There's an Etsy strike going on this week

April 11, 2022 5:37 PM

Etsy sellers have gone on on strike, and they're asking us not to cross the picket line. "What would happen if on April 11, so many sellers put their shops on vacation mode that Etsy starts shitting bricks?” https://etsystrike.org/

From the Jezebel link: "Etsy sellers are striking this week after the digital marketplace for artisanal-goods-turned-ecommerce-platform announced plans to raise its transaction fees to 6.5 percent, up from 5 percent. The strikers are asking consumers to not cross the digital picket line and buy anything from Etsy for one week.
Kristi Cassidy, a seamstress from Rhode Island, told CBC News that more than 17,000 makers are a part of the week’s boycott."

Previously: Etsy Raised Fees For People Who Sell Goods On Its Platform, And Now Sellers Are Planning A Strike.
11 Etsy sellers explain why they're going on strike.
Rolling Stone, limits clicks: 'We're Being Bled Dry': Furries Aren't Going to Roll Over for Etsy and Their Reportedly Unfair Practices

posted by jenfullmoon (53 comments total)

Well good for those sellers.

Not an Etsy seller, but a place I have sold on for many years, (BoardGameGeek) has just introduced their “new” marketplace. It has raised fees from 3% to 8%, requires sellers to use Stripe for all payment processing, requires sellers to use their shipping choices, with postage being determined at time of purchase, (which means no combined shipping for multiple purchases, and also no local no-shipping sales), and accepting returns unconditionally…

Fuck that shit. Bye-bye BGG marketplace.
(Buy my games now before the old marketplace gets sunseted)

Good luck to the Etsy sellers. Power to the people!
posted by Windopaene at 5:47 PM on April 11, 2022 [27 favorites]

I buy enough vintage stuff (mostly vintage brooches but sometimes other jewelry and home goods) and Etsy can be great for that! But it can also be a gigantic mess. It's hard to know what's actually "vintage" (people lie!) and there are pages and pages and pages to sort through (generally I'm looking for something pretty specific).

I've sadly given up on looking for handmade/artisinal things on Etsy unless I am following a link someone else has sent me personally or it's from an artist I follow. There is just too much mass-produced stuff to sort through.

When I was trying to sell some of my Polaroids last year, I initially looked into Etsy but decided to do Big Cartel because there was really no market for them anyway and it didn't feel like anyone would find me on Etsy organically. Even at $10 a month, Big Cartel was going to be cheaper than whatever Etsy was going to charge me and I felt like I was more in control. (I sold a few -- mostly to people I knew but it was a fun experiment).

For vintage stuff, there's still eBay (although that's not without its problems). I wish people who make stuff had a better platform -- I get selling your stuff in your own storefront isn't always practical but at the same time, it's not like Etsy really makes stuff discoverable either.

So yeah, Etsy was a great idea but it fell victim to greed, like all these things do.

I hope this boycott does something. It's too much to hope for that if a new platform springs up that it wouldn't eventually turn into this, though.
posted by edencosmic at 5:53 PM on April 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

I loved the idea of Etsy back in the day and thought they had a pretty good model but I noped right out once they opened up the "opportunity" to buy ads to promote your stuff in their own search engine. I'll only pay to play on a neutral marketplace.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:56 PM on April 11, 2022 [14 favorites]

Other links I just found:

"In addition to the transaction fee hike, Etsy shop owners are also striking against the company’s use of offsite ads. In some cases, Etsy will pay for ads for a shop without the seller’s approval — and if those ads lead to a sale, Etsy will then take a larger chunk of the profit."

Etsy Sellers Are Part of the Gig Economy.

"In a regular job, your boss is a person. Who is hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than you. For those of us in the gig economy, our boss is a digital platform. Our boss is an overreaching all-powerful AI, and we are mere numbers in an automated system. If we are mistreated, we have no one we can complain to. Nowhere we can go.
There is one difference between myself and my neighbor. I get to cosplay an entrepreneur on social media. She doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy pretending to be an entrepreneur on social media. But I know I’m a fake. Etsy knows I’m a fake."

posted by jenfullmoon at 6:04 PM on April 11, 2022 [30 favorites]

Oh nooooooo, I still purchase, if erratically, a fair amount of visual art (posters and postcards mostly), craft supplies (destash items and small batch materials), jewelry and skin care products on Etsy. Happy to support the sellers strike. Thank you for posting!
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:12 PM on April 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

Bigcartel is FREE if you have five or fewer products to sell, but you do have to use Stripe or PayPal as the payment processor, and I think their fees are higher on Bigcartel compared to other places. It's 30 cents and 2.9% per transaction with Stripe, 50 cents and 3.5% per transaction with PayPal.

