In my experience if you want to make a sustainable living from selling arts or crafts online, you want to go up market. Charge $1,000 or more per work.
Use a relationship based sales process starting with one focused social media presence, typically Instagram.
Not everyone will be afford your work, but if your marketing and customer service is solid, a plenty large market will exist.
Once you start collecting social proof from happy customers, flow that back into your marketing and getting your next client becomes easier and easier. You can then often charge $3,000 to $5,000 for the same exact work because of the social proof and the brand you are building with it.
Making an art business work is similar to making a bootstrapped software business work, in the sense that software bootstrappers again and again go through the personal realization that writing software is typically only 20% to 30% of what they need to focus on in order to be successful.
They realize they need to bite the bullet and learn sales and marketing too and only if they do so can they overtime shift more and more of their time to just the areas of their software business they want to spend the most time in.
I'm inclined to agree with this. I've watched someone start by making small macrame wall hangings and selling them for $60 on Etsy take this direction. Now they're posting professional level photos of large ($1,000+) custom ordered pieces hanging in client's homes on Instagram. They don't bother with the small stuff or Etsy anymore.
Yeah I hear you. I naturally can relate more to the producer than the fan or supporter.
Another good comparison is a company like Tesla. Tesla started out with the high priced roadster but as they sold more and their audience grew, they pushed the pricing down and make cars more accessible and affordable to more people.
Art can be done in a similar way but there's some nuance to it where you want to make sure if you offer lower ticket items that they don't cannibalize your core profitable offer and that you can actually have enough volume to profitably sell items at those lower rates.
Better to just focus on one profitable offer and skip the low ticket items until you have quite a massive audience to reach. The low ticket items then become more like "merch" you see youtubers sell to monetize their audience and then a percentage of those folks ascend to investing in commission or originals.
But when starting out just the one core profitable art offer sold through personal branding and relationship building, I've seen be the most sustainable way to go.
I'm not an arts & crafts guy, but in my businesses, I've noticed a few relevant things.
Pricing is particularly hard for people to do, especially people who aren't really into business. So here's my big learning about that: people judge by the pricetag. If you're charging a lot, they'll view your product as being more desirable (and if you charge very little, they'll view your product as being cheap and less desirable).
I had a business partner who demonstrated this many times before it sunk in -- any time he was asking for money (from customers, investors, whoever), he would take what he considered a realistic price and ask for four times more than that. He explained that it made it more likely to close the deal, because your asking price is telling people how much they should value you and your product. He never once had someone say "that's too much" and walk away, but sometimes he would negotiate a "discount".
Another thing I learned is that there is a market for literally anything. You can nail two sticks together and find people willing to buy it. That's what "marketing" really is (or should be) about: finding those people. If you're very niche, the internet is a godsend -- it's easier to find a few thousand fans from the pool of the entire Earth's population -- and a few thousand fans means that you're going to be profitable.
I know a few people who make their living selling arts & crafts. They all sell online, of course, but all of them report that they get the most sales in person. Fairs and festivals, saturday markets, that sort of thing. It's not as easy as just running an Etsy store, but it is more lucrative.
And for all of them, the bulk of their sales go to people who have purchased from them before, or who were referred by people who have purchased from them before.
And yes, all of them charge prices much higher than what you would have thought if you weren't familiar with the industry.
If you want to have a more enjoyable time with business, if you can do this, it is probably the best way to go, although it's definitely not easy and you are probably not bothering with Etsy.
There is a maximum anyone will pay for a certain type of good, no matter how great it is, and that is the sad truth you learn when turning hobbies into businesses on Etsy. You can be an expert in something, make something absolutely amazing, 10x better than the next, but people still won't pay more than $40 for it because it's just an XYZ.
If you can make the type of Art that someone is willing to actually pay whatever you charge for it, you have a chance to go up market because you've overcome the first obstacle of picking the right product. 95% of people on Etsy will not or cannot achieve this based on what they sell (or know how to do, or enjoy doing), but many can still be successful.
There are a hell of a lot fewer people who will buy something expensive than something cheap, and having run 5 different Etsy shops selling different handmade items from $3 up to $475 I can tell you it's so nice to get those big sales, but they don't come nearly as often as you'd hope. I make over 6 figures selling an average order value of $20. I still have to make and ship a LOT of stuff and I've optimized on the businesses that are the easiest to make and ship with the highest margin over the big sales that take lots of work.
We'll do craft shows and sell $20 items like hotcakes all day, while the depressed folks in the booth across from us selling expensive art make maybe 1 sale a day, and usually not for an expensive piece. Our $475 item that takes a week to make will turn heads and bring people in all day and we might sell one of them, and 5 other folks will just say they can't justify the cost, despite how unique and big and amazing they think it is. On the other hand, we'll sell wedding invitations that take 10 minutes to print for $500 and people won't even blink when we name the price, and then they'll re-order again because they changed the date. It's shocking.
