As some of you know, Etsy has been my mainstay for gaining new customers and for sales in general. For a long while, I felt Etsy had my back. These last few changes, however, I feel have hurt Sellers.
First they raised the percentage they take as fee. Ok, yeah, I knew that was coming. They claimed part of that would go for an increase in advertising. So Sellers raised their prices. Then they also started charging a fee percentage on the shipping cost, which not only made it hard to estimate shipping cost, but makes the shipping artificially high. Next they tried to make all Sellers ship for free. Needless to say, this is incredibly hard when we make our own items, often custom and there is not a huge sales margin.
The latest insult is now rather than allowing us to choose whether or not to pay for advertising, and for what time period (allowing us to budget for it), they will randomly advertise for us and then charge an additional 12% if they decide that the advertising resulted in a particular sale. That comes to about 17% of sale price going to Etsy. AND we won’t know when the extra fee is coming, so how do you adjust your price for that?
So needless to say, Etsy is growing stale. However, I liked the idea of Etsy and plan to continue that. By that I mean: personal customer service, the ability to customize, and making everything to order. This I will continue to do, even through my website. So if you have questions about a product, you can rely on me personally answering that question. If you need something customized in size, I will do my best to help you.
–Cathy
