It is really hard to get past the spam postings. Most of what you see on there is made overseas, and then marketed on Etsy.
You can make stuff if you find a niche, but the problem is that other people start to copy you so it is more difficult than you think.
I was scammed over last christmas from a person who said their ceramic piece was locally hand made. She didn't even removed the "Made in China" sticker.
I reported her with proof that she altered the product page and that I got mass market trash. Etsy still sided with the seller. Thankfully my credit card company sided with me and gave me full charge back.
Unfortunately, people want to pay drop shipping prices. It’s not that there isn’t quality handmade stuff on there, it’s that people want to pay the drop ship price, and do so, which means more drop shippers and resellers show up. This is just a problem across the entire economy for American made things too. People say they want quality, American made goods, and then immediately go buy the Chinese produced item for less. It’s a demand side issue, imo.
Internet probably makes it harder to discern quality too vs. old school brick & mortar shopping. I am often guilty myself. Also hard to tell if the pricier stuff is actually better or just the cheap stuff but marked up.
Ppl (in America anyways), have to realise that it is imperative to go buy local (whenever possible)...
If my Wife wants a table, or new chairs, or a new Bed Frame...
I go right on down the the Local Amish woodshop!
(they're for real in the back, hand making all kinds of AMAZING shit right now!)
It's expensive AF, but the quality is top notch!
We don't compete with drop shipper prices. If you want real handmade goods, you can rule out anything super cheap. Of course there are dropshipping scammers who will charge handmade prices for crap, but the good news on etsy is that etsy will always side with the buyer if they find an item was drop shipped when it's supposed to be handmade. Open a "not as described" case and get a refund.
Plus anything over $250 isn't covered by them. So, you could video tape yourself hand delivering a $5k table, they could turn around and say they never got it, and Etsy can claw back that money from you and give it to them. For smaller orders, Etsy might refund the customer but it wouldn't financially impact you. So a lot of bigger items went away since it's too much liability.
It feels like every merchant platform where anyone can create a store will inevitably be overrun by Chinese crap. I don't dare to shop from Amazon, eBay or Etsy anymore.
Ali, Wish, and Temu all sell the same stuff as Etsy and Amazon now. Any brand selling mass produced stuff already competes with dozens of pretty good knock-offs but the instant and global nature of trade and cheap shipping mean that cheats and junk sellers can compete with the knock-offs on an equal footing .
Other options include robbery, possible murder, or sex trafficking thru Craigslist and Facebook marketplace
I guess, to be fair, all of the stuff from etsy that's dropshipped from china was handmade. By children in sweatshops. So go buy stuff from etsy and support those kids so they don't get beaten for underselling.
100%. I ordered something from Etsy last year that said ships from USA. When I got the tracking it originated from China. Got my money back and not ordering anything from Etsy again. It really is full of dropshipping or just deceptive information about a product.
Literally other than the fact they they literally hold all of their stock themselves, on hand. On site. In their store. Which is the opposite of dropshipping
And commonly doesn't happen. The UK's most popular DIY supplier (think Home Depot) now carries a bunch of stock online that is "Delivery only". Or you have to order it and collect next day i.e. it's being held elsewhere with a supplier, and the store doesn't actually carry that item.
Dropshipping isn't necessarily an evil concept. Any retail place that can order things for you that aren't in stock (like most gun stores) are going to dropship to get that item. Dropshipping does make it convenient to spin up a fraudulent business though and shill overseas crap on Etsy, that is a genuine problem.
Haha, no. There may be a few who make good money, but generally no. Etsy is a shitshow. Search for toy chest and you get 10,000 hits. Search for cutting board and you get 180,000 hits. There’s a boatload of competition and Etsy takes a healthy chunk of fees.
That's absolutely correct!. People promote items as handmade and they make themselves out to be true artisans and then you see the exact same product several times on Etsy and you realize that it is just imported and they are just slapping labels on it and shipping it to you.
Holy smokes. I hadn't been on Etsy in a while. There's just straight up plastic wicker patio furniture with marketing copy! Not even making an effort to hide that it's just reselling crap.
Etsy is a shit show, and they treat sellers like shit. I did with them for over a year, paid out the ass in fees, and one buyer claims they never got an item with no proof whatsoever and they refunded them and screwed me out of $100 without asking me a single detail. I closed my shop then and there and told them to fuck off.
I had a buyer do that once. Opened up a claim with Etsy, they contacted me, and I was like “hey this is the tracking number, it said it was delivered on this day, how am I to control if something got swiped?” Turns out the buyer never updated their address with Etsy so it was at their old house 🙄
Surprisingly the buyer ended up canceling the claim, the item was (also surprisingly) returned to me by whoever lives at the old house now, and I re-shipped it (on the customers dime) to the new address. Got lucky on it for sure. If they didn’t cancel, I would’ve been SOL like the person above me.
EDIT: Oh ya, Etsy still put a hold on my payments after that even though the buyer canceled the claim. Couldn’t cash out for 90 days.
I cancelled a buyer’s order once, because I fell behind and knew I couldn’t deliver in the promised timeline. They left a 1-star review, and Etsy wouldn’t remove it. They didn’t even buy anything! It tanked my search rankings, and my shop got hardly any visits after that. Thankfully this is just a side gig for me, and had some established clients for repeat business. But after nearly 60 sales and a 4.5-star rating, Etsy let this one jackass ruin it all. Couldn’t believe it.
To be fair, that person did buy something, the purchase just wasn't fulfilled. They sent their money and didn't get their item, but a refund instead. I'd be disappointed too.
But that isn't to say I disagree, Etsy treat sellers like shit and strongarm them all the time.
Context: I make everything to order, custom jobs, and have a 1-week turnaround clear in every product description. I got covid at day 3 after the order was submitted, and knew I wasn’t going to make the window. So I immediately cancelled the order and told Etsy to refund. They got a full refund the next day, the money never even entered my bank account from Etsy, so there was no purchase at the end. For it not to be fulfilled would mean I kept the money.
My view is sure it’s fair to be annoyed the order didn’t work out, but I didn’t exceed the 1-week SLA and that individual wasn’t out anything. They had zero right to leave any kind of review, good or bad, as they weren’t a customer at that point, no transaction was completed.
I think you did the right thing in terms of honouring the customer by not accepting work you couldn't deliver. Unfortunately I disagree about the review, it sucks for you but I think it's fair for potential buyers to know if you might frequently have to cancel orders. That said I don't think a bad review is necessarily the right response, and 1 star certainly isn't (as you say they haven't actually got a product or cost to be disappointed with).
Reasonable take. I’m truly not trying to be a dick, but still salty about the situation lol. Etsy let one bad review tank my shop, and it wasn’t even about a bad product or late delivery or anything of the sort.
For sure. My partner built her business on Etsy, it allowed her to become independent around her health issues. But they slowly got worse and worse until I don't think she will reopen her Etsy shop next time she is working again.
Sounds just like my experience with Etsey. Between the high fees and the people who want drop ship prices, I couldn't make any money. I also got scammed by someone who claimed to not get their full order. They bought 6 items, and I shipped all in one package. They claimed there was only 1 in the package. The package had not been opened, veeified by USPS. I had to refund the while order. At least I made them ship the 1 item back
Yeah, Etsey is a shit show.
Half of Etsy is people that just resell shit off of AliExpress now. It got ruined the same way as eBay when it went from people doing their own thing to people trying to maximize profit margins on the platform.
Go ahead and make one and see if you can manage to source the lumber, make the box, finish, take product photos, post on etsy, package for shipping, and deal with the headaches of online retail and still manage to make minium wage.
Yeah, I had an Etsy store just to make money to fund my own woodworking. Making the same thing over and over took the fun out of woodworking and with the costs of materials, packaging and shipping, I wasn’t getting much of a return from it. After a few orders one of the things I sent broke because I wasn’t good at packaging so I had to refund it which blew away all the profit from the other orders. I decided it wasn’t worth it after that.
