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? 😢

Hi OP

I do my best to shop small and used Etsy all the time about 10 years ago. It used to be easy to navigate and almost guaranteed quality.

Now there are still great items there but they are harder to find. I do still look at Etsy but I find myself purchasing off Not On The High Street more. It used to be more expensive than Etsy but they have a loyalty discount scheme now where you pay something like £15 annually and get a 10% discount and cheap / free postage

I signed up at Christmas when I wanted to order several things and now find myself going back there and actually making purchases more often than I do on Etsy. So it might be worth a look.

good luck!

Fake "sale" prices (i.e. treating customers like idiots), tons of dropshipped tat, crap search function and irrelevant search results. I'm well and truly over Etsy as are some other former Etsy fans I know. And the items are always overpackaged with lots of stickers or ribbons and layers of bags and paper. I don't want that unsustainable nonsense, I want appropriate packaging. "Look at all my eco friendly brown paper packaging and greenwashed advert but I'll use six extra accoutrements that have no use and will go straight into recycling/waste." It's so thoughtless and wasteful.

Hardly surprising. Plenty of retailers get way with not refunding initial delivery charges to customers returning orders, despite this being required under Consumer Contracts Regulations. Of those, a lot do refund if the customer contacts them to complain, so they clearly know that it is an obligation and are consciously evading it.

Hardly any customers bother to complain to Trading Standards or raise a court claim. It's even less likely for someone to do that /just/ for an unfair trading practice, rather than directly losing out on money.

You have various hypotheses from here:

• Etsy is no longer place of choice for handmade goods
• Prices too high
• People don't buy at this time of year
• People don't have cash for luxuries

Try a few little experiments to see which of them are true. For example:

• Try another outlet
• Reduce your prices for a week or two and see if there's an uptick
• Try something seasonal (Mother's Day? Easter?)
• Try selling a few product lines with more practical applications

I used to buy things off Etsy but as mentioned above i now find i have to shift through same stuff at higher price than i can buy from temu.

I used to spend loads on Etsy, but I just got sick of using half a dozen filters to try to reduce the amount of crap being shown that wasn't what I was looking for at all.

I bought a few things from The British Craft House after seeing it recommended on a MN Christmas shopping thread - I've been really pleased with the things I've bought so far. It's like an online craft fair, but all genuinely handcrafted things, and reasonable prices. I bought one of these candles and ended up keeping it.

I'm ordering this for my sister's birthday this weekend, as she's just become a beekeeper. Could you check out selling on a platform like that, OP?

Sadly think people are having to tighten belts with mortgage interest increase, COL etc
Government have literally said they want spending to go down to bring down inflation. Small businesses will suffer

I made the mistake of buying from one of the Temu-like sites last year. I’d googled the item I wanted, seen it at a low price and got suckered by all the gorgeous pictures into buying some other clothes too.

The quality turned out to be rubbish, the colours sludgy and totally unlike the pictures, the fabric horrible to touch, the postage etc made the parcel much more expensive than I expected, and the fee for returning the goods was so high that I didn’t bother. Just took them all to a charity shop instead.

I dislike Etsy’s policy of banning feminist goods but allowing misogynistic slogans. So I like the idea of finding the seller’s address and buying direct.

OP not sure if this would work for your product but I follow a number of jewellers on Instagram and generating a perception of scarcity seems to be the key. So they have some core products in their store (in stock or made to order) and then do regular ‘drops’. I’ve literally just had a necklace delivered from a jeweller who uploads pieces to her shop every Saturday morning and they ALWAYS sell out immediately. She shows the pieces through the week in her instagram feed, does sneak peeks and in progress/behind the scenes stuff on her stories and the pieces go live in her store on the Saturday.
Another one I follow (which is a bigger store, not a one-woman-band) does regular drops of rare pieces, new designs or limited editions - again driving the idea that as a consumer, you’ve got to move fast to snag what you want!
I also follow a couple of stores selling raw stones and crystals and they do story sales which also seem to be pretty successful.
Could something like that be worth experimenting with?

Hey OP, I run one of the largest crafting FB groups and I have done for more than 10 yrs. I’ve seen so many craft businesses in your position but it is usually possible to turn things around.

I know you’re trying to be cagey but it would honestly help so much if you could tell us broadly what you sell.

Over the years I’ve seen many crafts become red-hot with sellers unable to keep up with demand. And then that craft falls out of favour and sales drop off a cliff edge. Glitter glasses is a good example, as is book folding. Both of those crafts were INSANELY popular for a while but now are pretty much snubbed by most.

You’ve had lots of brilliant generic advice but we could help you so much more if you gave some more specifics.