There are tons of digital download shops that makes 10k-100k sales a year on Etsy at $3-$15/sale and they only need to do the work of producing an item once. Those are amazing businesses and 100x times easier to run than trying to convince someone to buy a $x,000 item via social media and paid channels.
There are ways to make money, it requires work and cleverness and staying on top of things. You can go upscale and play the sales/marketing game. You are better off just starting from the point of already being a marketer/sales person and find something to sell, because trying to do that from just being an artist is not going to be easy. You can sell stuff people want that aren't that hard to make, but certain markets get flooded or less popular and you need to find a good niche and keep on evolving, but it's doable and can be fun. People underestimate how good the long tail is on Etsy and how much they can market for you with the right product. Even with crappy SEO people can just find and buy your stuff, which is mind blowing, but it doesn't work well when what you sell is just "crochet hat" or "pikachu shirt" or "watercolour lilies".
Not sure if this is an appropriate ask, but I'd be interested to see some of the download shops you're referring to - I'm putting my art up on print-on-demand sites and I'm interested in continuing the endeavour, but it's a slow process - I'd love to get some inspiration on the business side of that sort of thing.
Just start with the word "downloadable" in the Etsy search bar, you'll get quite the wide variety of random crap. Page through it and you can start rabbit-holing down different keyword combinations. It's vast. Most people don't even know you can get digital downloads on Etsy and we are still surprised all the time at the new things people sell (and that people are actually buying them and finding them! how???). We sell some SVGs and PDFs on one of our shops, but we haven't actually put any effort into it last year. Based on the handful of listings we already had up we made $3k USD in 2022 with like 20 minutes of work for the year.
And I'm really glad to hear you are doing so well with your approach!
> If you can make the type of Art that someone is willing to actually pay whatever you charge for it, you have a chance to go up market because you've overcome the first obstacle of picking the right product. 95% of people on Etsy will not or cannot achieve this based on what they sell (or know how to do, or enjoy doing), but many can still be successful.
Such a good point. Most artists I see work from their own beliefs outwards rather than seeing what the market will bear at different price points and targeting a higher rate. They think things like, "I wouldn't spend more than $X00 on a work of art" and so end up charging the same or less.
> I make over 6 figures selling an average order value of $20.
Just curious, is that 6 figures of profit or revenue? The nice thing about the $3k to $5k sales is how high margin they each can be.
> We'll do craft shows and sell $20 items like hotcakes all day, while the depressed folks in the booth across from us selling expensive art make maybe 1 sale a day, and usually not for an expensive piece. Our $475 item that takes a week to make will turn heads and bring people in all day and we might sell one of them, and 5 other folks will just say they can't justify the cost, despite how unique and big and amazing they think it is. On the other hand, we'll sell wedding invitations that take 10 minutes to print for $500 and people won't even blink when we name the price, and then they'll re-order again because they changed the date. It's shocking.
Yeah it's interesting at these kinds of events I see little mistakes or points of friction that artists selling high ticket work introduce that reduce their sales. Things like, sitting on a chair way back in their booth reading a book or their phone, not having an assistant standing out in the flow of foot traffic saying hi and drawing people in, displaying pricing, having too large a range of pricing, not asking questions about the person and their desires and instead "talking at them" about the art versus "talking with them", etc. Again it takes learning a communication / relationship building style that works great if you don't accidentally get in your own way.
> There are tons of digital download shops that makes 10k-100k sales a year on Etsy at $3-$15/sale and they only need to do the work of producing an item once. Those are amazing businesses and 100x times easier to run than trying to convince someone to buy a $x,000 item via social media and paid channels.
I could see once you identify your niche, write your copy, optimize the SEO, and set up all the other tech required, and you have a product that really resonates with your niche, this could be easier to manage once up and running than the social media / high ticket approach—at least for some people. That said, it sounds like it could be hard and unpredictable for non tech savvy art folks to initially set up.
There are definitely multiple paths that work for sure and there's no one magic ninja hack or silver bullet that doesn't require personal development, learning new skills, mindset shifts, etc.
Again, really glad to hear about all your success and I hope your businesses continue to serve your life and goals well in the future!
Etsy is one of the only places where one can buy quality handmade works. It certainly is the most concentrated market for those items, but you have to know how to dig deeper past the mass-produced crap. It helps to know a little about art or the medium first. That provides a launch point from which your queries can become more focused as one learns.
