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I have found that I have a lot of vintage items that might be a good fit for Etsy. If you also sell on Etsy & eBay, do you find that the profit is relatively the same? Do you feel like items will sit a lot longer on Etsy compared to eBay? I wonder this because until I started selling items myself, I thought Etsy was just for handmade items and did not include vintage.
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Hi,
I sell mostly on Etsy but also dabble on Ebay.
Fees are lower on Etsy than Ebay.
Buyers at Etsy are more willing to pay a premium for items that at Ebay.
Etsy is going pretty well for me as I don’t mind waiting a bit longer for buyers that are willing to pay more for my vintage designer items.
Even though Ebay generates a lot more traffic than Etsy, Etsy’s traffic has been growing significantly (e.g. Asia has become a big market for me there).
Even though the handmade side of business is more well known, people do searches on Google that lead to Etsy items and I guess that drives a lot of sales. You can even buy as a guest.
So, as a seller that prefers Etsy, I say… go for it.
Good luck -
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Here are some tips that I find work well for me:
Take good photos and use up all the 10 that you are allowed to upload.
Don’t bother staging photos if that’s not your thing. A clean white background is fine.
I put in a detailed description of the item (measurements, colours, weight, looks and style, designer, age, years in production, etc) and its condition. I disclose any flaws if there are any.
I always send a message when I receive an order and tell customers what to expect – when I’ll be shipping, how long it should take in transit, making people comfortable with how well I’ll pack, etc
In the beginning, set lower prices than the competitors, to make sure you get some sales and feed back.
Put in the work, be patient, and results will start to appear. -
I used to sell exclusively on Etsy for a time. I honestly don’t know which is better in terms of fees. Etsy keeps changing things, and I stopped trying to keep up. I will tell you of a recent experience though. I sold an item for $14.95 last week. I had just listed said item a few days prior. Okay great! Or so I thought.
Here’s what happened. The next day I get a prompt on my Etsy Sellers Dashboard. The message was letting me know that said item was sold through Etsy Ads. Huh? I didn’t sign up for any “ads”. Long story short…The item sold for $14.95. Because the item sold through Etsy Ads, I was being charged $2.69 as a fee for the ad that I did not ask to be part of. Then there is a listing fee. I say .80 cents, because there is a minimum of 4 months x .20 cents, so that is .80 cents. There is a multi-listing fee of .20 cents, then there is the percentage Etsy takes, the percentage you pay PayPal, and then your taxes. How much have I “profited”? Is it worth it? These are the things about Etsy which make it difficult to sell on Etsy. AND Etsy wants you to offer “free” shipping? No. Not after all of those fees. I did not offer free shipping on that particular item. If I had, I really would not even bother with Etsy. I would just sell on ebay and call it done.
I did receive a “So, how did you like selling through our ads?” type of question. I was quick to reply that I did not sign up for it, did not like it, and asked to be removed. Here’s the kicker. If you sold $10,000. or more on Etsy in a year’s time, you do NOT have the option to opt out of the Etsy Ads promotion! Oy!
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Just curious if Etsy is one of those places you have to send your items like a present, like bows and all that stuff. I take care of my items on ebay, but I don’t have time to sit and wrap stuff in pretty paper etc.
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We do not. We pack and ship the same way we do on Ebay. We also use our Ebay branded boxes and tape for all our Etsy sales.
Ratio wise we sell about as much on Etsy as we do Ebay. We have about 1,200 items in our Ebay store and about 750 in our Etsy store. So, we sell about the same if both stores had the same number of items.
We cross post on 3 sites currently and will be adding a fourth shortly. All will be handled by one software app called SixBit which we can ship to all through, manage inventory through, auto delete from all other sites when an item sells on one site. Much has been said here about 3 or 4 programs that can do this.
We do use the Etsy Promoted ads, but a seller can control their own budget. We have it set at $1 per day or $30-$31 per month, but with about $750 to $1k per month on Etsy, it is just a cost of doing business.