(Ask me how I know, lol.)
posted by subdee at 6:43 PM on April 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Stripe wants your SSN. Don’t think PayPal does, or didn’t when I joined 20 years or so ago…
posted by Windopaene at 6:48 PM on April 11, 2022

I bought a cheap shitty faux silk scarf on Wish awhile back and I routinely see the exact same cheap, shitty faux silk scarf in Etsy's Facebook ads. It was what I expected when I paid $7 for it on Wish, but it is complete fraud when it is selling on Etsy - by dozens of different sellers! - and purporting to be a genuine handmade, real silk item. I reported it to them but nothing happened. At this point, I don't trust Etsy anyway, so respecting this strike is not problem for me at all.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:11 PM on April 11, 2022 [17 favorites]

I still do a fair bit of shopping on Etsy, which is one of my go-to places to find interesting products made by craftspeople: a neatly sewn dice bag with six inset pockets, gorgeous bags with printed canvas fabric, hand braided fleece tug toys, fancy dog collars, and so forth. It's also the platform of choice for one of my favorite fountain pen companies. Lately, I've been gearing up to move house, so I've been using the site to identify good candidates for attractive yet functional cat shelves to let the cats use the new space more effectively. It's also been an interesting place to look at new fidget toys, like the 3D printed plastic articulated slugs I picked up a month ago, and some expensive but deeply tempting pieces like the giant plush sack big enough for a grown up to crawl inside with a book.

Ah, well. All of that shit can wait until after the workers win their strike. This is not the first time Etsy has been an utter shitbag to sellers, and if those shops move to another hosting platform to sell their gear, it's them I'll follow. Etsy does a shit job promoting them or helping weed out mass produced but mislabeled gear, but it sure does take a big cut. In particular, the fuck awful thing they do with nonconsensual but expensive automated ad promotion--in which case you can't opt out--is risk garbage.
posted by sciatrix at 7:13 PM on April 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

Good for etsy sellers!
Kick 'em in the pecans.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:13 PM on April 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

I buy on etsy often enough and was planning on buying a digital product this week....actually quite urgently. I will contact the seller and see if I can buy by some other means. But can someone explain the bit about off-site ads? So if I click an etsy ad on another site and end up buying something (I don't think I ever have, but I can imagine doing so), does the seller pay a higher fee than if I had just gone to etsy and found the thing myself?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:28 PM on April 11, 2022

It was what I expected when I paid $7 for it on Wish, but it is complete fraud when it is selling on Etsy - by dozens of different sellers! - and purporting to be a genuine handmade, real silk item. I reported it to them but nothing happened. At this point, I don't trust Etsy anyway, so respecting this strike is not problem for me at all.

yeah, there are plenty of things on etsy that look like either drop-shipping and/or big companies setting up shop on Etsy. But I feel like I can still tell what's handmade craft and what's resold from aliexpress.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:31 PM on April 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

So if I click an etsy ad on another site and end up buying something (I don't think I ever have, but I can imagine doing so), does the seller pay a higher fee than if I had just gone to etsy and found the thing myself?

Yes. That's what that says, at least. It's like the restaurant delivery frontrunning scam, except Etsy vendors are in a worse position as there's probably some language buried somewhere in their store terms that permits it.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:32 PM on April 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Perhaps a better course of action is to establish a separate site collective where the seller is the owner. Just saying.... Perhaps call it 'Notsy'. Essentially it is the difference between owning and renting a property.
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 7:38 PM on April 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

I remember back when I followed Regretsy in the early 2010's that a lot of that blog's ire was directed towards all the obviously mass-produced stuff dominating Esty and the platforms utter failure to do anything to curb it (in fact I seem to remember that being the majority of what was posted about before the blog was shut down in 2013). It's sad to see that twelve years later, this is still a big complaint among many of the strikers interviewed.

It's also horrifying to see that sellers hit with a 12% marketing find that they are taking losses on sales. Both because they don't have a choice about the marketing, but also because market conditions aren't letting them have a 30%-50% margin like traditional retailer (partly do to competition with mass-produced stuff) which would allow them to absorb an occasional 12% hit.
posted by 3j0hn at 7:46 PM on April 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oh, PayPal definitely wants your SSN too. They won't ask for it when you sign up, but they'll freeze your funds if it looks like you might make over $600, which is some kind of threshold for the IRS, apparently.
posted by subdee at 7:47 PM on April 11, 2022

It's hard to know what's actually "vintage" (people lie!) and there are pages and pages and pages to sort through (generally I'm looking for something pretty specific).