I've discovered entirely new categories (to me) of arts and crafts in that way, from 19th century American coverlets to Welsh stick chairs, eventually learning about the nascent Arts and Crafts movement's evolution in the 19th century in response to the soulless factory-produced goods of that age.[0]
As a result, today I probably have some of the largest context-specific art collections in Texas, if not the United States, which includes Japanese Takatori ware, Ukrainian art, handmade Windsor chairs, and Anagama (dragon kiln) wood-fired pottery. All discovered through Etsy.
In some respects, I am under the impression that most people simply don't know what they're looking for, i.e., they don't know how things are made and therefore don't know how to search for it. The genuine real McCoy is there, behind the first page of mass-produced imposters, you just have to dig for it.
That's awesome to hear that you have developed the expert knowledge needed to search out such unique finds and successfully acquired them!
Except that the entire core selling point of Etsy was that we would be able to search, and artists/artisans would be able to surface their works, WITHOUT the searchers having to sort through all the crap. Merely coming to Etsy was supposed to bypass the crap and get to the good stuff.
Clearly the VCs and Etsy management are happy with lying for profit.
100% will forever have a chilling effect on me after watching BJ Novak's opening scene in Vengence. that scene was oh so accurate that it was painful to sit through
I'm sure you know this, but for others curious about stick chairs, Chris Schwarz has brought about a dramatic increase in people's awareness of them and how to construct them. Lost Art Press has several books and videos about their history and construction.
I write about some of it on my Facebook page. Just search my name and "Lampasas, TX". I don't do this too much; there's just too many pieces and after the 15th piece of Takatori ware people start to lose interest. When I do write, I try to keep it fresh and interesting in some way.
I like to dream about changing to a four day workweek, and dedicating one day to woodworking. Originally, I wanted to sell on Etsy, but the flood of drop shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off. It seems like it has gotten a lot worse in the last decade.
I know that this one day a week would decrease my overall earnings, but it would probably still be worth it. However, with the abundance of cheap, mass-produced items on Etsy I would have to price my items so cheap that I would fall below minimum wage on that day.
I don't want to complain, I get to do enough woodworking as is, since my employer gives me 12 additional vacation days in exchange for 5.2% of my salary, taking me up to 47 per year.
But it would still be nice if there was a platform in Europe that does what Etsy used to do.
1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day.
2. Etsy is flooded, true, but it doesn't mean people still don't find you and buy your stuff if it's good and unique (and you put effort into learning how to do Etsy SEO). If you make something that no one else has, you can charge a proper amount for it, people will buy it and leave you great reviews.
We make nearly 6 figures on Etsy as a side-business across 3 different Etsy stores for crafts/handmade/digital goods we produce. I can tell you that we used to make a lot of money with our laser-cut wood shop when it started, it was a wonderful learning experience and trip, but after 2 years or so everyone and their dog had a laser cutter, ripped off our designs, and sold them for less than half of what we did (and they weren't making any money at those rates). We had a Chinese scam ring rip off our most expensive item featuring pictures of my wife's face in them and use them as facebook ads to try and sell our $500 item for $79.99 on pop-up stores. Nothing you can do about that, but it shows that we reached a success point to be targeted like that. There are so many niches and things you can make and sell on there it still blows our mind. People sell literal PDFs of a piece of paper with an image of a piggy bank repeated like 500 times that people buy, print out, and cross out 1 by 1 as they add $10 to their vacation fund knowing that at the end they'll have finally saved the $5k they need. These stores will have like 30k+ $3.99 sales for 20 minutes of work.
It sucks that you can't report shit stores, they are frustrating, but even though they are there, the long tail is real, you can find anything from any niche, the trick is finding out what people will type in that search bar that you actually make or can make, because that will filter out most of the crap.
> 1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day.
I think the huge increase in QOL is, in part, because on most weekends, 2 days is just barely enough to catch up on the shit you need to do but were deferring through the week, get things in order for the next week, take a quick breath, and then dive straight into the next work-week. It's barely even time off. It also means you can't travel anywhere (to visit family, just a short vacation, whatever) and have a whole day away that's not also a travel day, unless you leave late on Friday and aren't going far.
A three-day weekend mean you can usually get at least one actual day off most weeks, versus an average of nearly zero entire or almost-entire days off with a two-day weekend. It also opens up a ton more options for short get-aways, and leaves more room for recovery and relaxation after any activities you engage in, making the whole thing far more relaxing and cutting out some of the urgency.
Yeah, that's a big part of it! It also reduces the amount of work/BS you have to deal with each week as well, so you don't get as exhausted both mentally and physically. Going from 5/2 to 4/3 really changes the balance in work/rest to almost even in comparison. My wife noticed she never really felt like she had to take vacation days or was dying for time off the way she was before, you can actually get enough time to recharge that it's not like you are crawling to that distant finish line.
