I opened up a shop, but I can’t help wonder if the work is going to be worth the effort. I am treating this like a full time job, because I figure I can’t expect good returns unless I’m willing to put in the labor.
On the other hand I don’t want to be wasting my time and hope on a pipedream that only see the huge players making any returns
I have a friend who has a full time etsy business. She sells hand stamped silver jewelry. She has had to hire her husband to help with the business, she does so well.
Unfortunately I don’t have the gritty details of how she got to this place, or how much she makes. But, she is a success so far!
She also does local craft shows fwiw.
Put up a link to our store. What do you sell?
I sold stuff but not a lot. They changed how you’re listed in the search from time listed to some metric I don’t understand. When that happened I sold nothing at all. That’s because I knew to time my listings so that the maximum amount of people could pull it up on the first page of their search. After that I don’t know if my stuff ever showed up on anybody’s search.
That was two years ago. BTW, they do have pages explaining the metric, I just never got it to work for me. Still, I’m thinking about re-opening mine. It’s so cheap, I already take nice pics of my stuff and it’s only gathering dust here anyway.
Plus there is now a way to link your Etsy to Pinterest which I will be looking into.
So, in conclusion: Many people make a living with Etsy. I was not one of them.
My aforementioned friend did leave Etsy for a short while, to try to do sales on her own Web site. It was not long after I’d read some articles about Etsy and how their sellers were getting pissed off with their crazy rules (my reading and her leaving were not related).
She did return to Etsy. I think the extra steps involved in running her own site were too overwhelming and she was willing to put up with Etsy’s rules to avoid having to do the extra work and pay the extra fees of having her own site. I’m guessing Etsy just gives her more exposure, if anything else.
Good luck with your shop. It is usually pretty tough to make much money at any small business. I’ve known several people who had Etsy shops, I think they made a little money but for them it was just a thing to do on the side - and they were doing something creative that they liked. The problem is a market with no barriers to entry and you probably have no real competitive advantage. Of course you might have some cool thing you make that’s hot for a while, but then you are encountering the risk of relying on a market with fickle and ever-changing tastes and probably no budget to do market research. Even people I know who had a decently popular product didn’t make enough to live on their own without help from someone else.