If you sell on Etsy, can I ask your opinion about something

[EverardDeTroyes]

I used to have a thriving little shop on Etsy. I still have the shop but it no longer thrives. I know why this is. It has been a slow downturn followed by a massive death blow last year.

The start of the downturn was when I could no longer sell to the EU because of health and safety regulations. Actually, I don't think that impacted me very much as I did not make many sales to the EU at the best of times, but I realise now that by not offering my items for sale in the EU after the H&S regs changed, I was losing traffic to my shop which pushed me down the listings.

Then the death blow came: first import duties on items going to USA (though again, I dont think that would matter too much, its just means my prices went up 10% but my prices are quite low anyway) and finally, Etsy insisting things are shipped tracked. That meant my postage costs more than doubled, nearly tripled. Since then, traffic coming to my shop has dropped off a cliff. I did not realise before firstly how many sales to the US I made, and secondly, how much the US traffic to my shop impacted overall sales. Because America aren't visiting my shop, it has slipped down the list and now hardly anyone sees my shop.

It is very depressing. I do not have a lot going on in my life and my Etsy shop was my little modest success. Now no more. I just wondered if anyone else has suffered from this issue. If you did anything about it, what did you do?

Can you sell from other platforms?

Bumping.
And because I want to visit your shop.

I've thought about selling from Folksy but my feeling is, probably most people interested in craft items will have heard of Etsy by now, but has anyone other than the crafters themselves (and probably not even all of them) heard of Folksy. I used to sell a bit, a tiny bit, on Ebay .... is there anywhere else?

@BaronessBomburst thanks, but it really isn't anything out of the ordinary. It just gave me a little something to feel pride in, mainly in the months leading up to Christmas.

I have an Etsy store, the US customs hit us, but we’ve just increased all our shipping costs to reflect the fees payable (shipping + customs) sadly we sell a lot to other countries too, so it’s a bit of an issue for us, as well as Etsy only providing shipping labels for small parcels under 2kg, if over you have to process your own shipping labels, sometimes pay customs fees, sometimes not, depending on where it’s going, it’s an absolute shit show trying to sell to an overseas customer now.

Our monthly income has dropped from c. £20k a month to c.£6-8k a month now. It’s probably a mixture of the extra fees that put overseas customers off as well as lots of people not having the extra cash to spend. That as well as the Etsy fees increasing over the last 1-2 years makes it more time consuming than we’d like, but still brings in some profit, so for now, we’ll keep using it.

That said we have recently been using eBay… again not quick, cheap , and find we spend more time listing, answering silly questions (that are fully explained in the advert) and non payers that we have no protection over. It’s a tough world out there for an online sales company, but we just use any platform we can, as well as our website & hope it’ll pick up at some point

Thank you @Helga55 . What you've said has pretty much confirmed that I am not alone with this problem. I am just a one person operation with a considerably smaller turnover than you so it is even harder to adjust to meet the demands of overseas sales. I guess I was hoping someone might have cracked the problem and would share their strategy. I might look at Ebay again as I still have my account.

Make your own website (it’s really easy). Then post videos on TikTok of making the item, packing the order, sending mail.

People sell crafts and art on Vinted. But it’s more of a risk.

I've been on Etsy for 13 years out of the 15 I've been running my business. It was great up until the cost of living crisis in 2021. It's been a downhill run ever since. The last two years have been awful. GPSR, tariffs, customs fees and more have made trading with the EU impossible and USA heavily reduced. Pre-covid I was turning over on average £8-10k a month on just Etsy, plus other avenues (eBay, Amazon and website). Now I have days where I don't have a single sale across any of my platforms.

I opened a bricks and mortar 19 months ago and this year has been awful there too. It isn't just an Etsy specific issue. The whole economy is in dire straits. There are a lot of different things going on at the moment, but that's not to say Etsy itself hasn't gone down, allowing the place to be overrun with cheap Chinese tat and losing the faith of buyers.

It's always important to have your eggs in several baskets. I wouldn't bother with any other handmade sites, you'll lose money. Your own website isn't a bad idea, but do it properly and legally, or you won't sell anything on there either. eBay is okay these days. I've pulled from Amazon recently, I couldn't keep up with the red tape and they messed up my accounting with vat calculations so I gave up.