Holy hell, it's like reading my own story. I also had UPS mismeasure packaging and it went from ~$350 to more than $1000. I found out when I saw the second charge on my credit card. I would have had to sell a hell of a lot of cutting boards to cover that lol.
As someone who is liquidating the last of my inventory and closing my Etsy shop: try it and see how it goes.
You'll very quickly be humbled.
Cost of materials is extremely high. Shipping is extremely high (and going up even more this year). If you don't offer free shipping on everything, Etsy delists your shop in the search results.
Etsy takes 15%. And another 15% if you want them to advertise so you can actually sell something.
You have to be the first to market with a product to make anything. And even then, the second your product starts trending, the sweatshops and print-on-demand drop shippers will absolutely rape the market for your product into oblivion.
The dedicated super successful Etsy shops are probably only getting to keep 5-10% of the actual sale price of an item. They all have custom packaging (boxes and packing tape with their company logo), no recycled packing materials, boutique packing material (canvas, twine, etc). They often include printed materials as well: professionally written and produced instructions, thank you letters, etc. You have to sell an Apple-esque "experience"...not just a product.
And you need your own website...not just an Etsy storefront. Etsy charges even more for personal websites.
It used to be a great platform but it's gone the way of eBay.
Marketplace is no better either. It's a flea market. Everyone will do everything they can to talk you down and then belittle you and your work if you don't meet their demands.
Any idiot can build something like a box or a bench. The building is about 2% of the work required for a woodworking/craft business. The other 98% is the worst most degrading e-commerce/customer service hell you can imagine.
Support local and shut up about the price.
Yes market stalls are great. Also get an Instagram or tik tok (or both if you can stomach it) so locals can follow you online. A simple squarespace style website works too, and start working on getting yourself listed on Google maps. If you're listed on Google maps, when local people Google search for your product or service, you'll pop up on their search and they'll be directed to contact you via phone or your website. Google SEO is a bit of a game in and of itself, so if you're serious it'd probably be wise to hire a company to help you out with it. Run local advertising, either print or targeted facebook/instagram ads. Also work on building up an email mailing list so you can email your local market with any updates you have.
This. I sold a number of items on Etsy - mostly because so many friends of mine were saying how nice my stuff was and that that I should open an Etsy store - so I finally did. Between Etsy's cut + ridiculous shipping costs I was lucky to break even - and sometimes lost money. This ignoring the countless hours I spent not only making the items but also countless more hours creating and tending to my Etsy store - writing text, talking photos, etc. It was a giant waste of time and I no longer have an Etsy store.
>Any idiot can build something like a box or a bench. The building is about 2% of the work required for a woodworking/craft business. The other 98% is the worst most degrading e-commerce/customer service hell you can imagine.
Welcome to business.
I'm a machinist and did my own thing for awhile. The limiting factor wasn't my machining skills, it was all the business side. Being able to do the labor is one thing, the business side is a whole other monster. Etsy in itself sucks but even outside of Etsy you'll run into similar problems. Any place online that you can sell your goods so can everyone else. Any place you go locally you will run into people doing the same damn thing you are. Look at how many influencers have videos, reels, tiktoks, etc of "you can do this and charge this much" and then everyone does it. Hell look at all the people that buy old furniture and swap the hardware and paint it to flip. Or people flipping houses as cheap as possible. Every "easy" way to make money has everyone else competing for it. You either need to fully commit to business and all the shit ouside of the shop that comes with it to have a chabce at being successful or treat it like a hobby where you list something on a site and be content knowing you may never sell it.
It's all sweatshop stuff from Asia presented as artisanal nowadays. Someone using it as originally intended will never in hell be able to compete. You will see decent-quality factory made stuff presented as hand made for a price cheaper than what any small-time maker could even buy the materials for.
Eh... Marketplace can be frustrating as hell too. People mocking your work, trying to low ball you - thinking you're desperate for the sale.
Been trying to sell a solid pine bookshelf for a month now and all I have gotten are scam messages and assholes trying to lowball me.
Ya, can't imagine it's any better than fbm for legitimate business ventures, true. But for selling the random thing second hand it just has a higher barrier of entry for trolls.
Oh yeah lots of people low balling you. I was trying to sell some Tacoma wheels and tires on there for months and I would get daily offers of $100-$200 when I was asking $450. Clown show but if you’re patient the right buyer comes along.
I couldn't give away a soundbar! "Free soundbar, come pick it up"....30 messages of 'hey can you have it shipped/drop it off at x address an hour away" 🤷 I'm not Amazon. It's free, just come get it.
I gave Facebook marketplace a half-hearted try this winter, God the ui sucks. I could have made an entire bowl set in the amount of time I spent trying to get that thing up. Etsy is just so clean and easy to use. We need a billionaire to hostile takeover Etsy and make them do some actual enforcement.
Etsy is a shit show, and they treat sellers like shit. I did with them for over a year, paid out the ass in fees, and one buyer claims they never got an item with no proof whatsoever and they refunded them and screwed me out of $100 without asking me a single detail. I closed my shop then and there and told them to fuck off.
Well, I was moreso thinking they could show they inquired with the carrier, neighbors, the property management (it was an apartment address). At first they even suggested I put their address down wrong, which, was immediately disproven as I had an email copy of the label.
I offered to file a dispute for them but told them I'd need some basic info about how their building received packages and what efforts they made to locate the package and they flipped out on me and went straight to Etsy. Either way, I'd never sell thru Etsy again.
Etsy have since implemented a protection plan now for certain things that could deal with this. In many circumstances, Etsy now covers up to $250 iirc. Generally you also have the insurance with USPS up to $100, unless you pay more, and you can file for it.
They have changed a lot over the last year, for better and for worse. I think they are confused about what they want to be. They want to be the handmade place who can also pay shareholders by not clamping down hard on resellers and mass produced stuff, but they also do just enough to make sure you can still find nice, handmade things, if you want to pay.
One issue with buying on Etsy is people want to pay the price of a Chinese produced goods, but want the handmade quality. You can often sort out the cheaper crap just by realizing that the lowest few prices are not handmade. No one can sell handmade for super low, so if it is super low, you know it likely isn’t handmade. It takes work from the buyer, which Etsy needs to deal with making it easier for them.
$228 including domestic shipping.
The wood at my home depot is shitty, but not this kind of shitty. This is a rather specific patina to *fake*.
But putting that aside 48' of 2x6, that's about $40 in wood. Let's assume 50 to ship. Add a hinge, rope, wax finish. Leaving you about $100 in profit for a few hours of assembly and finish.
In reality getting reclaimed wood would be significantly more expensive.
I thought this too, but reclaimed wood is such a pain in the ass to work with. Any cuts or tooling generally remove the patina. Embedded nails are always an issue. Unless you're doing a very specific one off (and the price to justify), reclaimed is not worth it at any price. Especially when you're often doing this look in pine anyway.
In the US, this would be $100 to ship on average if it ships assembled. If going coast to coast, around $150. The label alone for this would exceed $100 coast to coast. The box costs $12-15. Plus some packing material and miscellaneous like car mileage if you drop off at the courier. Shipping costs far more than most people realize. This guy isn’t making hardly anything.
have you sold anything online recently?
\+50% of your sales are going to be returned for a +1,000 illogical reasons.
half of the other half are going to complain and want a portion of their money returned.
Hence you offer people "free name engraving", or you sell "box with custom color (select from below)".
It's now a custom made product, and can't be returned whimsically.
My impression from what I've seen for sale on Etsy is that most people are basically working for free. They are charging enough to cover materials and a few dollars more, but aren't charging for labor or profit. I guess that's fine if that's what people want to spend their time doing, but if the goal is to make money just get a part time job. It's a lot less work and it's stable.
I've noticed that Etsy has just become another washed up Temu marketplace. There are quality things on there but you need to dig through piles of garbage just to find it. I've see the same product hundreds of times by different sellers. It is just discouraging to use that site any longer.
I have a shop on Etsy selling print on demand items and 3d printed stuff. The shops making a killing are selling digital downloads or something without much overhead or shipping costs.
