My Etsy shop is sooo quiet now

[WeRD]

I opened my Etsy shop a few years ago and was blown away by the success of it. I managed to leave my 9-5 and live off of it alone. It was great, so flexible and I was making enough money not to need anything else, I couldn’t believe it. Fast forward a few years and the sales have all but dried up. I don’t know if it’s mainly that people just don’t have the extra cash anymore to spend on ‘nice things’. I’ve had to put my prices up a bit due to my increasing costs or it’s hardly worthwhile selling my items. I don’t know what to do 😞 I have a fairly decent social media following but it doesn’t seem to convert to sales anymore. I pay for ads sometimes but it’s not worth it for the number of orders I get in return. Do I need to shut up shop and go back to a ‘proper job’? How else could I save it now? 😢

There’s a lot of mass market tat on Etsy nowadays. It annoys me when I’m looking for something to see duplicates of the same items across different shops.

Also, postage is expensive nowadays.

I just popped on to Etsy to buy a “bowl cosy” after burning my fingers again heating up lunch. Found a design I like. It’s £5… added to basket… £2.50 postage. I don’t want to spend £7.50 on it. So I’m not ordering and tomorrow I’ll burn my fingers again 😂 Hope I see one at a local craft fair or similar.

This is it and it feels like if you aren’t on the ball with the latest trend on TikTok, reels or whatever that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. I have young kids and just don’t have the time to be on top of that as well as making my products, buying in stock, keeping on top of what I have listed, packaging them, posting them and everything else 🤯 Even without young kids I think that would be more than one person could manage! If we could go back to when all I needed to do was post a social media pic and lots of people liked it that would be great 😂

Find influencers with good followings whose content is relevant to your products and approach them to promote your business.

Folksy spends next to nothing on advertising, and most people have never heard of it. You need to find your own customers and send them there to complete the sale. You can't rely on potential customers stumbling across you. Same with mademe, numonday and the rest.

It's also not much cheaper than Etsy

I'm in a handmade Etsy sellers group on FB and this is the main topic of conversation at the moment, everyone's sales have nosedived right across the board since December. Worse than usual even at this time of year, apparently, although I only sell on a very small scale so can't really comment.

Totally agree that as a buyer the Etsy experience is pretty crap now, every category just completely flooded with mass-produced tat. And it's all sponsored advertising so it fills up the first page of hits. Finding the genuinely handmade items is so hard. As a seller, I currently drive 100% of the traffic to my shop from my own social media.

I've considered switching to Folksy, but as others have said there's no brand awareness and it's only other makers who have heard of the platform. But as I'm doing all my own marketing perhaps that doesn't matter!

I find the same.

There was a time when you’d actually reach the end of your search results. Now there isn’t an end in sight.
And they are the same products repeated a hundred times.

For me, the issue is that there are so many Etsy listings that are just people drop-shipping things from places like Temu and Wish... with a substantial markup! Unless you care enough to do extensive research on the sellers, you have no idea if the "hand-knitted bottle holder" you bought was actually handmade by a nice lady the next town over or made in a factory somewhere halfway across the world. Way too often, the £30 item you want on Etsy is the EXACT same item you can find for £3 on one of those sites as that's probably where the seller bought it from anyway.

Etsy looks like a jumble sale of new things so I don't bother going anywhere near it.

I'd look for other places to sell if you want to keep your business alive.

Nobody can really help much if they don't have a clue what sort of item you sell though.

You need to find where your target market hang out and be there.

I didn't know this about Etsy but now I know I will delete the app and shop elsewhere, thanks.

I would 100% recommend Shopify. I opened my business on Etsy, got into social media and when I moved over to my own website my sales didn’t drop at all. My Etsy store is still open but barely makes a sale a week without me promoting it. Shopify website, get an app where you can install pop ups, “spin the wheel” for discounts fun things like that, build a customer email list where you can promote new items, 10% off their first order for signing up etc. if you have a good following on social media, create a Google document questionnaire asking customers what they’re looking for, age range, how much they’d spend on products etc to try and figure out who your main customer base is. Social media is a pain but ultimately it’s what’s going to get you sales, I have 120K following across tiktok and Instagram but still get quiet periods, especially this time of the year.