Do you know who your main competitors are on Etsy? How much are they selling?

Do your main competitors only sell the same as you or have they diversified into other lines??

The majority of successful crafters have to be able to bring in new products/techniques/ideas to stay relevant. So for example, metal stampers have brought in colour and full picture designs, while some also offer laser engraving.

You say you could bring in something else but it wouldn’t be handmade. I would strongly advise you not to do this - you’ll damage your brand. People buy from crafters because they love handmade goods - if you start selling things you didn’t make, it will make your existing things look lower quality and customers will doubt whether you made those too!

NOTHS might help broaden your potential customer base but I doubt it will prove to be a total lifeline. I know marketing isn’t much fun but it’s now an essential part of success. You need to set time aside for this - I know it’s a pain but you need to proactively manage your shop.

I think Facebook works really well alongside Etsy - you can send your customers to purchase via Etsy but FB lets you reach a really wide market, including local customers.

How’s your SEO working? When you search for your items, where do you rank? Do customers see other shops first before they find yours? Do you make the most of seasonal occasions - Mothers Day is coming up, have you added SEO tags to items that could be sold for Mothers Day?

There are so many crafters out there unless you offer something that’s truly unique we’re not going to identify you. But a bit of a pointer about your actual craft would let us offer more meaningful advice than just general commentary.

FWIW, I’ve seen many, many craft businesses go through a lean spell and come out the other side. The trick is to never stagnate, you always need to be thinking ahead.

One crafter I know who offers stunning resin crafts also runs a group where she provides hints and tips to those who want to try it. It may sounded counterintuitive but then she sells access to a private group for 1:1 online tuition, step by step instructions and craft kits. A needle felter I know supplements her sales by putting together kits.

Crafting has rocketed in popularity - if you can diversify in a way that allows others to try your craft and pay you for your expertise in some way, that could be VERY worth trying. If you’re not comfortable providing tuition, it might just be selling kits with all the necessary components included, or writing up a personal design (for crochet or knitting etc) that people could directly download.

You obviously have fabulous skills to have achieved what you have - you just need to find new ways to reach your market.

And of course, CoL and customers’ dislike of Etsy won’t help - but I suspect your problems might be more than simply that if your competitors are still doing well.

Genuinely good luck x

I think you need business advice from a mentor or someone with marketing and sales advice. Is there a local small business office you can approach?
There are alternative selling platforms to Etsy so maybe try those.
Also you need another product or a new line of current product.

I like Etsy and have got some nice stuff from there over the years. However - there are so many sellers and just pages and pages of search results. So it's a lot to trawl through. If you're appearing a few pages in then people might not get as far as you.

I buy absolutely everything off etsy. Birthday gifts, furniture, niche things I collect. It's an absolute mine of wonderful handmade items.i collect very niche things and I can find anything I want off there.
I never buy anything off temu. I'd rather save up and get something lovely.

Could it be a fashion thing? Ie. What you sell is no longer fashionable, so sales have dropped off?

I specialise in running ads on social platforms & it’s very easy to waste money on them. What setup are you using for your Meta ads? If you want some help getting everything going I’m happy to give you some pointers. Send me a PM if you’d like a chat. Will happily help you for free, so not touting for business!

I couldn't do social media posts, there's no time.
I also previously ran a very very successful Etsy - before it fell apart. We tried to revive it although it somewhat worked it was a real struggle. The Etsy algorithm is very challenging now.

We found that without free shipping none of our products would get sales but as soon as we added free shipping we'd get 100s of orders a day - we tried to mess around with adjusting shipping cost etc. This was hindering as it meant taking profit to pay for registered delivery because people lied so much about not receiving items so it had to be registered. This was eating into the profits.

Etsy would always side with the customer even though I would purchase shipping labels from them and they have the tracking information. They knew the customer received the items but would still refund from my account and the customer kept the product as well!

There are also many people who copy products on Etsy and sell for next to nothing, so this sometimes made it difficult to sell at a decent price. My last year on Etsy was good but less than the previous year because the algorithm changed so much with shipping. If I had increased the cost of the item I would get maybe 5 or less sales per day.

I did use the advertising which meant Etsy took 1/4 of my revenue with advertising. Towards the end even with advertising I wasn't profitable at all. I would sell products and not make anything at all. So I quit. I had tried notonthehighstreet but the platform is not very user friendly. I do think branching out from the get go by having your own website, using amazon, even notonthehighstreet, eBay, and other platforms like faire etc would help as it means you are not at the mercy of one website!