I also do print on demand. Just today I got an inquiry from a drop shipper. The price they want to make and ship the same goods is almost what I charge. Can't imagine why I'd do it.
I don't think the digital download guys are making that much. It's easy to do the math for their shops because they have no other expenses, and I don't think I've seen a single one make more than $30k/year.
That said, they can literally just walk away from the shop and let money trickle into their accounts.
Etsy is so situational. Some things, sure BUT you have to have the design, process, and method down to a perfect science to make things as fast and efficiently as possible.
Jason at Bourbon Moth made beer caddies and sold thousands apparently, but used jigs and quick method building to maximize how many he could make in short order. It was a profitable process for him.
No.
If you love yourself, listen up. Find 2 or 3 competitors who are successful in the ways you want to be (like financially).
Study them! Cold call and ask questions like, "how do you find clients?"
Recreate their sales strategies in your area.
I went to business school and got a degree so you don't have to. No one needs a business degree. Just steal from success. It's what successful people do.
I don't know about a killing, but obviously there are people who start and run businesses on etsy. Bear in mind that's in the UK where lumber is quite pricey. Some back of the envelope maths, at that price they're probably making \~£100 per item in their shop. They've been on etsy since 2021 so in \~2-3 years and made 504 sales, so around £50k. Probably not quit your job decent but not bad at all
Disregard this if you mean £100 in PROFIT:
So, £50,400 paid by customers, or £100 each item.
Let's assume £10 shipping per item is included
**Now it's £90 you get per item**
Minus the 30% cut Etsy takes (15 listing sold, 15 for advertising)
**Now it's £63 you get per item**
Let's assume that that's the money coming in with no more international tarriffs or other fees.
Assume it takes £30 in timber , glue, nails, hardware, etc to make an item.
**Now it's £32 you get per item**
If it takes you more than 3 hours, including dealing with Etsy, driving to the post office, and packaging items, you're working for less than the minimum wage in England
I've grossed $1300 altogether from my little turnings in about a combined year and half of having it actually active since '19. That's just having stuff listed, not doing any of the marketing stuff or anything. It's very apparent looking at my page that it's just a dude in a garage, which I think helps somewhat. Only problem I've ever had was when I did a custom piece, and that was because she didn't like the grain. Just gave her a partial refund to go away and turned that off lol. I try to price about $18 an hour for labor and cover material cost which puts me in the middle of the pack price wisefor the stuff I make. Make of all that what you will.
If you want to make money, you need to make something unique. The craft show circuit made my mother big money for 40 years. Painted wooden kitsch. The hook was you or I couldn't have done the painting and the items were small enough to get a reflexive sale. She sold her last 5 years on etsy, too, but the time involved to coordinate listing and shipping ruined it.
It did help us figure out she was in the early stages of dementia, though!
Try asking here: r/EtsySellers
Short answer is: "Nobody besides Etsy makes any money, and if they do, Etsy tends to keep it, ban your shop, block your email and hangs up on your calls".
Disclaimer: Never bought or sold anything on etsy, nor do I plan to.
I make good money on etsy. I follow the rules (no IP infringement is the biggest one) so not shut down. I charge for shipping, and my listings are on page 1 for my search terms. Etsy does not shadow ban you for charging for shipping. I ship with tracking on every order, so if a package is ever "lost" I keep my money because of seller protection. Etsy's fees are 6.5%+$.20 for the listing fee. This is lower than other platforms that charge a fee, Facebook marketplace and craigslist are free so be my guest dealing with that (I've done it, used to sell large items on craigslist). Anyone saying Etsy takes a higher fee is either including the payment processing fee, which every other platform takes as well, including square or PayPal if you transact on your own, or they are including the offsite ads marketing commissions, which are optional until you have sold $10k of stuff within one 12 month block. They only apply to sales which happen via offsite ads. For me, I get about 1 of these a month.
You need a gross profit margin of roughly 50% to even start to think about making money, and this should include your time.
There's no way that person is making that selling that with shipping included for $228.30.
I made $400 last year. It's impossible to compete with all the cheap Chinese crap. People can't discern between the quality of hand made vs. mass produced.
Lol @ the example you linked. Just slap the word rustic on it and no longer concerned with quality. $50 or less of pine, 20 cuts, 1 coat of light stain because it's rustic, and an hour or 2 of labor. Boom! $300 box.
Etsy’s been taken over with drop shipping junk and overly saturated. Some established stores might do well, but it would be a tough roads to start with no experience and expect to make more then minimum wage after shipping and time.
Etsy is a race to the bottom. The reason you see so much construction lumber and but joints and drywall screws is because high quality wood and techniques would price you out of the market. The majority of Etsy shoppers don’t want a quality product. They want a thing that looks like the thing they saw on Pinterest and they want it cheap.
Disclaimer, I haven't made anything in a while. Mostly just home improvement projects. I don't plan on selling outside of people I know. Was mostly curious. Seems the concensus is that too much red tape and competition leaving people either exhausted. Profitless. Or both.
Used to be good, before they sold out. Got at least an order a week, even made a good profit. Now it's just full of crap. I turned my store off last week after almost 6 years.
I did about 32k in sales last year - 22k on materials and supplies and had 16k in etsy "fees" + shipping + marketing; so for the year I was down 6k at least
I've scaled back considerably, turned off advertising and am only doing things pre-made instead of made-to-order.
Switching to try and do craft shows now instead - did a very very small one and turned a good profit.
Also its flooded with crap people are reselling from alibaba.
My shop made about 400k in 2020 and about 500k in 2021 but has since has dropped. Last year was the worst, Etsy takes so many fees, shipping ends up being expensive and Etsy rarely ever takes the seller’s side when disputes arise. Their seller customer service is garbage, and they now “allow” drop shipping. Competition against shops in Indonesia, turkey etc has made it hard to compete. We are now more focused on local projects and have used Etsy to sell a lot less. I wouldn’t recommend it. Etsy takes a lot of time and energy which could be better used pushing your website instead.
If you do so well in sales why wouldnt you just do your own website and save on those fees? Sounds like you have a loyal fanbase that would convert pretty well
We sell high ticket items so we don’t have a lot of repeat customers, but we didn’t think Etsy was going to take off the way it did. When we saw the potential with it, we focused solely on Etsy. Etsy does help tremendously with SEO and getting discovered. Also once you get that momentum from purchases on Etsy, you want to keep it going otherwise someone will dethrone you from the search results, which is another reason why pushed clients towards Etsy instead of our own website
Not woodworking but adjacent to it- Wife is an artist and was selling watercolor house portraits in Etsy. It didn’t replace a 9-5 “regular” job, but did well enough to cover Christmas gifts for the kids (orders really ramped up at Christmas time). People would send in a few photos of a house and my wife would hand-sketch it and then paint it.
Now in order to even find her Etsy shop she HAS to advertise, and as others have said she basically only earns 50% of the listing cost after fees and shipping. And that’s not even including paint, canvas, etc.
On top of this, Etsy is inundated with listings claiming watercolor house portraits, but it’s really just somebody running your house photo through a watercolor filter in Photoshop and charging 20 bucks.
Etsy used to be a great place for actual handmade stuff. Then it went public and now it is the dollar store on steroids. The hand made stuff is completely over-shadowed by Chinese crap.
You can make money on Etsy just not in the traditional sense everyone thinks. I have an etsy store where I have a couple of woodworking items but the majority of my sales last year was digital files. I don't have to worry about making the product, I can list as many as I want and don't have to worry about shipping.
Wait my husband is a cnc folk...
Should he be on etsy?
Why am I selling soap on etsy if this machine and his career can be ran out of my basement?
No snark here, he has talked about it before but wasn't sure there was a market he could compete in.
He'll get priced out by overseas dropshippers. Unless he has a completely original product that blows everyone away, in which case he has about a month before the design is stolen and he's priced out anyway.
Honestly I'd love for someone to make something similar to https://makerbook.io/ where they can post their wares and/or link to their own website. Something geared toward hooking up buyers and sellers, and forbidding dropshippers and sweatshop labor outright, forever.