This isn't really a problem with Etsy dropshippers, handmade goods simply cannot compete with mass-produced goods as you can't scale your time. Without scale you need magnitude, people must be willing to pay you for a piece of work much more than it cost you to make it, and you must do so consistently.
My suggestion is to put a few example woodworks you've done on your spare time for sale with no expectation of making any money from them, and then offer to make custom handmade designs for people.
You can charge a lot more for those and you are basically guaranteed a sale for the time you spend on each one. The rest comes down to marketing, I have a print-on-demand shop with my own designs with 0 sales. I mostly use it as a way to leave a mark somewhere of things I've made that didn't involve coding. Burnout does that to you. Losing 20 cents for each design I make, but hey, I enjoy it.
This is the reason I haven't started putting my original artwork on Etsy. I make a small amount annually with JIT art prints from Society6 and RedBubble (I used to do DeviantArt as well, but since their AI debacle, I've got a moratorium on that option). Originals cost much more than prints (my stuff is priced between 100-10,000 USD depending on size and complexity) and mostly come via work of mouth commission. I want to market, but the time commit seems onerous, and I like it not being "work" (that's what the day job is for)
Yes, this is a common thing to think of e-commerce sites like Etsy as a sort of social network page where you post stuff but maybe have no intention on making any sales, it’s just another way to display your hobby.
You could sell your creations on Etsy. It would help to label them such that people can find your wares if one were searching for something made by hand, for instance. You can also create an external marketing site/portal that directs people to your Etsy shop.
My mother was a successful fused glass artist. Her works sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars, but in the end, she made close to minimum wage per hour, as you described. Art, or anything made by hand, doesn't scale well.
The external marketing site is probably the key, as well as making the items small enough that the profit margins don't get eaten by shipping and the cost of high quality wood.
I've started an Instagram account where I post some of my work, but I've found out that I'm really bad at social media for marketing purposes. I'm currently debating whether it's worth it to become better at marketing or SEO in order to promote my stuff, but even though it is a no-brainer from a business standpoint, it is the opposite of what I want to do.
I originally started this plan to have a workday where I don't look at the screen for 8 hours, and now I've gotten myself in a situation where I look at a screen in my free time to learn how to promote my business.
You're right, art just doesn't scale well. Maybe it's best if I continue to just do it for fun and gift it to friends and family. Not everything needs to be a business.
What's interesting about the online art world is that there are a number of platforms like Etsy that ostensibly take the sales and marketing off your plate, that said, all your points are true. They are often a race to the bottom where you feel a strong pressure to compete on pricing.
What I've seen work instead is to charge much higher rates of $1,000 or more. Think to yourself, hypothetically speaking, if I were to charge $1,000 or more for my art or my woodworking etc. what kind of items would justify that price point and then just focus on those.
Then when it comes to marketing and selling, pursue a relationship based selling approach rather than an ecommerce transactional approach.
Once you start getting social proof of happy customers you can often take the same work that was selling for $1,000 and sell it for $3,000 to $5,000 or even more.
That's the key to making a sustainable income with art or handcrafted work these days.
As someone with a similar side hustle: If you are going to drive your own traffic don't drive it to a platform thats going to take 20%+ of your gross product cost. Drive traffic to your own shopify or squarespace site that has really good ecomm built in. Get a shipstation account and you're pretty set. IMO.
My brother in law has a successful Etsy shop where he mostly sells "charcuterie boards" he makes in his home workshop as a side gig from his job as a VP of a civil engineering firm. There isn't much to them: no joinery, just a slab with a live edge. He just fills any voids or defects with epoxy, puts it through his surface sander, and applies a nice clear durable finish. Every piece is unique. He does seek out spalted and other interesting grain features to highlight. It helps that almost all of his wood is locally salvaged at almost zero expense other than his time. He loves to hunt down recently fallen trees to make a deal with the property owner to take the wood off their hands.
He gets a lot of repeat business from people like realtors who use his boards as housewarming gifts for their clients.
I work a four day workweek and have been for a full year now. I'm likely to never return to a 40hr workweek. I actually ended up interviewing at a few places a couple of months ago (Capital One, Farmers, few other smaller companies). I was pleasantly surprised by how many hiring managers and HR folks were willing to talk to me after I mentioned that I was only interested in 32hrs/wk @ 80% salary. My point of advice to anyone who is curious about a four day work week is just do it. Ask and I'm willing to bet you will receive.