Personally I prefer Amazon although Bezos seems to be taking about half of your revenue now vs what it used to be before. Amazon for me is still a better place to sell if you can also get around all the viciousness from other competitors on Amazon which you don't really get on Etsy.

Etsy has changed, It's a shame. At times they just stop you from selling which if you are unlucky can take several months to get going again. I saw a few people on YouTube including a woman who made over 900K who took several months to get her Etsy account back.

Sorry I haven't read all the posts, but thought I would jump on here.

I am self employed, I have been selling online for 16 years, my current venture for 7 years. I sell hand made craft items and this is a full time job for me. I keep my revenue a tad under the VAT threshold.

The christmas just past was quiet for me, I think money is an issue for many, but I usually close up by the first week in December until the new year. January was quiet, but Feb has been steady.

I am guessing your item is craft/art related WeRD ?

One thing I would strongly suggest is not to rely on one selling platform. If for whatever reason that platform is not working for you then the entirety of your business doesn't fail.
Spreading over different platforms gives you added security.
I sell on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and my own web site. The split of my online sales is around 40/40/10/10. I have only a third of my items listed on etsy and my web site, but I could increase listings quickly as I am all set up. Amazon are particular monsters to deal with, policies change on a whim, will require ongoing financial validations etc, but (possibly because of that) but I don't have many competitors there. One huge advantage of Amazon is that there are no listing fees, you only pay if you make a sale- so you could have hundreds of items listed, and once set up don't require a lot of work other than processing orders.

Have a look at your product range- other sellers will move in if you are successful, and compete, so you need to be aware but not fixated on competition. 30% of my orders are from repeat customers, and they will return if you provide a good service. I pop in little free gifts, and buyers often thank me for those little things.
Can you introduce new products, change things up a little? I constantly scan Pinterest, US web sites for new ideas- at any time I have 4 or 5 new ideas in the pipeline, at any one time.

One last thing is selling offline. I supply a few shops on a regular basis, I know other vendors who sell at craft fairs and seem to be successful.
There are a couple of craft shops near me who sell products from local individual crafters, they stock items for free, and take a percentage of sales.
Don't be afraid to approach directly shops in your area which may be a good fit for your items. Get in touch, take some examples along- many shops will be happy to display your wares on a sale or return basis.

Sometimes we need to take a step back from the bigger picture to get things in perspective.

There's obviously a lot of experienced Etsy sellers on here so it'd probably be beneficial if you posted your shop name as I'm sure you could get good feedback. I'm on a few different Etsy Facebook groups and I've seen a lot of people post similar, but to be honest when they post their shop URL it's often easy to see why the shop is in decline. What worked a few years ago doesn't always work now. If I were you I'd pay someone to do a shop audit if you don't want to mention your shop here. There are probably things that you can address.

Same. I had a great little shop on there 10 years ago and then they started to up the taxes, introduced mandatory advertising etc, and now as a consumer when I try to shop on Etsy every other item is a "promoted" item I have no interest in and there's just so much CHinese knock-off crap that I recognise off of Ali express etc. I hate shopping on there so avoid it.

It's CoL. I sell designer stuff on vestiaire and high street on depop. It is ridiculous now. Unworn and great quality items at 80-90% off retail price aren't shifting. It's a joke. People want to buy utter crap from temu and shein for £2.

I'm puzzled as to why you won't tell us what you sell.
Surely you'd like to promote it? Maybe people with a bit of knowledge could give you some useful advice?
If it's about privacy, change your user name after this.

I'm also a full time etsy seller, have been for some time. I think you've got to keep moving and changing, I've recently opened another shop targeting smaller slightly lower price items and we are the busiest we've ever been, I think due to COL etc. Work on your SEO, try other platforms, don't be afraid to make changes if things aren't working.

There are less and less money to spend as a result of all the remortgages that have been done last year+cost of living+after Christmas. If you sell something nice but not essential you are going to notice the lack of spare cash in the people.
There is huge competition as well, someone mentioned Temu but there are more webs like that.
Can you sell different things, get a part time job in the meantime?
Good luck. Don't give up now but make some plans just in case.

I like Etsy, but I don’t feel it’s always the place to go for handmade, unusual items anymore. A lot of it feels mass produced. I ordered a personalised key ring, it took far too long to arrive (it said 3 days but was about 12) and it was rubbish! I couldn’t give it to the intended recipient due to the slow timings and it was embarrassingly small (I did check measurements first).
Is there somewhere else you could advertise your product?

There seems to be a lot of disposable income around, though. People spend a lot on pets. Dog accessories are a thing. People have high budgets for hen nights, weddings, baby showers etc. Perhaps it's the kind of market.