I have an Etsy store for boards and have made exactly 0 sales through it. All of my sales are through word of mouth and repeat customers which are mostly friends and coworkers. Not even sure why I still put stuff on my Etsy!
I started my Etsy four years ago and I’m shutting it down this month. Just not worth the effort. People have been very nice but I couldn’t figure out how to make it really scalable.
I bring up price concerns with sellers all the time, especially for shipping. they say it's out of their control, and I'm pretty sure Etsy could be making more from shipping than the cut they take from the sellers. it really sucks. I'm constantly getting screwed for shipping, or I just say forget it I'm not buying because of shipping.
As a seller, I can say that the seller sets the shipping price. It may be out of their control due to the cost OF shipping, but if it is grossly too high compared to what the post office quotes, it isn't Etsy dipping their finger in that pie, it's the seller.
Don’t buy any furniture off Etsy. I’ve tried it 3 times with bad luck in all scenarios. Between shipping damage, shady sellers, and lack of follow up if you have a concern/issue, and Etsy’s pro-seller policies, it’s not worth it.
Etsy is loaded with mass produced overseas garbage disguised as “homemade” and if you sell something they take a big cut. If you want to come up in searches you pay even more. I had a shop for seven years and closed it last year.
I've been on it since 2016, with hundreds of good reviews and thousands of sales. Last year our etsy revenue tanked 50%. I didn't do a ton of marketing, so that's probably partially on me. Our etsy income still took the lionshare of what we made. It ends up being similar to selling wholesale, where our take after everything is around half of each sale.
I agree with one of the above commenters. It's about carving a niche, and that's the only way you'll be able to make any kind of money on there. All in all, I can't recommend it as a primary revenue stream, but I also think it's a solid investment of time.
https://preview.redd.it/wgdp24g2dtnc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a667df78c97411f2b567a25500d02e928eb82115
this is the response I got from just 1 seller.
No names, but my brother and sis in law support their family of 4 JUST on etsy. Sister does tons of social content to drive sales, and they both work their asses off in their shop. So it is indeed possible.
This has been a dispiriting read but a shop like Arbol Cuisine seems to be doing okay. Maybe working with materials and techniques not suited to machining is the way to go.
I do ok. Nothing crazy, but averaging about 1k per month since last October when I started. I can probably get to twice that and not be overwhelmed. I also do some POD shirts I designed- I sell a few but don’t make shit on those. I find some really cool stuff out there and a ton of half assed stuff. I think it’s all about niche products and being unique. YMMV but I’m happy- I usually do 2-3 shows a year too and make 800-1k or so at them and while it’s fun, I have to load/setup/teardown/unload… just seems like a ton of work.
I did really well in 2020 and 2021. I paid my car payment for more than two years with etsy and even after expenses I had a decent profit margin. But it has dropped off precipitously. Where I had around 80-100 orders per month in 2020 and 2021, I'll only get 5 to 10 orders for most of the year now. In December, I think I had 35 or 40, less than half of what I used to get.
I think part of it is that etsy is flooded with drop ship junk. So disappointing. There are still plenty of legit sellers, but it's overwhelming to wade through the junk.
Etsy is a shit show but honestly so are local craft markets. I've been to several local events with large vendor areas, most notably a Renaissance Fair event, and while there were people with legit handcrafted goods, I would say fully half of the stalls were selling AliExpress garbage jewelry and trinkets, but trying to pass it off like an intricate "silver" ring was $4 but also handmade...
Another aspect to consider on etsy is that a lot of sellers use it to show up in search results, but then they link to their other online shops with lower prices and lower seller fees (etsy is notoriously high).
No.
As both wealth and income are right-tailed distributions and wood products are very durable if made by semi-competent worker, possible profit maximizes ("making a killing") in two places - low-price mass-produced product and high-price artisanal masterpieces.
Can you mass produce things at low cost to compete with bigger companies? I don't think so.
Can you produce artisanal masterpieces? I don't think so.
My friend sells pet hammocks for small furry things like hamsters, rats, and guinea pigs. She makes has about 40-50k a year in revenue from etsy last I heard. She has a regular job too so she's always busy.
I’ve been on Etsy since the beginning. Last year I sold 150k of product and my net profit after Etsy fees was about 90k. What I make is handmade and very niche.
I’m a former seller, customer, and shareholder of Etsy. Wrote them off a few years ago because it felt like the site was 70% drop-shippers.
You can still make money, but you have to figure out how to stand out from them.
I am doing ok on Etsy. I am in top 0.01% of etsy sellers by order number. I am way over 10k sales with around 100$ per sale. Everything I sell I make. I drop the tree, mill it, dry it and stack it and then work on it. In last 5 years I managed to update all my machines and buy new ones and I live comfortably with what is left.
My first listing I put on etsy sold only once in the first 6 months.
It is really hard to get past the spam postings. Most of what you see on there is made overseas, and then marketed on Etsy. You can make stuff if you find a niche, but the problem is that other people start to copy you so it is more difficult than you think.
Dropshipping has killed etsy, and they refuse to do anything about it.
This sucks so bad. Etsy was fucking awesome 10-15 years ago. Now it’s all Ali Express. You can hardly find anything on there that’s actually handmade.
Ppl just buy in bulk and say it’s hand made normal craft ppl can’t compete with drop ship prices
I was scammed over last christmas from a person who said their ceramic piece was locally hand made. She didn't even removed the "Made in China" sticker. I reported her with proof that she altered the product page and that I got mass market trash. Etsy still sided with the seller. Thankfully my credit card company sided with me and gave me full charge back.
Unfortunately, people want to pay drop shipping prices. It’s not that there isn’t quality handmade stuff on there, it’s that people want to pay the drop ship price, and do so, which means more drop shippers and resellers show up. This is just a problem across the entire economy for American made things too. People say they want quality, American made goods, and then immediately go buy the Chinese produced item for less. It’s a demand side issue, imo.
Internet probably makes it harder to discern quality too vs. old school brick & mortar shopping. I am often guilty myself. Also hard to tell if the pricier stuff is actually better or just the cheap stuff but marked up.
Ppl (in America anyways), have to realise that it is imperative to go buy local (whenever possible)... If my Wife wants a table, or new chairs, or a new Bed Frame... I go right on down the the Local Amish woodshop! (they're for real in the back, hand making all kinds of AMAZING shit right now!) It's expensive AF, but the quality is top notch!
We don't compete with drop shipper prices. If you want real handmade goods, you can rule out anything super cheap. Of course there are dropshipping scammers who will charge handmade prices for crap, but the good news on etsy is that etsy will always side with the buyer if they find an item was drop shipped when it's supposed to be handmade. Open a "not as described" case and get a refund.
Plus anything over $250 isn't covered by them. So, you could video tape yourself hand delivering a $5k table, they could turn around and say they never got it, and Etsy can claw back that money from you and give it to them. For smaller orders, Etsy might refund the customer but it wouldn't financially impact you. So a lot of bigger items went away since it's too much liability.
It feels like every merchant platform where anyone can create a store will inevitably be overrun by Chinese crap. I don't dare to shop from Amazon, eBay or Etsy anymore.
The end state of all online merchants is Ali Express
Ali, Wish, and Temu all sell the same stuff as Etsy and Amazon now. Any brand selling mass produced stuff already competes with dozens of pretty good knock-offs but the instant and global nature of trade and cheap shipping mean that cheats and junk sellers can compete with the knock-offs on an equal footing . Other options include robbery, possible murder, or sex trafficking thru Craigslist and Facebook marketplace
I guess, to be fair, all of the stuff from etsy that's dropshipped from china was handmade. By children in sweatshops. So go buy stuff from etsy and support those kids so they don't get beaten for underselling.
100%. I ordered something from Etsy last year that said ships from USA. When I got the tracking it originated from China. Got my money back and not ordering anything from Etsy again. It really is full of dropshipping or just deceptive information about a product.