Do you still get fulltime employment benefits? That seems to be the sticking point with many companies, as fulltime and parttime employees are treated, and cost, different, even if salary is prorated.
That's wild to me because it's my understanding that most HR departments consider anything over 30hrs a week to be full-time. I didn't encounter any of that last time around. My offer from Farmer's included a pension and full benefits. I'm a small sample size though...
FWIW I shop on Etsy quite a bit and I can definitely tell when something is actually handmade, and I shell out for it. I think you would still have a market despite the degradation in quality of Etsy generally.
It might be cool to include some photos and a build-log of each item being made. I think I’d like this as a shopper and it would let you distinguish your products from mass-produced stuff.
It wouldn’t have to be super-comprehensive, but I think it would be fun, especially if the reader could sorta track how the product evolves from the raw material: a knot being used as the focal point of a rustic table—-or hidden with an inlay for a fancy one, for example.
Bespoke pieces should still fetch a pretty price. It's not gonna be a good wage by any means, but it should be far above what you'd get by undercutting dropshippers.
I made my desk out of a thick walnut slab, and it turned out great. On the woodworking FB group, people said I could sell it easily on Etsy etc for over $2K. So I looked into it. My COG was about $1k, and Etsy would take 20% of the $2K selling price, leaving me with $600 before shipping costs. Now this desk is large, weighs a lot and shipping would easily be $300-500 in the CONUS. I guess that's on the customer though. Hmm...
While noodling around with this idea I did some market research on Etsy and saw that others were selling similar desks for about $2K, with FREE shipping. I reached out to one of the sellers asking if this was real or a bait and switch. Apparently if you don't ship for free, Etsy actively discriminates against your post. So my end profit would have been between $100-$300 for a week or so of work.
Sometimes no matter how you slice it, physical goods don't make much sense. I'd have to charge at least 50% more to make it even worthwhile, and I doubt the market for $3K desks is that large.
Usually it means you are buying the item from the person who made it or the store you are shopping in bought it directly from the person who made it. It's low volume production with very little or no automation involved.
Elsewhere in this thread, someone describes selling lasercut items on Etsy, which is obviously highly automated. Would you argue that shouldn't be considered handmade?
Depends on the specifics. If the service is "submit a file and I'll load it into my laser machine and mail you what comes out the other end", then probably not. That feels like getting photos printed at the CVS and nobody would say CVS sells handmade prints.
If there is a substantial amount of manual work to the piece after it comes out of the machine, then maybe. It would have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
This was a constant complaint about Etsy 10 years ago when I worked there. This was a complaint that predated my time working there, even. At one point we even had to ban people selling spells (yes, as in the seller would offer to do a magical incantation on your behalf).
The exact details might've changed, but the symptoms look the exact same. I remember we had to deal with a lot of people trying to skirt OFAC regulations, for example, by doing all sorts of things to hide the country of origin for something.
Optimistically I will say this is a very hard problem to solve. Pessimistically of course the company benefits from it, so I'm sure it's not a problem anyone besides maybe a few diehard advocates look too deeply into.
I mean sure, I think that's why it flew under the radar for so long. The dark underbelly of it was people buying love spells and the like, which starts to feel a lot like preying on peoples' desperation.
I find that genuinely fascinating from an ethical standpoint.
What if the people really believe spells work? Does it matter that they don't? Is it just the ephemeral nature of spells? What if I were to ship a complete spell in a bottle to the person?
(not to be too much of an edgelord) What about religious iconography or religious paraphernalia? I would argue that anything related to that is just a more accepted version of magic spells. Would prayer be banned?
For an e-commerce platform that allows returns: Yeah that's kind of an important sticking point and was a big part of the problem.
The other problem was that spells were effectively a service and you can imagine that we didn't want to get involved in determining the validity or accuracy of services being performed virtually that had zero tangible artifacts.
> What if I were to ship a complete spell in a bottle to the person?
This is probably what people actually do now to get around it, since there's an actual item being sold now.
Given that I am an occultist and a divinatory reader (tarot, etc), I see no issue with selling spellkits as goods to use. I also see no issue in selling spellcasting or divinatory services either. But I also acknowledge significant problems with companies allowing these to be sold and impossibility of validation or "returns".
Comparatively, selling spells can be quite easily compared with a Christian baptism, communion, the Catholic sacraments, prayer. The alms (baskets to collect money) is the cost for accessing these sorts of spells. Some Christian churches demand 10% of your earnings, which is way more than what some spells would cost.
Christians dont have normalized divinatory methods, so I'm unable to compare those. Their deity, YHVH, expressed a ban on that for most anybody - there exists a type of divination usable only by his high priest in Judaism while wearing the appropriate vestments, and only in yes/no questions.
