Do you use Etsy? New Legislation fucked things up.

[EssieEssieEssieOyOyOy]

I sell on Etsy. I obviously am not going to say what I sell, or what my shop name is or anything. But a lot of us have seen our sales drop off a cliff and general feeling is that it is because of the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act.

This ensures upfront price transparency, preventing unexpected, non-optional shipping fees at checkout. Great in theory.

However. It fails to take into account combined shipping and there aren't enough notices on Etsy that prices now include shipping so now it just looks like everything costs loads more because by all accounts, people think that they will still need to pay shipping on top!

So this is just to let everyone who uses Etsy know that if you are in the uk, the price you are seeing on the search pages is the price of the item PLUS what you would pay in P&P for that item.

AND that if you buy more than one item from a shop, you won't pay the single figure you saw on the search page because you won't be paying the shipping on every item you bought.

This is useful information. Thanks for sharing OP and best of luck with your sales.

It's more streamlined to add shipping costs into your product price and then offer "free shipping" to the UK. Then your products will also show up if customers filter with the "free shipping" option and you'll have the free shipping badge on your product (assuming you don't have any badges that override it like Etsy's Picks etc)

You can still charge your original prices internationally with separate shipping costs

Sales went off the cliff for me when the US introduced tariffs and insisted on items being sent tracked. I don't sell much at this time of year so the impact of combining item cost and p&p hasn't hit me yet. Generally, it's all shit, isn't it?

oh tarrifs have been a bloody nightmare. what i make is particularly popular in the usa, they are my biggest customers and it's been a bloody pain in the arse.

Building the price into the cost and having 'free' shipping here means the customer pays more per item if they buy more than one thing (trying to stay vague but what I make people often buy several different but related ones but not in a way you can offer in sets) and was very unpopular here which is why i switched away from it in the first place.

I sell on Ebay but on the US site so my prices are all in dollars. Ebay shows the shipping up front on the item page. I also sell on another US site but my shipping is built into the product price.

Everything I sell is tracked and the tracking is built into the shipping price. My buyers often purchase multiples. If they enquire about combined shipping I just refund the excess to their account if they already paid.

As for tariffs just send everything as a gift priced at inder $100. I only sell vintage so there is no "real" price to comapare with.

yeah, im a business and it's illegal to claim that what you're selling is a gift or to undervalue it. It's customs fraud and carries fines or, in extremely serious cases, prison time. Not doing that.

Thanks for mentioning this. I sell on Etsy but do free shipping at the moment in UK. With the new having to send only tracked to US is a pain. I am having to buy from Royal mail now directly now to bypass the tracking which is the only choice now.
The other problem which I haven't managed to sort out yet is that I can only seem to charge only one postage price for all my overseas items I don't seem to able able to list a separate postage price for each item. When I change the postage price it changes all of them at the same time. After 2 years I still haven't worked out how to do it.

You have to set up different shipping profiles and do each one individually

Okay thanks. So don't choose copy an existing listing then. With Ebay you can copy a listing and still change the postage for each one.

I have had a fair bit of success when seeing things on etsy and simply googling the maker name. Quite often they have their own presence and I can buy direct from them without etsy markups.

One seller was very grateful and said etsy charged her about 30%. Obviously this comes with the risk of being outside the platform, so DYOR etc.

But to OP - when I see something I like, I will almost always investigate the listing fully to understand what the actual prices would be, as the thumbnail results simply aren't useful enough to make a decisin for me.

Yes, etsy fees are steep and when you add on vat etc it works out for me at about 25% mainly because I can't opt out of their offsite ads programme which is a right bugger.

I have my own website too, I drive what I can there.

Just a note for the younger readers that all of this is a result of the UK leaving the EU.

Don't get me started on that.

In fact, all the EU stuff is another headache altogether! To sell within the EU you need an eu representative and you have to send them all the paperwork for each item you sell. You pay about £300 a year for that. Then you have the recycling schemes like LUCID for germany and citeo for france and so on and a company like ecosystant to make sure you're compliant eu wide, that's several more hundred a year but you do have several countries where they have amounts per year below which you don't have to pay.

A lot of sellers just opted out altogether. I didn't. It cost me over a grand altogether to be eu compliant and I made about 5 eu sales the whole year so I have turned it off now and won't be renewing.

You seem unduly upset at a democractic decision ? This is what the UK wanted and got.

I wouldn't say unduly upset. Just pissed off about it.

I am not happy whenever the tories win the general election either.

I have to accept the results of a democratic election or decision, I don't have to be happy about it.