We are in the final stages of our Shopify Store and will be going live with that hopefully in the next few weeks, then will come the integration of Mercari into the mix, then the up and coming Facebook Market Place Shop. That will be 5 selling platforms for all our inventory all managed and controlled and synched through the one program SixBit.
Jay and Ryanne have 5 income streams [or will have], but 4 of them are not e-commerce sites. Ebay, rental properties [shampoo and booze], their video conferencing business, Ryanne’s interior design services with her sister, and now a coffee roasting venture, and I bet you dollars to donuts with that coffee, Jay has some stocks or mutual funds in their somewhere. HHhhmmm!!! Maybe I am off on this, but they do juggle a lot to create a multi-faceted income stream. This day and time, diversification is a must especially with all the non-sense going on inside of these platforms like the Ebay upper level staff getting indictments and Etsy CEO jumping all over the place with their fee platforms.
What I like about Etsy, no offers, maybe every now and then in message form, but no in place system for allowing buyers to click on make an offerr. We sell for higher prices on Etsy. We offer shipping included on etsy but have all 8 zones covered and extra for handling on over size lg. DIM Weight packages that require “Franken Boxes”. Buyers don’t seen to care. And by mixing in the shipping they can’t tell what is shipping costs vs. just a higher object/item cost, it is just part of the price that they are willing or not willing to pay.
We don’t make anything pretty inside because we ship all breakables and have a “special cocoon packing” methodology we use, and it doesn’t lend itself to have ribbon tied all around it. But drop a glass candelabra we have packed from 4 feet up, on it’s corner onto concrete and it won’t break. Tons of our reviews all mention our packing. So nothing pretty, pretty.
Also Etsy because of google is desiring plain backgrounds also, so we no longer do any extra props or curating of our photos, which has greatly increased our productivity.
Because of corporate shenanigans of all sorts taking place in all these platforms, many online people are pro diversification and that’s what we are doing.
Now all this is just an opinion here and as i always say, that and and $1.50 will get you about half a cup of coffee.
Mike,
MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Equipment.
Collins Creek Collections-
That’s interesting to hear your experience of selling on Etsy Mike.
We are in the UK and sell almost excusively on Etsy (1375 items at the moment). About 40% of our sales are to the USA. Like you, I would say that we are able to achieve a higher price for our items on Etsy.
We don’t do ‘fancy packaging’, other than a first layer of white tissue paper on small items, and use lots of recycled cardboard boxes.
The fees are definitely a bit lower than Ebay, but the main thing for us is the higher prices customers are willing to pay.
We do ‘free’ shipping within the UK for most things, and have been experimenting with offering our mirrors (large, heavy and breakable!) at a price which includes the considerable cost of shipping to the US. Sales seem unaffected.
We have a high enough profits (over $10,000) to be in the Off-site Advertising programme which you can’t opt out of. It’s not a problem – you only pay the fee (12%) when you make a sale. Like you say, it’s a cost of doing business.
Mike – when you say you sell for higher prices on Etsy, do you list at higher prices than on Ebay? or is it about not having a best offer/discount function, and selling for full price?
I’ve often wondered about cross listing our whole store on Ebay. I suspect our sales would be very similar, but we might sell more in the UK and fewer items to the US. Etsy remains quite small in the UK.
My hand might be forced on 1 July. Royal Mail in the UK are putting up shipping prices to the US by a significant amount – to reflect the ‘last mile delivery costs’. It will mean around 50-60% increase. It will be more expensive for us to ship to the US than to Australia!
I’m pretty sure this will effect our sales.
I hear you on diversification. We also have property we let out and a magazine which has been running for 12 years. I’m working on another couple of Etsy businesses – Houseplants (an obsession and luckily fashionable!), and printables/downloadables (passive income once you’ve set up your products). I better get cracking on getting these businesses off the ground!-
“Mike – when you say you sell for higher prices on Etsy, do you list at higher prices than on Ebay? or is it about not having a best offer/discount function, and selling for full price?”