I love Etsy but tend to use it only for special occassions and I live in a town devoid of any decent shops. For my DDs recent 21st I ordered invitations, a birthday message book, a canvas photo collage and birthday card, all from Etsy. I'd be sad to see it go but it is very niche, and I doubt most sellers rely on it for sole income

My shop is quiet as well; things have definitely been quieter after the pandemic- if you opened your shop around the time of lockdown, everyone was shopping online. Now they're back in the shops, plus selling on Etsy has exploded, with everyone watching YouTube videos on how to make thousands a month on Etsy! I sell printables and I've noticed there's a lot more competition. Many new sellers think it's a get rich quick scheme. Spoiler alert- it isn't.

18,000 people have seen your post and you won't say what you sell where's the logic in that! You could have made loads of sales fro mumsnetters who would also spread the word if the products are nice.

If she did that, MN would likely remove the thread as it would be considered advertising.

I'm on Folksy, which does little to no advertising - it's up to me to drive traffic to my shop. If it were anything but a side hustle for pin money, I'd invest time in my own website and shopify it. As it is, it suits me but its 2 - 5% of my income.

For the OP, you prob need to spread out your sales over different platforms and real life markets.

Etsy as a business model no longer makes sense. Its unrecognisable now. Its certainly not the place I joined many years ago. That place died when they went public and had shareholders demanding dividends. Now its just yet another street market.

I try to avoid Etsy due to a few things. One is how much it charges Sellers to use the site. Secondly is how impossible it is to do relevant searches anymore or avoid US sellers charging ludicrous postage. It's really difficult to find a UK seller with what you are looking for. Searches return thousands of results mostly irrelevant. It's not the items for sale that are the issue, it's finding them.

Sites that rely heavily on promoting and advertising are very frustrating for users because you search for something and every few results you then have to scroll through stuff that is not particularly relevant because someone has chucked in 60 keywords or hashtags. I try to avoid Etsy if I can as it seems to be hundreds of different listings for quite similar mass produced stuff and I have to do a lot of filtering to try to find people selling hand crafted/designed items.

I was quite annoyed the other day to see that the tesco shopping app now comes up with a lot of paid promotions before you can see what you searched for. No one stops to think of the inconvenience it causes the person trying to buy something.

All internet advertising is generally useless and off putting with the exception of Instagram where I am constantly surprised how much stuff I see on there that is relevant to me. (Guess that comes from a s**t tone of data mining though)

I think if you’ve recently put your prices up that’s probably part of it.

Ohh I will need to look at joining that Facebook group! I’m glad in a way that it’s not just me 🤦🏻‍♀️ I couldn’t believe my luck when I had started up a year or two, it was consistently busy. Due to a few different things I took a backseat for a few weeks here or there and would notice sales dip during these periods and kind of blamed myself when they weren’t picking up again now but I can’t do much more than I’m doing in terms of Etsy with ads, turnaround time etc.

I’m in the process of opening on Shopify as the fees seem less and I’m planning to use the link to that off my social media and leave Etsy running in the background so I still have both. Maybe just because I’ve been so used to Etsy for years though, I’m finding shopify quite complicated to set up. I’m sure it’s actually all very basic but I need a good few hours run at it to get it going I think

They haven’t gone up that recently, it was probably about 6 months ago so sales were still going fairly well and I did still get December orders but it wasn’t the massive rush like it usually is at Christmas which ties in with what other Etsy sellers are saying

Yes I think if I worked full time I would still leave my Etsy on in the background as I do genuinely enjoy it but right now I am relying on it for the money side of things too so it is worrying me a bit how much it’s dropped off. You’re right though, I’ve had loads of good suggestions on here of all the places I can list my items so I’m going to spread myself far and wide and escape some of the Etsy fees in the process 👏🏻

I know, I knowww! I just don’t really want to highlight my struggling business on the internet though then try to go in with all these marketing strategies. I feel like I’d almost be as well just going on my instagram and telling everyone I’m struggling 😂 (which i actually did see someone do the other week, with tears, and she got hundreds of sales after it) so maybe I’m the idiot for not 🙈

I think is to pricey now i got a tiny teddy from etsy in a tin £13 plus £3.50 for shipping.
Got the same from temu for £2.50.
No difference at all just cheaper.

Thank you 👏🏻 I am half way through setting up my shopify and getting a bit floored by all the different parts to fill out. I’ve been used to Etsy for too long! I am planning to finish setting it up this weekend though and launch it with a discount or something next week