From the occult community, what we see with "spell-selling" and the like is that it does attract frauds who are in it just for the money. Naturally, some here will consider any sort of esotericism to be a "fraud" - to those, nothing I say will be of any use. But the issue here is "How do you know if you're getting what's claimed?"
In order to know that you're buying a legitimate spell, the only way to know its true is if you can see and work with those energies initially... Thus meaning you would be able to do it regardless. Or you don't have those abilities developed and thus must trust who sold you the spells.
Of course, from a company's viewpoint, there's no way to validate spellcasting at all. Anybody could claim "fraud" and there's no defense against that. So it's easier to not allow these types of sales to happen. Effectively they're more problems then they're worth. (And doing a simple cursory search shows no christian prayer services being sold either... but that's easy to do with the abundance of churches in the USA.)
Edit: I'm really tired of having a discussion here, sharing my personal experiences, and having it drowned out with -1's. You may disagree with the occult. But it definitely is an area that Etsy had to deal with.
I guess the -1's are "I disagree with your lifestyle". Quite closed-minded, honestly.
Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with people disagreeing with your religious choices, and more that you posted one sentence in response, followed by a long off-topic screed that includes simplistic criticism of a stereotype of other people's religions?
Etsy generally doesn’t go into selling services IIRC, and a lot people selling this stuff on Etsy sell “I will do a spell/psychic healing/remote reiki/whatever”, which is a service.
Also, even in the case of having the parts of a spell shipped to you, how do you do a payment dispute when the spell doesn’t work?
And where would you even go to buy spells in real life
There's places in pretty much every major city, and even in some surprisingly rural places. Even in ritzy neighborhoods, there are private and public palm readers and tarot card shops catering to the upper crust who will sell anything they can get away with.
In places like New Orleans there's an entire tourism sector for it.
Etsy in its purest form was great. Its been diluted to almost trash with all the people gaming the system. Same with almost all other tech platforms. Humanity defaults to greedy (ie optimize for search results etc).
Worse yet is the big companies pretending to be little companies to cash in on indie buyers.
Humanity doesn't default to greedy, but the humans who are greedy are the ones motivated to flood these market places. For every 1000 small creators hand-chiseling marble effigies there's someone who is greedy and can sell the entire catalogue of some niche factory in Guangdong. The net effect is a flooded market, despite only 1 in 1000 people being greedy.
I always figured the endgame is to get the scalers into industries that scale well, and then build the non-scaling factors as peripherals.
For example, I could imagine a hyper-scale firm selling exceptionally generic standardized clothes, or furnishings, and that feeds an ecosystem of artisans who do alterations and customizations. The scale business avoids the risk of dead stock and having to discount unsellable goods, since its primary drive is price/quality ratio, and the customizers don't have to directly compete with a behemoth that has economies of scale.
I’ve seen more than a few influencers recently promoting “passive income” by way of arbitraging Alibaba garbage on Etsy/Amazon/EBay. I place more blame on those systems than the folks trying to make a buck, but it’s demoralizing as a buyer having to wade through all of it.
Yeah the same way with Kickstarter that was first overrun with scams and now mainly used for commercial products dumping a few early bird discounts for cheap marketing.
The platform doesn't care because they still make money. The only one that still seems to work is crowdsupply, I think because they are really in a niche market.
Here is headline for you: Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget was charged with securities fraud by the SEC and is permanently banned from the securities industry, yet he runs a publishing platform dedicated to trading and securities.
EDIT: And this story, when it was originally published by Business Insider, just happened to break 3 business days before ETSY's May 5, 2021 earnings call. What a coincidence!
Governing whose products are cooperative and defective within the market seems like a hard problem, and the same problem that forum moderators have, but mostly because the people doing it are adopting the wrong principles. If a defective participant can make an appeal to external/exogenous market principles, there's nothing the regulator can do. The artists markets (and forums) that do thrive are the ones ruled by direct curation to enforce sanctions on defective and noncooperative parties.
This is a general problem with any artisanal market, where artists who have made an investment in their craft attract crowds, and crowds attract opportunists who defect from the rule of cooperation that makes the artists market viable. The whole principle of competition is that it's only competition if you are playing by the same rules. Imo, artist markets resemble more of a co-operate/defect game theory model than a simple economic market competition model. In an artisanal market, the co-operation rules are unfortunately, tacit, and rubes will reward the honest players and defective/dishonest ones alike.
That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon.
Honest signals of quality and cooperation are necessarily discriminatory, and dishonest/defective parties (ones who do not cooperate) have the aggregate effect of increasing these signalling costs on quality goods to where the signalling out-prices its utility.
