Etsy
Etsy was started to give the creatives of the world an online marketplace to sell their goods. It was for people who needed a place to sell their handmade creations online, instead of selling them at small local markets. Although this business idea was novel, it simply couldn't grow quick enough. The owners decided to make a shift away from it’s roots and focused on making the company more financially viable. In 2013, Etsy tweaked its Terms of Service so that sellers were allowed to sell manufactured goods and second hand items as well as the usual handmade items. This opened the door for antique dealers to start selling on this low cost marketplace and there are now thousands of antique pieces listed!
The second biggest marketplace
With over $1.0 billion of sales and 53 million active users in 2018 alone, it’s safe to say that Etsy are the second biggest marketplace out there. I’ve sold on Etsy for just over a year and I’ve been very happy with the results. The sales are steady but I would recommend selling on other platforms as well, but Etsy is a great additional platform to sell on. As a seller you get some useful features which we are going to explore in this article.
Seller hub
Personally, I enjoy using Etsy. Each seller has a shop manager where you will find your dashboard, listings, conversations, orders, stats etc. easily accessible and well laid out (unlike Ebay’s busy dashboard!). The listing process is straightforward and is a simple step by step process, plus they also have hundreds of categories so you can usually find the right place for your item to be listed. In your dashboard you also have a tab for “marketing”, — I’ll be honest here, I've not used this too much yet so I wouldn’t be able to comment on the results, but it gives you options to promote your listings through social media, Google and obviously on the Etsy site, which is a great little feature!
Low fee’s!
So although Etsy is the second biggest marketplace out there, it also happens to be the cheapest to sell on! To list an item you get charged £0.20p and the listing lasts 4 months. When your item sells, you get charged a small 5% commission (half the price of Ebay) and a 3% + £0.25p per transaction payment processing fee. These fees are considerably cheaper than other competitors so you could always make your items slightly cheaper which will help to attract more buyers!
The App
The Etsy app is such a handy tool for sellers. You are constantly logged on so you don’t have to mess around logging in meaning keeping up to date with your inventory becomes an effortless task. You also get notifications on your phone when ever an action is taken on one of your items making your response time instant, leading to better customer satisfaction, which is always a positive😁👍. The app makes it both quick and easy to edit an existing listing, so altering the price, or changing the description takes a matter of seconds. The Etsy app does also allows you to list items, though this isn’t something I do very often at all due to my item templates — but if you are taking photos on your phone or aren’t using description templates, then listing on the app may be the best way forward for you
Search engine
The Etsy search engine is quite different to Ebay’s. Like I said in my last article, Ebay works by pulling the key words from the title which is why you see titles such as: “Vintage Retro Mid Century Danish Style Teak Sideboard”. Etsy have come up with a clever alternative where you can add up to 13 keywords when you create your listing. These keywords aren't shown in your listing so you can add anything that you think a customer would search to find your item. Try and use all 13 as the more you add, the more likely it is that a customer will find your item. The downside to this feature is that there isn't an option to save the keywords you often use, so every time you have to type out each word, this isn't the end of the world, but when you’re adding 20 listings it can become slightly tedious!
Stats — zzzzzzzzzz
Okay, I know stats are boring and not something you want to be reading about but Etsy have smashed their version of business analytics. Similar to Ebay, Etsy offer a huge selection of stats which can help grow your business and analyse what’s performing well and what’s falling flat on its’ face. It has five sections: views and visits, data, traffic sources, marketing tools and search terms. The data that you see is all put together into easy to read charts and graphs which is in my opinion, is better than Ebays analytics. Instead of over-facing you with huge amounts of data, its all put into sections which is easy to understand and digest, even for someone who hates numbers! Ebay offer more information and can give you a more in depth analyse of your businesses performance, but Etsy give you the key pieces of data which you should always keep an eye on in an easy to understand section of your dashboard.
The negatives
To be honest, in the year that I’ve been selling on Etsy I’ve not found many negatives. The app makes it easy to keep things up to date, the customers I’ve had have always been great, the website is easy to navigate, there’s lots of features that you can use, the fees are cheap and the website traffic is huge. The sales I’ve had through Etsy have been consistent yet not as many as I’ve had on Ebay, so I’d recommend selling on other marketplaces aswell as Etsy.
Rating
. User friendliness — 4.5⭐
. Features — 4.5⭐
. Stats — 4.5⭐
. Mobile app — 4.5⭐
. Website — 3.5⭐
. Sales — 2.5⭐
. Overall — 4⭐