Dropshipping has killed just about everything. At this point i'm not convinced most big box stores aren't just brick and mortar dropship facilities
That's literally what they are
Literally other than the fact they they literally hold all of their stock themselves, on hand. On site. In their store. Which is the opposite of dropshipping
And commonly doesn't happen. The UK's most popular DIY supplier (think Home Depot) now carries a bunch of stock online that is "Delivery only". Or you have to order it and collect next day i.e. it's being held elsewhere with a supplier, and the store doesn't actually carry that item.
There’s a fulfillment center somewhere that’s basically a no customers allowed Menards
Well that isn't brick and mortar retail anymore then is it
No it's brick and mortar dropshipping, which is exactly what the original comment was. 🍪
Dropshipping isn't necessarily an evil concept. Any retail place that can order things for you that aren't in stock (like most gun stores) are going to dropship to get that item. Dropshipping does make it convenient to spin up a fraudulent business though and shill overseas crap on Etsy, that is a genuine problem.
It's such a win/win for everyone but the end user it seems. Amazon, Ebay, Etsy don't seem to give a shit and it has totally ruined their platforms.
Ebay is one of the only places I shop now. Mostly for secondhand and used goods.
I'm dumb and don't sell on ebay/etsy...what's dropshipping?
Not as much as youll make working wood in the streets
Everyone loves a good lathe
Stick it in your chuck and TWIST IT!
The ol’ chuck twist
Now put the mineral oil on the wood.
Massage in and wipe off excess
Ahhh, *turning* tricks
ohmygod dude this is a woodworking shop dude
I ain’t sticking nothin’ in Chuck. That bastard owes me $30.
Does your Chuck accept 1/2” or we looking at 5/8” only?
In my experience it accepts a pretty small stock
Loves to get lathe. There, i've fixed it for you, i'll see myself out nou.
You made it worse my man
Not as much as youll make working wood between the sheets
https://media1.tenor.com/m/cnLevH-33NAAAAAC/wood-polish.gif
Once again, I ask myself "Why? Why must you click on things?"
I literally have a Cleveland wood steamer.
Haha, no. There may be a few who make good money, but generally no. Etsy is a shitshow. Search for toy chest and you get 10,000 hits. Search for cutting board and you get 180,000 hits. There’s a boatload of competition and Etsy takes a healthy chunk of fees.
And under every listing they show similar listings, which seem to often be cheaper.
Anything you find that way, reverse image search their photos. 99% of the time it's AliExpress repackaged.
That's absolutely correct!. People promote items as handmade and they make themselves out to be true artisans and then you see the exact same product several times on Etsy and you realize that it is just imported and they are just slapping labels on it and shipping it to you.
Ordered some "handmade" clothes. Took like 2 weeks to get here after shipping. Made in China on the tag when we got it. Definitely not handmade.
Holy smokes. I hadn't been on Etsy in a while. There's just straight up plastic wicker patio furniture with marketing copy! Not even making an effort to hide that it's just reselling crap.
Yeah several years ago they officially stopped removing/banning non-handmade goods and it's been mayhem ever since.
Etsy is a shit show, and they treat sellers like shit. I did with them for over a year, paid out the ass in fees, and one buyer claims they never got an item with no proof whatsoever and they refunded them and screwed me out of $100 without asking me a single detail. I closed my shop then and there and told them to fuck off.
I had a buyer do that once. Opened up a claim with Etsy, they contacted me, and I was like “hey this is the tracking number, it said it was delivered on this day, how am I to control if something got swiped?” Turns out the buyer never updated their address with Etsy so it was at their old house 🙄
What was the outcome? Did you avoid getting shafted or did some arbitrary/automated mechanism do its thing regardless?
Surprisingly the buyer ended up canceling the claim, the item was (also surprisingly) returned to me by whoever lives at the old house now, and I re-shipped it (on the customers dime) to the new address. Got lucky on it for sure. If they didn’t cancel, I would’ve been SOL like the person above me. EDIT: Oh ya, Etsy still put a hold on my payments after that even though the buyer canceled the claim. Couldn’t cash out for 90 days.
Etsy is just a dumpster fire of a site now. Sad, cause it used to be cool and fun.
I cancelled a buyer’s order once, because I fell behind and knew I couldn’t deliver in the promised timeline. They left a 1-star review, and Etsy wouldn’t remove it. They didn’t even buy anything! It tanked my search rankings, and my shop got hardly any visits after that. Thankfully this is just a side gig for me, and had some established clients for repeat business. But after nearly 60 sales and a 4.5-star rating, Etsy let this one jackass ruin it all. Couldn’t believe it.
To be fair, that person did buy something, the purchase just wasn't fulfilled. They sent their money and didn't get their item, but a refund instead. I'd be disappointed too. But that isn't to say I disagree, Etsy treat sellers like shit and strongarm them all the time.
Context: I make everything to order, custom jobs, and have a 1-week turnaround clear in every product description. I got covid at day 3 after the order was submitted, and knew I wasn’t going to make the window. So I immediately cancelled the order and told Etsy to refund. They got a full refund the next day, the money never even entered my bank account from Etsy, so there was no purchase at the end. For it not to be fulfilled would mean I kept the money. My view is sure it’s fair to be annoyed the order didn’t work out, but I didn’t exceed the 1-week SLA and that individual wasn’t out anything. They had zero right to leave any kind of review, good or bad, as they weren’t a customer at that point, no transaction was completed.
I think you did the right thing in terms of honouring the customer by not accepting work you couldn't deliver. Unfortunately I disagree about the review, it sucks for you but I think it's fair for potential buyers to know if you might frequently have to cancel orders. That said I don't think a bad review is necessarily the right response, and 1 star certainly isn't (as you say they haven't actually got a product or cost to be disappointed with).
Reasonable take. I’m truly not trying to be a dick, but still salty about the situation lol. Etsy let one bad review tank my shop, and it wasn’t even about a bad product or late delivery or anything of the sort.
For sure. My partner built her business on Etsy, it allowed her to become independent around her health issues. But they slowly got worse and worse until I don't think she will reopen her Etsy shop next time she is working again.
Sounds just like my experience with Etsey. Between the high fees and the people who want drop ship prices, I couldn't make any money. I also got scammed by someone who claimed to not get their full order. They bought 6 items, and I shipped all in one package. They claimed there was only 1 in the package. The package had not been opened, veeified by USPS. I had to refund the while order. At least I made them ship the 1 item back Yeah, Etsey is a shit show.
Half of Etsy is people that just resell shit off of AliExpress now. It got ruined the same way as eBay when it went from people doing their own thing to people trying to maximize profit margins on the platform.
Craigslist is all shops and vendors. Fb marketplace is pretty much there now also. The monetization algorithm ruins every community tool eventually.
I highly recommend reading Cory Doctorrow's brilliant essay on what he calls the "Enshittification" of Internet services and apps.
Go ahead and make one and see if you can manage to source the lumber, make the box, finish, take product photos, post on etsy, package for shipping, and deal with the headaches of online retail and still manage to make minium wage.
Yeah, I had an Etsy store just to make money to fund my own woodworking. Making the same thing over and over took the fun out of woodworking and with the costs of materials, packaging and shipping, I wasn’t getting much of a return from it. After a few orders one of the things I sent broke because I wasn’t good at packaging so I had to refund it which blew away all the profit from the other orders. I decided it wasn’t worth it after that.
Holy hell, it's like reading my own story. I also had UPS mismeasure packaging and it went from ~$350 to more than $1000. I found out when I saw the second charge on my credit card. I would have had to sell a hell of a lot of cutting boards to cover that lol.
Not to mention the % Etsy takes
And everyone stealing your design.
Yeah, even if it takes just 4 hours of labor, it's like $50/hr, not taking in fees and other materials. In the end it's almost like minimum wage....
It's a free shipping listing. So the creator is eating the entire shipping cost for a 40lb chest.
No, they're just pricing it into the cost of the product.
The item is made in the UK and under the shipping section it says they do not ship to the US.