Agreed. I have bought from Etsy for years- mostly vintage, some handmade, some craft supplies. In nearly all cases I am looking for very specific things, or using very specific parameters. Unfortunately Etsy's search has gone from bad to worse to execrable. A couple years ago I said to someone who worked at Etsy (and has since quit) that it didn't seem like Etsy searched the titles of items, and he agreed they did not. Why? WHY would you build a search engine like that? I can only assume it facilitates views of completely unrelated things in some way.

It's really a shame because I want to buy unique items, I want to buy vintage, and I want to support small businesses. I buy a lot more from eBay than I used to, and I try to suss out if the sellers I visit on Etsy also sell on other platforms. I don't understand having such a unique platform and driving it into the ground, but the writing was on the wall when I was asked to fill out a survey by Etsy. All they really wanted to know was did I want free shipping and if so would I buy more stuff there. Stupid.
posted by oneirodynia at 7:51 PM on April 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

I can only assume it facilitates views of completely unrelated things in some way.

If we show you things, you might buy them. If we don't, you definitely won't.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:56 PM on April 11, 2022

I do think the SSN stuff is IRS related. But, prett sure I have never given eBay my SSN. Haven’t sold anything there in a while, but if I do, won’t be giving them that info. Craigslist and, ugh, Facebook marketplace don’t as far as I know.
posted by Windopaene at 7:57 PM on April 11, 2022

eBay will start requiring SSNs in 2022. KYC is getting more stringent everywhere and the IRS is doing more enforcement (regressively, bc ofc).
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:59 PM on April 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

The promise of e-commerce was cutting out middlemen to create a better deal for customers, but it seems like creating that better deal was actually at the cost of leaving just a few middlemen (Amazon, the card processors, Etsy, etc) and destroying the value that middlemen created.
posted by jimw at 8:03 PM on April 11, 2022 [12 favorites]

so, in this modern era of ours, what's the proper way of asking someone if they shipped your etsy order before the strike, while still letting them know you support their strike and hope they win?
posted by mittens at 8:29 PM on April 11, 2022

“ Etsy purchases offsite advertising from a network of participating partners, such as social networks and search engines. If such advertising includes your listing, a buyer clicks on it, and then places any orders from your shop within 30 days of that click, you will be charged an advertising fee on these orders ” - from Etsy’s own fee page.

Even more execrable is that they charge 12% only if you have made over $10,000 in the last 365 days. If you made LESS than $10,000 they’ll charge you 15%. So, the smaller you are the more of a cut they’re going to take. Etsy is stacking the deck in favor of mass produced goods.

Oh and they also charge a per listing fee. So if you have an endless supply of item X it’s cheaper than having ten handmade or unique items.

This is why you see so many artists selling through Instagram sales. Etsy is a rank scam.
posted by Bottlecap at 8:31 PM on April 11, 2022 [12 favorites]

what's the proper way of asking

the way you just did, but backwards.

hey! I support your strike and hope you win! when you have time, please let me know if my order went out first, or if I should expect a wait.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:31 PM on April 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

I have sold on ETSY for over a decade and have watched views steadly decline over the last 15 years, sometimes abruptly and never recover. The thing about not buying ads was probably part of it.
A thing I found odd on the forums where a decent majority were siding against their own interests and defending etsy with things like "if you don't like it you can go elsewhere". Some folks got bent when i postulated that some accounts may be etsy backed bot accounts (how could you possibly tell?) I paused my shop today.
The BS resellers ahve really damaged the DIY aspect.
posted by boilermonster at 9:15 PM on April 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Seller co-ops seem like the only real answer.
posted by jamjam at 9:42 PM on April 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wouldn't expect the strike to have any direct economic impact on Etsy, but it will cause them some bad press, and they deserve it. The flagrant failure of Etsy to enforce its own rules on handmade goods makes the site borderline unusable. At the end of the day, the economics of Etsy seem directly opposed to the mission -- how do you support small sellers when 80% of your revenue is going to come from the biggest 20% of your sellers?
posted by phoenixy at 11:18 PM on April 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was sure I'd read that Etsy had abandoned the rules on handmade goods. It certainly looks like it when you browse it. I know some UK makers who are now selling on Folksy instead but Etsy has that name recognition... it's hard.
Really does feel like Etsy are deliberately trying to not have any small sellers anymore though.
posted by mathw at 1:48 AM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah I used to love Etsy about a decade ago and shopped there a lot but now I find the site nearly unusable unless you know exactly what you're looking for or come to the site from somewhere else - it's just filled with too much mass-produced stuff, burying the handmade sellers. Basically as soon as they did away with Treasuries (still mad about that) they removed so much useful functionality.

