Etsy is somehow being even worse, do not click etsy ads
Etsy is now forcing shop owners to be part of their ads. We can not opt out.
To anyone who buys from etsy: DO NOT EVER CLICK THEIR ADS
They are rolling out a program where if you get a sale from an ad they put out, they’re taking 12-15% of the profit(probably on top of the like, 5%ish+ they already take). Even worse, if you have clicked an Etsy ad in the last 30 days ANYONE YOU BUY FROM ON ETSY IN THAT PERIOD WILL BE BILLED THAT FEE.
So please, if you see an ad for something you like off etsy, do not click it. Just go on etsy and search for it.
This is somehow worse than what storenvy used to pull.
Please go directly through an artist or see if they have their own storefront (I use bigcartel) instead of purchasing off etsy. And if you must, just please, please, never click an etsy ad.
Hey I opened my etsy shop back up after years to destash some stuff and make a little extra money and so I ran smack into this myself. DO NOT CLICK ETSY ADS to buy something. It charges the seller a huge fee that that did not expect or agree to. In my case it was pretty much large enough to eat all my profit. The only way to fight against this is to increase all your prices a lot in case anyone buys your stuff after clicking on an ad, therefore driving all prices up.
And it’s not 12-15% of the profit, it’s 12-15% of the PRICE. There’s no way Etsy knows the cost of the actual item before profit. So if you price your wares with 15% profit for yourself, congrats you’ve lost money on the transaction.
Just a reminder for holiday season and in general.
Let me break this down with actual numbers:
Etsy charges the following fees on every single item sold (and they stack):
$0.20 listing fee per item (that’s per individual item in a listing, so if I sell 10 stickers from the same listing, that’s $2.00 in fees)
6.5% of total purchase price
6.5% of shipping (this is DEADLY on international purchases. I’ve had to stop shipping some items internationally because Etsy’s cut of shipping alone was more than the price of the item!)
2.9% + $0.30 of all transactions for credit card processing
15% of sale price and shipping for all sales to a shopper who clicked on an ad – this percentage only drops to 12% once you cross a threshold of $10K in sales in one year (which most sellers don’t). THERE IS NO OPT-OUT for sellers, and no way to control what products Etsy chooses to feature in ads.
So how does that shake out in actual cost? Here’s an example:
Let’s say I make a handcrafted item for $15 in materials, sell it on Etsy for $35, and it costs $8 to ship – not bad, right? On the surface, it looks like I’m making $20 for the time and labor I put in to make the thing.
Except right off the top, Etsy skims $4.26 in base fees from that transaction. Etsy’s free shipping guarantee (which technically has an opt-out, but they penalize sellers heavily in search results for not offering it) kicks in at $35, so that makes me responsible for the shipping costs – now I’m down another $8. If the buyer clicked on an ad, that’s $6.45 on top of listing/processing/shipping fees. Now I’m potentially paying up to $16.20 in fees and shipping for that sale.
That leaves me, the designer and craftsperson, making only $3.80 on a handmade item that sells for $35.
My time and labor should be worth more than a Starbucks drink, y'all.
And that’s before you get to Etsy’s predatory sale structuring, or their paywall-locked “Etsy Plus” features, or the way they take over your credit card processing once your account is linked (I can’t use my Square account for point-of-sale card processing without Etsy charging all of these fees, even on sales I make in person at craft fairs)… Basically, Etsy hides fees at every level of the sale process and is essentially nickel-and-diming small businesses and hobbyists to death.
We all know Etsy is garbage – but the unfortunate truth is that a lot of people choose to shop there for handmade and niche goods, and buyers are often reluctant to purchase from an independent website without big-name purchase protection. Everyone’s afraid of being scammed, so they flock to giants like Etsy and Amazon and eBay for their satisfaction guarantees (even when the price of customer dissatisfaction comes straight out of sellers’ bank accounts).
As sellers, our only recourse is to pass the exorbitant fees on to the buyer, which 1) prices us out of much of our target market, and 2) annoys shoppers (many of whom have come to expect mass-market Walmart prices rather than handmade boutique goods) into complaining about how expensive everything in our shop is. You wouldn’t believe how many “I love this but you’re charging too much” comments I’ve gotten. My dude, I can’t charge less. I have listings that literally only net me a profit of 54 cents per item, and I can’t live on that.
All this to say: Please, PLEASE do not click on Etsy ads. If you want to look at an item you saw in an ad, search for it by name/description from the Etsy site (and you may find more things you’re interested in that way, anyway). If you do accidentally click on an ad, go to your address bar and remove everything after the first “?” in the URL and reload to turn off link tracking, and delete any Etsy browser cookies before making a purchase.
And if the seller you’re interested in has a storefront that’s not on Etsy, consider buying items from there instead. It might turn out to be cheaper than buying the item on Etsy, and even if it isn’t, you can feel better about the purchase knowing that more of the price is going to the person who made the item rather than into Etsy’s pockets.