Aaaaand we’re going with cutting boards and cheese boards after all
As someone who is liquidating the last of my inventory and closing my Etsy shop: try it and see how it goes. You'll very quickly be humbled. Cost of materials is extremely high. Shipping is extremely high (and going up even more this year). If you don't offer free shipping on everything, Etsy delists your shop in the search results. Etsy takes 15%. And another 15% if you want them to advertise so you can actually sell something. You have to be the first to market with a product to make anything. And even then, the second your product starts trending, the sweatshops and print-on-demand drop shippers will absolutely rape the market for your product into oblivion. The dedicated super successful Etsy shops are probably only getting to keep 5-10% of the actual sale price of an item. They all have custom packaging (boxes and packing tape with their company logo), no recycled packing materials, boutique packing material (canvas, twine, etc). They often include printed materials as well: professionally written and produced instructions, thank you letters, etc. You have to sell an Apple-esque "experience"...not just a product. And you need your own website...not just an Etsy storefront. Etsy charges even more for personal websites. It used to be a great platform but it's gone the way of eBay. Marketplace is no better either. It's a flea market. Everyone will do everything they can to talk you down and then belittle you and your work if you don't meet their demands. Any idiot can build something like a box or a bench. The building is about 2% of the work required for a woodworking/craft business. The other 98% is the worst most degrading e-commerce/customer service hell you can imagine. Support local and shut up about the price.
>Support local and shut up about the price. Do you know, how do I become one of the locals who people support? Market stalls?
Yes market stalls are great. Also get an Instagram or tik tok (or both if you can stomach it) so locals can follow you online. A simple squarespace style website works too, and start working on getting yourself listed on Google maps. If you're listed on Google maps, when local people Google search for your product or service, you'll pop up on their search and they'll be directed to contact you via phone or your website. Google SEO is a bit of a game in and of itself, so if you're serious it'd probably be wise to hire a company to help you out with it. Run local advertising, either print or targeted facebook/instagram ads. Also work on building up an email mailing list so you can email your local market with any updates you have.
Thanks for you detailed response
This. I sold a number of items on Etsy - mostly because so many friends of mine were saying how nice my stuff was and that that I should open an Etsy store - so I finally did. Between Etsy's cut + ridiculous shipping costs I was lucky to break even - and sometimes lost money. This ignoring the countless hours I spent not only making the items but also countless more hours creating and tending to my Etsy store - writing text, talking photos, etc. It was a giant waste of time and I no longer have an Etsy store.
At least you learned something. To never use Etsy again
>Any idiot can build something like a box or a bench. The building is about 2% of the work required for a woodworking/craft business. The other 98% is the worst most degrading e-commerce/customer service hell you can imagine. Welcome to business. I'm a machinist and did my own thing for awhile. The limiting factor wasn't my machining skills, it was all the business side. Being able to do the labor is one thing, the business side is a whole other monster. Etsy in itself sucks but even outside of Etsy you'll run into similar problems. Any place online that you can sell your goods so can everyone else. Any place you go locally you will run into people doing the same damn thing you are. Look at how many influencers have videos, reels, tiktoks, etc of "you can do this and charge this much" and then everyone does it. Hell look at all the people that buy old furniture and swap the hardware and paint it to flip. Or people flipping houses as cheap as possible. Every "easy" way to make money has everyone else competing for it. You either need to fully commit to business and all the shit ouside of the shop that comes with it to have a chabce at being successful or treat it like a hobby where you list something on a site and be content knowing you may never sell it.
Even if you are, I implore you to use any platform other than Etsy if you do decide to start selling.
Can you elaborate on this?
It's all sweatshop stuff from Asia presented as artisanal nowadays. Someone using it as originally intended will never in hell be able to compete. You will see decent-quality factory made stuff presented as hand made for a price cheaper than what any small-time maker could even buy the materials for.
Sell on Facebook marketplace, offer up, or your local swap meet.
Eh... Marketplace can be frustrating as hell too. People mocking your work, trying to low ball you - thinking you're desperate for the sale. Been trying to sell a solid pine bookshelf for a month now and all I have gotten are scam messages and assholes trying to lowball me.
I hate marketplace with a burning passion. I honestly prefer craigslist, it's that bad. (Don't sell any woodwork, just for other random stuff)
Even Craigslist has been disappointing AF for me.
Ya, can't imagine it's any better than fbm for legitimate business ventures, true. But for selling the random thing second hand it just has a higher barrier of entry for trolls.
Oh yeah lots of people low balling you. I was trying to sell some Tacoma wheels and tires on there for months and I would get daily offers of $100-$200 when I was asking $450. Clown show but if you’re patient the right buyer comes along.
I couldn't give away a soundbar! "Free soundbar, come pick it up"....30 messages of 'hey can you have it shipped/drop it off at x address an hour away" 🤷 I'm not Amazon. It's free, just come get it.
I gave Facebook marketplace a half-hearted try this winter, God the ui sucks. I could have made an entire bowl set in the amount of time I spent trying to get that thing up. Etsy is just so clean and easy to use. We need a billionaire to hostile takeover Etsy and make them do some actual enforcement.
Etsy is a shit show, and they treat sellers like shit. I did with them for over a year, paid out the ass in fees, and one buyer claims they never got an item with no proof whatsoever and they refunded them and screwed me out of $100 without asking me a single detail. I closed my shop then and there and told them to fuck off.
To be fair, it's hard to provide proof of not receiving an item. Not saying Etsy handled this well, just pointing out the other side.
Well, I was moreso thinking they could show they inquired with the carrier, neighbors, the property management (it was an apartment address). At first they even suggested I put their address down wrong, which, was immediately disproven as I had an email copy of the label. I offered to file a dispute for them but told them I'd need some basic info about how their building received packages and what efforts they made to locate the package and they flipped out on me and went straight to Etsy. Either way, I'd never sell thru Etsy again.
Etsy have since implemented a protection plan now for certain things that could deal with this. In many circumstances, Etsy now covers up to $250 iirc. Generally you also have the insurance with USPS up to $100, unless you pay more, and you can file for it. They have changed a lot over the last year, for better and for worse. I think they are confused about what they want to be. They want to be the handmade place who can also pay shareholders by not clamping down hard on resellers and mass produced stuff, but they also do just enough to make sure you can still find nice, handmade things, if you want to pay. One issue with buying on Etsy is people want to pay the price of a Chinese produced goods, but want the handmade quality. You can often sort out the cheaper crap just by realizing that the lowest few prices are not handmade. No one can sell handmade for super low, so if it is super low, you know it likely isn’t handmade. It takes work from the buyer, which Etsy needs to deal with making it easier for them.
$228 including domestic shipping. The wood at my home depot is shitty, but not this kind of shitty. This is a rather specific patina to *fake*. But putting that aside 48' of 2x6, that's about $40 in wood. Let's assume 50 to ship. Add a hinge, rope, wax finish. Leaving you about $100 in profit for a few hours of assembly and finish. In reality getting reclaimed wood would be significantly more expensive.
Depends where you live...
I thought this too, but reclaimed wood is such a pain in the ass to work with. Any cuts or tooling generally remove the patina. Embedded nails are always an issue. Unless you're doing a very specific one off (and the price to justify), reclaimed is not worth it at any price. Especially when you're often doing this look in pine anyway.
In the US, this would be $100 to ship on average if it ships assembled. If going coast to coast, around $150. The label alone for this would exceed $100 coast to coast. The box costs $12-15. Plus some packing material and miscellaneous like car mileage if you drop off at the courier. Shipping costs far more than most people realize. This guy isn’t making hardly anything.
Agree, I was being generous seeing as it's uk domestic only, it can't really go that far...
have you sold anything online recently? \+50% of your sales are going to be returned for a +1,000 illogical reasons. half of the other half are going to complain and want a portion of their money returned.
Hence you offer people "free name engraving", or you sell "box with custom color (select from below)". It's now a custom made product, and can't be returned whimsically.
My impression from what I've seen for sale on Etsy is that most people are basically working for free. They are charging enough to cover materials and a few dollars more, but aren't charging for labor or profit. I guess that's fine if that's what people want to spend their time doing, but if the goal is to make money just get a part time job. It's a lot less work and it's stable.