Their front page for buyers is also terrible now, with the recommendations. I bought cloth masks from a seller at one point and in my recommendations Etsy pushed freaking MESH masks to me. And back when the trucker occupation was going on in Ottawa (where I live!) it was pushing a bunch of trucker convoy garbage to me in its "hot listings". Not sure that I will be using Etsy much in the future any way about it because of that. Another site letting its algorithm do the work instead of quality community.
posted by urbanlenny at 2:14 AM on April 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Was bummed to learn of this because I'd only recently discovered that I could buy the best pants in the world very cheaply via Etsy and have them arrive here from Thailand unexpectedly quickly.

But as it turns out, the makers have their own online shop! And judging from the fact that the domain is registered at GoDaddy, a primarily retail outfit that I can't imagine a corporate like Etsy would ever have reason to use, I'm assuming that it isn't merely some kind of branded Etsy front. So buh-bye, Etsy! The strikers have done me a solid by nudging me to find that out.
posted by flabdablet at 2:37 AM on April 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

Those pants are legit, flabdablet.

Yeah, count me as someone who used to love Etsy and got some cool handmade indie stuff on there, but holy cow, it's too much work to weed out the resellers and the real deal these days. Go strikers go!
posted by Kitteh at 4:42 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

The importance of freeing your pants life is underrated. If you can't go full boho/harem/hippie pants, the magic words may be "beach pants" (they're a bit more constructed). Wear a long enough shirt to cover the drawstring and they can pass as chinos.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:23 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hah, I already have the mandala pants from an IRL store here.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:51 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

What's worse about the offsite ads nonsense is that a. they take the fee from anything someone buys from your store, not just what they advertised, and b. if someone leaves and comes back within 30 days, they still apply it. Absolute greed.

I was using Etsy to sell some clay earrings and art bits I made, but I was driving about 70% of my views from my social media. It stinks because the one-off fees for listings are actually not bad for teeny businesses like mine where I was listing individual items. Most of the other options are a monthly fee and I definitely wouldn't have made that back most months.

I've seen people talking about SmHauler which requires small sellers to have their own website, but then offers the benefit of listing a bunch of shops in one place.
posted by brilliantine at 5:58 AM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

It pleases me to see so many people supporting the strike! I have had a modest Etsy shop catering to a niche hobby for over a decade, and I put my shop on vacation mode yesterday. It's been pretty frustrating to use for a while, because of the re-sellers, blatant factory items, and full-on scam shops that are always on the platform, no matter how much you report them.

What really sticks in my craw, though, is that about two years ago I started getting these incessant, chirpy, pushy emails from Etsy about how I can grow my business, with a strong implication that the only thing standing in my way was me, while in reality, the thing standing in my way is mostly Etsy. My business was doing just fine when they still had Treasuries [if anyone doesn't know, a Treasury was a user-curated page of items that were thematically linked or looked nice together; they were creative and cool, and democratic free advertising] and I didn't have to compete with crap made in a sweatshop.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 6:14 AM on April 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

if it looks like you might make over $600, which is some kind of threshold for the IRS, apparently.

For years, $600 was the threshold at which a business had to report that they had paid a person for work, and issue a 1099 form, which in turn meant that the person had to declare it as income. This rule still holds, and a little-noticed provision of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 basically expanded the law so that earning over $600 from a variety of sources will now also get reported to the IRS, with the responsibility for reporting and issuing a 1099 falling on the "third-party" organizations that serve as middlemen & payment processors, like Etsy and Uber and eBay and PayPal.

Here's a Motley Fool article on the change.

So they all want your SSN because sellers on Etsy or wherever are considered to be running a business by the IRS, and if you don't want or need to go through the hassle of getting a Federal tax ID number for your business (a.k.a. an Employer identification Number or EIN) then your SSN serves as your "business" ID number, just as it serves as your ID number for paying personal income tax.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:37 AM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

If you need to buy something this week (and perhaps in the future as well), find out if the seller has their own website.
posted by Scout405 at 6:58 AM on April 12, 2022

Perhaps call it 'Notsy'.