Regulation comes into play when dishonest parties increase the signalling costs so much that it destroys the market for the products, and parties have to decide whether the regulatory/moderation costs are lower than the signalling costs, or to abandon the market altogether, which in the case of Etsy, they often do. This is why Etsy is full of scammy junk. They have a curation and moderation problem they are not equipped to solve.
Ironically, what makes curation and moderation good is that it doesn't scale well at all, even negatively, but that's what makes it scarce and valuable - unlike anything available on Etsy. Maybe that's the lesson.
Excellent post! I particularly appreciate that you highlighted that the "fatal flaw" of curation's lack of scalability is also its strength.
>That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon.
I think this opportunity is applicable to content as well as products.
I’ve been selling on Etsy for a few years and the problem has only been getting worse. Etsy the company seems to turn a blind eye to it since they are making money off of the cheap Alibaba junk as well.
That being said etsy is still the best game in town. People searching there are very ready to buy and if you are able to stand out from the crowd it’s possible to be successful.
I started looking on Etsy specifically to get away from the cheap Alibaba junk other stores are flooded with. There are some really nice handmade products there.
Yeah, I've gotten burned by this. We bought some wooden toys for a friend's child that said they'd be shipped from Poland, assuming they were made in Poland at least.
It turned out the toys were made in China, and they even shipped them in the retail packaging (which was nowhere to be seen in the listing's pictures).
Everything else I've gotten there has been basically someone with a decal machine making custom decals or applying a customization to a (likely) mass produced product.
This happened to me last week, but with Wayfair instead. We ordered something from Wayfair by a seller called "Williston Forge", and the item that arrived was in packaging branded as "VASAGLE". I looked up the corresponding VASAGLE item and the exact same thing was available on Amazon for one-third of the price.
I ended up returning the Wayfair SKU and getting the Amazon one instead. Something about the branding just screams Alibaba drop-shipper to me, but the product itself was fine so I stuck with it.
Left a (politely worded) bad review on the Wayfair SKU page, and surprise surprise, it's not been approved for display.
Since then, I've also been wary of stuff on Wayfair.
Is a vendor obligated to charge a price similar to another vendor? Wayfair did the work to show you a product you couldn't find elsewhere first, and charged you a price you found fair.
I happen to know that Etsy is being used as a tax haven for selling “products” from an online “store”. Basically, you buy stuff, offer it for sale of Etsy, and claim all of the goods you purchased as businesses expenses for tax writeoff purposes. This of course is not limited to Etsy, but it’s an easy platform to use for this purpose. It’s similar to how movie studios will purposefully produce horrible movies in order to create a loss. Or any other tax loophole, really.
The loophole is that they don't actually expect anything to sell. So they are claim a tax write off when the goods depreciate, all the while actually enjoying them for personal use.
I doubt many Etsy sellers are running their business on an accrual basis to be eligible for depreciation expense. Beyond that Inventory is a non-depreciable asset. If they're not generating any revenue they can't claim COGS. Any of these scenarios are obvious red flags and would be audit candidates.
Now if you're suggesting people are submitting fraudulent returns thats another thing but there's no "loophole" here.
EDIT - just to add, I'm sure there is a ton of attempted illicit activity on Etsy, just like any other marketplace. See this [0] for example. I don't think there is any tax "loophole" here, however.
> you buy stuff, offer it for sale of Etsy, and claim all of the goods you purchased as businesses expenses for tax writeoff purposes.
That's not a loophole, that's just fraud that goes undetected because the taxman doesn't know or monitor Etsy. Amazon used to be the same, before someone knocked on their door. Businesses doing that are still guilty of tax fraud and will be convicted if/once authorities come around (since Etsy will be compelled to collaborate).
I may be wrong, but I believe Etsy have a hidden charge of 4% for currency conversion.
Normal banks charge about 3%, FinTechs 0.5%.
It listed absolutely nowhere when you buy; it occurs when you pay in a currency different to the native currency of the shop.
Etsy I recall decide which currency you will pay in, according to the country of your bank - which does not work for multi-currency FinTechs; in fact, you can end up paying Etsy their excessive conversion fee, and then a second conversion fee to the FinTech - that is, if you didn't know any better, and Etsy are completely silent about this.
Regarding pricing, looking at Etsy prices, and the prices on the web-sites of the sellers, I believe Etsy charge 20%. This is monopoly pricing.
I work on a fairly high-end solution to this problem: works for art authentication, real estate transactions, that sort of thing.
The only way this gets fixed is through liability: if they ship you a mass-produced thing, you get your money back. But if buyers are happy with the goods (and they seem to be, generally speaking) it's hard to say anybody's been defrauded -- making window shopping boring because most of the stuff is mass produced crap is not a crime, as it were.