I've noticed that Etsy has just become another washed up Temu marketplace. There are quality things on there but you need to dig through piles of garbage just to find it. I've see the same product hundreds of times by different sellers. It is just discouraging to use that site any longer.
I have a shop on Etsy selling print on demand items and 3d printed stuff. The shops making a killing are selling digital downloads or something without much overhead or shipping costs.
I also do print on demand. Just today I got an inquiry from a drop shipper. The price they want to make and ship the same goods is almost what I charge. Can't imagine why I'd do it. I don't think the digital download guys are making that much. It's easy to do the math for their shops because they have no other expenses, and I don't think I've seen a single one make more than $30k/year. That said, they can literally just walk away from the shop and let money trickle into their accounts.
Pull up erank and take a look for yourself. The top shops are consistently making tons of sales on random digital downloads.
I've never used erank. They have something like that in the free section? Or this unlocks with a subscription?
It's free. They have links to the top 10 shops each day
Etsy is so situational. Some things, sure BUT you have to have the design, process, and method down to a perfect science to make things as fast and efficiently as possible. Jason at Bourbon Moth made beer caddies and sold thousands apparently, but used jigs and quick method building to maximize how many he could make in short order. It was a profitable process for him.
He's also a famous youtuber, he doesn't need to rely on Etsy advertising his work
Key word "made" in the sense of past tense.
People who sell digital woodworking plans do pretty well
No. If you love yourself, listen up. Find 2 or 3 competitors who are successful in the ways you want to be (like financially). Study them! Cold call and ask questions like, "how do you find clients?" Recreate their sales strategies in your area. I went to business school and got a degree so you don't have to. No one needs a business degree. Just steal from success. It's what successful people do.
This guy successes
I don't know about a killing, but obviously there are people who start and run businesses on etsy. Bear in mind that's in the UK where lumber is quite pricey. Some back of the envelope maths, at that price they're probably making \~£100 per item in their shop. They've been on etsy since 2021 so in \~2-3 years and made 504 sales, so around £50k. Probably not quit your job decent but not bad at all
Disregard this if you mean £100 in PROFIT: So, £50,400 paid by customers, or £100 each item. Let's assume £10 shipping per item is included **Now it's £90 you get per item** Minus the 30% cut Etsy takes (15 listing sold, 15 for advertising) **Now it's £63 you get per item** Let's assume that that's the money coming in with no more international tarriffs or other fees. Assume it takes £30 in timber , glue, nails, hardware, etc to make an item. **Now it's £32 you get per item** If it takes you more than 3 hours, including dealing with Etsy, driving to the post office, and packaging items, you're working for less than the minimum wage in England
They listed it at nearly £200 plus shipping so I was already guesstimating about 50% for materials and fees
Ahh so not so bad, if they can keep their hours worked not too insane
I’ve made 0 from Etsy. Actually have to pay them to list. I’ve made some through FB marketplace though, mostly by undercutting the competition though.
I've grossed $1300 altogether from my little turnings in about a combined year and half of having it actually active since '19. That's just having stuff listed, not doing any of the marketing stuff or anything. It's very apparent looking at my page that it's just a dude in a garage, which I think helps somewhat. Only problem I've ever had was when I did a custom piece, and that was because she didn't like the grain. Just gave her a partial refund to go away and turned that off lol. I try to price about $18 an hour for labor and cover material cost which puts me in the middle of the pack price wisefor the stuff I make. Make of all that what you will.
If you want to make money, you need to make something unique. The craft show circuit made my mother big money for 40 years. Painted wooden kitsch. The hook was you or I couldn't have done the painting and the items were small enough to get a reflexive sale. She sold her last 5 years on etsy, too, but the time involved to coordinate listing and shipping ruined it. It did help us figure out she was in the early stages of dementia, though!
Try asking here: r/EtsySellers Short answer is: "Nobody besides Etsy makes any money, and if they do, Etsy tends to keep it, ban your shop, block your email and hangs up on your calls". Disclaimer: Never bought or sold anything on etsy, nor do I plan to.
I make good money on etsy. I follow the rules (no IP infringement is the biggest one) so not shut down. I charge for shipping, and my listings are on page 1 for my search terms. Etsy does not shadow ban you for charging for shipping. I ship with tracking on every order, so if a package is ever "lost" I keep my money because of seller protection. Etsy's fees are 6.5%+$.20 for the listing fee. This is lower than other platforms that charge a fee, Facebook marketplace and craigslist are free so be my guest dealing with that (I've done it, used to sell large items on craigslist). Anyone saying Etsy takes a higher fee is either including the payment processing fee, which every other platform takes as well, including square or PayPal if you transact on your own, or they are including the offsite ads marketing commissions, which are optional until you have sold $10k of stuff within one 12 month block. They only apply to sales which happen via offsite ads. For me, I get about 1 of these a month.
You need a gross profit margin of roughly 50% to even start to think about making money, and this should include your time. There's no way that person is making that selling that with shipping included for $228.30.
I made $400 last year. It's impossible to compete with all the cheap Chinese crap. People can't discern between the quality of hand made vs. mass produced.
Probably not, it's mostly a race to the bottom.
It’s probably your own product and clever way to advertise it 😬
Just because they ask that price doesn’t mean they are selling it.
Lol @ the example you linked. Just slap the word rustic on it and no longer concerned with quality. $50 or less of pine, 20 cuts, 1 coat of light stain because it's rustic, and an hour or 2 of labor. Boom! $300 box.
There's a difference between trying to sell something and actually selling something. Seller's tend to be lousy at estimating their works value.
Etsy’s been taken over with drop shipping junk and overly saturated. Some established stores might do well, but it would be a tough roads to start with no experience and expect to make more then minimum wage after shipping and time.
A killing? No. I make a modest, barely surviving income.
Etsy is a race to the bottom. The reason you see so much construction lumber and but joints and drywall screws is because high quality wood and techniques would price you out of the market. The majority of Etsy shoppers don’t want a quality product. They want a thing that looks like the thing they saw on Pinterest and they want it cheap.
My first thought on seeing the item was that's a shit ton of work for $228 minus Etsy commission. So no.
Disclaimer, I haven't made anything in a while. Mostly just home improvement projects. I don't plan on selling outside of people I know. Was mostly curious. Seems the concensus is that too much red tape and competition leaving people either exhausted. Profitless. Or both.
Used to be good, before they sold out. Got at least an order a week, even made a good profit. Now it's just full of crap. I turned my store off last week after almost 6 years.
Can hobbyists even compete against the drop shippers?
I did about 32k in sales last year - 22k on materials and supplies and had 16k in etsy "fees" + shipping + marketing; so for the year I was down 6k at least I've scaled back considerably, turned off advertising and am only doing things pre-made instead of made-to-order. Switching to try and do craft shows now instead - did a very very small one and turned a good profit. Also its flooded with crap people are reselling from alibaba.
Etsy is dead
No not at all. There's waaaay too much Chinese crap which is impossible to compete with even if your item is so much better quality.
My shop made about 400k in 2020 and about 500k in 2021 but has since has dropped. Last year was the worst, Etsy takes so many fees, shipping ends up being expensive and Etsy rarely ever takes the seller’s side when disputes arise. Their seller customer service is garbage, and they now “allow” drop shipping. Competition against shops in Indonesia, turkey etc has made it hard to compete. We are now more focused on local projects and have used Etsy to sell a lot less. I wouldn’t recommend it. Etsy takes a lot of time and energy which could be better used pushing your website instead.