Yes.. The higher prices on Etsy are due to the fact we don’t have to deal with offers which lowers the selling cost, and that we offer “Shipping Included” in the Etsy Items and we build in either Zone 6 or in some cases even Zone 8 into the price so we make money on any sales that are shipped to any zone closer than that [zones 1-7].
We also build 25% on top of all of that because we want to make up for a Sale that we run. We have a Sale running about 200 days out of 365. Usually about 25% and occasionally 30-35% percent. So we always build that 25% into our item prices along with the Zone 8 prices. Then when a buyer purchases an item not on Sale on Etsy, they pay a much higher price than an Ebay item that has calculated shipping, [no built in shipping] and also that 25% SALE buffer built in and no offers accepted.
But the actual BASE price of the item is the same on Ebay and Etsy.
Hope that is understandable.
It is funny that even when we run a 25% Off Sale storewide on Ebay and take offers, a high percentage of our Sales come from people also making an Offer in addition to the Sale Price. And we notice the amount of the offers “seem” to be about the same amount as the calculated shipping is. It is like the buyer sees the ON SALE price, then sees the shipping costs and makes a lower offer by subtracting the shipping cost from the “ON SALE” price. Sort of the Buyers way of trying to get Free Shipping”.
In other cases, it seems the buyer doesn’t even see or care about the original price that gets crossed out with a red line during a Sale [Prior to the “SALE” price, only sees the discounted [On Sale] price then offers 50% less than that.
It is because of all this nonsense of back and forth, multiple offers, etc. that we are currently talking about using our Etsy approach on Ebay.
Take an item we procure for $5 that we research and decide we would like to price at $35, then we add the cost to ship it to zone 8 at let’s say $14 = $49 and then we mark that combined number up another 30% = $63.70 and that will be our starting listing price.
We leave the Make Offer turned on and add FREE SHIPPING. Then we can accept a 50% off offer at $31.85 or put it on a 25% Off Sale and take a 25% lower Offer and still be fine and end up where we wanted to be in the first place.
We still get about what we wanted, and the buyer gets to feel like they got to make us lower our price by their lower offer and they GET FREE Shipping and they are happy.
But we all know it is all about a perceived value or a perceived deal to the customer on Ebay.
So it is that Make an Offer that lowers our margins on Ebay.
Think about why retail stores almost never offer more than 80% Off Sale but will within about 30 days be done to 40%-50% OFF. That is because it is built in and the buyer who buys as soon as an item hits the racks pays top dollar and gets the pride of first owner of a new design. But the bargain hunter waits for the 50% off Sale late in the season. Well the store is still making what they wanted anyway.
Even at 80% Off they are still covering the cost of the item and a small margin. A $69 dollar ladies dress or coat cost the retailer maybe $4 or $5 bucks total.
And as always, just our opinions here at the business and that and $1.50 will get you half a cup of coffee.
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
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Thank You so much for this detailed information! It is really helpful. I’m still a baby compared to everyone and it can get a bit overwhelming sometimes. It’s hard to decide where to start and I also worry about selling something for too little money.
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I had a pretty nice little etsy business in 2016/2017 that sometimes generated very close to the same $ sales per month as my eBay store.
Then etsy started a “pay for placement” campaign where you had to pay additional fees to get good placement for your items in search. After that if anyone searched for lowest price first, the items that paid for placement with higher prices showed up before the lowest priced ones. I did try paying the fees for placement but for my lower value items there was no longer much profit after paying the fees. I stopped paying the fees and at that point my sales dropped and continued to drop until I ended up having several zero sales months in a row.
I completely abandoned etsy as a sales platform in early 2019 for those reasons. But if your items are higher priced you could pay the placement fees and probably still make a profit. I also don’t even know if the “pay for placement” is still in effect since I’ve not been on etsy for about 18 months. I like etsy as a selling platform but for lower priced items it ultimately didn’t work for me.
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