No harm, no foul.
As for the "illicit" products, same applies: if the buyers don't care, it's hard to make the "system" care.
Is there any proscription against posting subscriber only content to HN? It's annoying to have to go through archive.org or something else, and for me my work actually blocks archive.org.
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
>Seems like scalable systems tend to fail with this problem.
Yes, and the solution is curation, but nobody wants to hear that because it likely means paying people to curate vs. coding an algorithm that makes a founder rich.
It's probably worth including (2021) in the title. The article described Etsy putting money to fight this problem in 2021, I wonder if it has improved? Some spot checking makes me think probably not.
Definitely not, they won't even include a way to report these folks. We run multiple Etsy shops and would report all day if we could because it's not hard to identify them at all.
Yes I'm curious to sign up but don't have an Etsy store either. Are you looking to build a more of a competitive intel product for existing Etsy store owners or something more for end users of Etsy like a weekly curation email newsletter?
It's essentially an end user service that benefits the creators by reducing the noise and finding actually compelling creators. When a creator signs up, I'm able to filter their store info and automatically scrape all the info I'd need.
From there it's just a manual vetting process (although quickly filtering out the stuff I don't want is kind of hidden in the sign up).
What I don't understand is why Etsy doesn't seem to be doing anything measurable about improving this. This reason is pretty much the sole one that prevents me from shopping at Etsy.
1. Seller listed an item they had already sold on another platform. I had to wait several days for a refund.
2. Item was sent, but not properly packaged and damaged. They re-sent the item but it was also damaged.
3. Ordered an antique from Europe that didn't ship for 4 months and now they're sending me letters from FedEx and asking me to return the item I never received...
I miss what Etsy used to be. It's definitely degraded as it expanded.
I volunteer for a youth symphony and we were just looking to replace one of our timpani. First link was to Etsy. It was clear this was not some handcrafted bespoke instrument; it was just a used drum. Basically just another Ebay.
I know in the 90's if something had the "Good housekeeping Seal of Approval" then it was usually a trustworthy purchase.
What we need is a regulatory board that, like other people say, curate products based on their quality, not on whatever kickbacks or affiliate link profits they get.
It sucks if, for instance, you go looking for a Towel Warmer for your girlfriend and you have to read through 17 different, "Top 10 tower warmers 2023" pages that all recommend the exact same items with the exact same stock photos from different sellers with alphabet soup names.
What I want is an opinionated site that reviews items, has a short write up, and then keeps an updated list of their top 3 which is split between "Best overall", "Best for your dollar", and "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product, i.e. the least expensive one they've found so far that meets their minimum quality expectations for the product).
Products are allowed to occupy more than a single category.
Give me that site, and then let them develop a unique recommendation logo with a QR code that goes to their page so you can read the review yourself.
I often go to WireCutter before I even look elsewhere, but it's a hassle. Amazon and Etsy should be at least partially responsible for policing what is being sold on their sites. They are not helpless victims.
>much like we look for the "organic" label in a store
Which means very little.
At some point, there is a distinction between lovingly handcrafted and mass-produced in a Chinese factory. But it's often not clear where that line is.
Looking forward to when Etsy becomes the new Silk Road. I can shop for hand-crafted gifts for friends and family, and a little black tar heroin for myself, all in one go.
But I know I'd actually buy a lot of stuff from Etsy if I was guaranteed to get quality handmade goods by a devoted craftsman rather than a strong chance of something made in some Chinese factory.
Yeah, you have to put in the work, read all the descriptions, look at the images, see their bio, look at their location, and the tricky, yet most obvious thing, is if they have a "production partner", which you are supposed to specify if you don't make the thing yourself. Even if people fill it in, Etsy makes it purposely hard to find that info and anyone not using Etsy as a seller wouldn't even know it's a thing to look for.
If something looks too good or too produced in images, and the cost seems too good, it probably is to good to be true. You can Google image search their main picture and find where else it's being sold. If they have a lot of sales (like thousands), look much more closely as most artisans don't get that high unless they are pretty good.
Clothing is nearly impossible to find anything that isn't just a drop shipper. Anything from a country that you think would be sketchy is 90% of the time, which sucks for the amazing people there, but it's such an easy signal to see. Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, almost always all scams, dropship or ripoff factories.
It's sad and frustrating just how much worse Etsy gets year after year. We've got 5 shops on there and see all the BS and how it hurts us. My wife can't even shop on the platform anymore because it's too hard to find actual handcrafted type stuff and we know what we are doing. If they'd let people report shops it would get cleaned up fast, but they'd lose so much money they'd rather kill themselves first, they are incredibly greed oriented.