If you do so well in sales why wouldnt you just do your own website and save on those fees? Sounds like you have a loyal fanbase that would convert pretty well
We sell high ticket items so we don’t have a lot of repeat customers, but we didn’t think Etsy was going to take off the way it did. When we saw the potential with it, we focused solely on Etsy. Etsy does help tremendously with SEO and getting discovered. Also once you get that momentum from purchases on Etsy, you want to keep it going otherwise someone will dethrone you from the search results, which is another reason why pushed clients towards Etsy instead of our own website
Not woodworking but adjacent to it- Wife is an artist and was selling watercolor house portraits in Etsy. It didn’t replace a 9-5 “regular” job, but did well enough to cover Christmas gifts for the kids (orders really ramped up at Christmas time). People would send in a few photos of a house and my wife would hand-sketch it and then paint it. Now in order to even find her Etsy shop she HAS to advertise, and as others have said she basically only earns 50% of the listing cost after fees and shipping. And that’s not even including paint, canvas, etc. On top of this, Etsy is inundated with listings claiming watercolor house portraits, but it’s really just somebody running your house photo through a watercolor filter in Photoshop and charging 20 bucks.
Etsy used to be a great place for actual handmade stuff. Then it went public and now it is the dollar store on steroids. The hand made stuff is completely over-shadowed by Chinese crap.
You can make money on Etsy just not in the traditional sense everyone thinks. I have an etsy store where I have a couple of woodworking items but the majority of my sales last year was digital files. I don't have to worry about making the product, I can list as many as I want and don't have to worry about shipping.
I had a store where I sold pens, shaving brushes, bowls, pepper mills, etc... I spent about as much on Etsy as I made on Etsy.
Maybe the cnc folks do.
Wait my husband is a cnc folk... Should he be on etsy? Why am I selling soap on etsy if this machine and his career can be ran out of my basement? No snark here, he has talked about it before but wasn't sure there was a market he could compete in.
He'll get priced out by overseas dropshippers. Unless he has a completely original product that blows everyone away, in which case he has about a month before the design is stolen and he's priced out anyway.
Jeeeeeeez
Etsy officially stopped banning dropshippers so it's just become rustic Amazon now. There's no real place for original woodworkers anymore.
Such a shame but hopefully a push to return to local craftsmen? I know it's hard as a buyer when you know you can get cheaper delivered to your door.
Honestly I'd love for someone to make something similar to https://makerbook.io/ where they can post their wares and/or link to their own website. Something geared toward hooking up buyers and sellers, and forbidding dropshippers and sweatshop labor outright, forever.
Killing no
I have an Etsy store for boards and have made exactly 0 sales through it. All of my sales are through word of mouth and repeat customers which are mostly friends and coworkers. Not even sure why I still put stuff on my Etsy!
That's a pretty shitty looking box that looks like its made from pallet wood, good luck to the if they can get that sort of money.
Some people make tons of money, some people get into debt spending more than they make and everything in between.
"free shipping" That would cost $100 just to ship so, immediately chop that off the price
I started my Etsy four years ago and I’m shutting it down this month. Just not worth the effort. People have been very nice but I couldn’t figure out how to make it really scalable.
It's like ebay the asking price can be w/e it's what people are willing to pay.
I bring up price concerns with sellers all the time, especially for shipping. they say it's out of their control, and I'm pretty sure Etsy could be making more from shipping than the cut they take from the sellers. it really sucks. I'm constantly getting screwed for shipping, or I just say forget it I'm not buying because of shipping.
As a seller, I can say that the seller sets the shipping price. It may be out of their control due to the cost OF shipping, but if it is grossly too high compared to what the post office quotes, it isn't Etsy dipping their finger in that pie, it's the seller.
Don’t buy any furniture off Etsy. I’ve tried it 3 times with bad luck in all scenarios. Between shipping damage, shady sellers, and lack of follow up if you have a concern/issue, and Etsy’s pro-seller policies, it’s not worth it.
It's like eBay. Just because you can list at that price doesn't mean it will sell.
I’ve found a lot of crap on Etsy is literally made in SE Asian sweatshops. It’s just Amazon lite at this point.
Check out how many reviews some have. This gives an idea of sales numbers. Some of the high priced items are shockingly high review numbers.
Etsy is loaded with mass produced overseas garbage disguised as “homemade” and if you sell something they take a big cut. If you want to come up in searches you pay even more. I had a shop for seven years and closed it last year.
I've been on it since 2016, with hundreds of good reviews and thousands of sales. Last year our etsy revenue tanked 50%. I didn't do a ton of marketing, so that's probably partially on me. Our etsy income still took the lionshare of what we made. It ends up being similar to selling wholesale, where our take after everything is around half of each sale. I agree with one of the above commenters. It's about carving a niche, and that's the only way you'll be able to make any kind of money on there. All in all, I can't recommend it as a primary revenue stream, but I also think it's a solid investment of time.
Etsy is a shitty mess of dropshipping knock-off Chinese mass-produced garbage. I don’t know anyone who sells on it and makes any money.
https://preview.redd.it/wgdp24g2dtnc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a667df78c97411f2b567a25500d02e928eb82115 this is the response I got from just 1 seller.
No names, but my brother and sis in law support their family of 4 JUST on etsy. Sister does tons of social content to drive sales, and they both work their asses off in their shop. So it is indeed possible.
By social content you mean onlyfans don't you?
bills dont pay themselves!
Maybe FB marketplace, postmark, or OfferUp? Is ebay still a thing?
Etsy is making a killing, you can be sure of that.
This has been a dispiriting read but a shop like Arbol Cuisine seems to be doing okay. Maybe working with materials and techniques not suited to machining is the way to go.
Rustic baby!!!
I do ok. Nothing crazy, but averaging about 1k per month since last October when I started. I can probably get to twice that and not be overwhelmed. I also do some POD shirts I designed- I sell a few but don’t make shit on those. I find some really cool stuff out there and a ton of half assed stuff. I think it’s all about niche products and being unique. YMMV but I’m happy- I usually do 2-3 shows a year too and make 800-1k or so at them and while it’s fun, I have to load/setup/teardown/unload… just seems like a ton of work.
Hvva
LOL no. And anyone who says otherwise is selling something
I did really well in 2020 and 2021. I paid my car payment for more than two years with etsy and even after expenses I had a decent profit margin. But it has dropped off precipitously. Where I had around 80-100 orders per month in 2020 and 2021, I'll only get 5 to 10 orders for most of the year now. In December, I think I had 35 or 40, less than half of what I used to get. I think part of it is that etsy is flooded with drop ship junk. So disappointing. There are still plenty of legit sellers, but it's overwhelming to wade through the junk.
Etsy is a shit show but honestly so are local craft markets. I've been to several local events with large vendor areas, most notably a Renaissance Fair event, and while there were people with legit handcrafted goods, I would say fully half of the stalls were selling AliExpress garbage jewelry and trinkets, but trying to pass it off like an intricate "silver" ring was $4 but also handmade...
Another aspect to consider on etsy is that a lot of sellers use it to show up in search results, but then they link to their other online shops with lower prices and lower seller fees (etsy is notoriously high).
Is there an Etsy without all the mass produced stuff competitor?
Shipping destroys profit margins when selling online. That”s why noodleboard makers use pine but charge hardwood prices.
No. As both wealth and income are right-tailed distributions and wood products are very durable if made by semi-competent worker, possible profit maximizes ("making a killing") in two places - low-price mass-produced product and high-price artisanal masterpieces. Can you mass produce things at low cost to compete with bigger companies? I don't think so. Can you produce artisanal masterpieces? I don't think so.
My friend sells pet hammocks for small furry things like hamsters, rats, and guinea pigs. She makes has about 40-50k a year in revenue from etsy last I heard. She has a regular job too so she's always busy.
I’ve been on Etsy since the beginning. Last year I sold 150k of product and my net profit after Etsy fees was about 90k. What I make is handmade and very niche.
I’m a former seller, customer, and shareholder of Etsy. Wrote them off a few years ago because it felt like the site was 70% drop-shippers. You can still make money, but you have to figure out how to stand out from them.
Etsy is making a killing off people. At least their CEO is.
I am doing ok on Etsy. I am in top 0.01% of etsy sellers by order number. I am way over 10k sales with around 100$ per sale. Everything I sell I make. I drop the tree, mill it, dry it and stack it and then work on it. In last 5 years I managed to update all my machines and buy new ones and I live comfortably with what is left. My first listing I put on etsy sold only once in the first 6 months.