, I need to pay for every time someone buys my product. YEAH, you do! for the USA the fee is 3% + .025.
Finally my actual review!
Etsy besides the ridiculous fees can be a great starting point for your tiny business to get your feet wet and start this new path in your life
but do go about this knowing you will need to pay fees for pretty much everything as I mentioned above. And please don’t undercut yourself, you’re better than that and you deserve to have that cute craft room you have been dreaming of. Most people never move to their own site and that’s fine and the reason so many don’t is due to the fact the traffic Etsy brings to the site, your products need to be on point as people say, you need good pictures, you need a good description of the item, and most of all you need to learn SEO ( Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.) and tags too. If you end up outgrowing Etsy say you have over 100 orders a month then that’s where I would look into getting a web designer ( like me ) to help you transition to a website of your own. This can be scary but it’s not you can do this on a small budget I did. I hope this helps you decide what to do.
If you have any questions please contact me and I’m happy to chat with you.