Ummm say that out loud to yourself and maybe pick a different name. Heh. It’s a good idea though.
posted by freecellwizard at 8:48 AM on April 12, 2022 [15 favorites]

Basically all of my art selling the last couple years has been through an Etsy shop and it's been a weird experience of trying to basically use the site itself as minimally as possible compared to how they try to sell it to you as a new vendor. I went with it because it was established and known and (a) made it pretty easy to add/manage inventory and (b) incorporated shipping and postage stuff pretty much effortlessly. I just wanted to get a store set up and list art prints, and be able to point people to that store page from elsewhere, and not have to manage the whole payment process myself or do a bunch of custom bootstrapping on my own CMS.

But the sales pitch Etsy makes is a death by a thousand cuts that exploits people's hopes of their store blowing up: don't you want more eyeballs? Don't you want to show up in search? Don't you want to be on the front page? Don't you want to show up in ads on other websites? Think how much these things will help your selling-handmade-crafts-etc business be the viable new income we dare you to imagine it will be! And all it'll take is another percentage cut, another fee or vig from every sale. And sure they stack but think of the success!

In practice of course the market is crowded and getting more so every time a mercenary reseller joins the chase for thin margins, and most folks doing small craft sales stuff are already both setting their margins too small and operating in a way that wouldn't let them scale up in volume even if lightning did (with the help, or not, of several tens of percentage points of Etsy's add-on service vigs) strike and blow up their business to even ten times their normal production volume.

It was a souring experience when I first set up my shop to realize how many things I needed to not check (or maybe even uncheck from default? I can't recall) just to not volunteer up like an additional 30% cut of my sales on top of Etsy's standard (and now rising) basic sales fee. The exploitative pattern to the whole thing is gross, even if you are in the know enough and confident enough to just opt out of it all entirely.

I still have my store there and I've been pretty inert on actively pushing sales the last while; I might go in and vacation mode it if I remember to today but just not throwing traffic at them this week is an easy thing to do (despite, ironically, wanting to get some of my shit back in gear specifically on art sales as a current general goal). But what I'd really love is to find a good just-does-the-basics solution that's off Etsy but does the same inventory management and shipping management stuff well enough without wanting to pull me and everyone else into rent-seeking adtech bullshit in the process. This seems like a good time to look harder at that idea.
posted by cortex at 8:50 AM on April 12, 2022 [9 favorites]

Shopify is one option.

More indie or 'maker' centric options I've seen people use are ArtFire, BigCartel, and StoreEnvy. I'm not sure what any of them are like as a seller.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:56 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

And dammit now I'm thinking about it so I'm on my Etsy dashboard after all, looking at how to go into vacation mode and also noticing that I have, in fact, made one sale via Offline Ads. (And had my store viewed 55 times via them. Weird to glad about a low conversion rate, but here we are.)

Which got me curious about whether it's even possible to opt-out; it turns out you have to get all the way to the bottom of a long Q&A about the offline ads process (and how great it is! how much it could help! what an exciting opportunity this is for you!) before you find out that you can, in fact, opt out if you are (and almost everybody is, for better or worse) a little guy with less than $10K in sales in the last year. So that's done; only had to say "yes i'm really sure" in the face of a hard-sell confirmation twice in order to do it. Didn't have to call a human to do it, so they've got a tiny leg up on NYT's unsubscribe process I suppose.

Anyway, that probably explains in part why $10K+/yr shops only pay 12% on the fee instead of 15%: as damage control for the fact that they don't even have the option.

Got my store into vacation mode, put a note up:

Hey, folks. A lot of Etsy sellers are putting their shops in to stasis for the week of April 11-18 to protest Etsy's continued moves toward predatory exploitation of sellers; I'm joining the club there. I appreciate your patronage and am going to be exploring other storefront options going forward.

It's more work for you, and more work for artists, but please consider contacting folks directly about their work. Etsy's role should be as service-provider, not as a rent-seeker.

posted by cortex at 9:11 AM on April 12, 2022 [9 favorites]

don't you want more eyeballs? Don't you want to show up in search?

People have been telling me for years I should have an Etsy store. I tried it out (nothing happened) when they first opened and haven't bothered since. However, I did buy a report years ago on how to sell on Etsy and they emphasized that new things have to be put up EVERY DAY or else you aren't found in the searches. I absolutely don't have the time for that. It sounds like it'd have to be a full time business JUST for new pics and products every day, and I have a job.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:16 AM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I list my art on Square's web shops, which handles unlimited products, reasonable categorization, five images and inventory management, as well as some reasonable shipping fee calculations. Their cut is just the credit card fee, so that's very nice. The "free" tier (e.g. you don't pay an extra monthly fee for the shop itself) doesn't combine mailing label generation or analytics or whatever. I'm happy with it except that their item management UX is donkey balls. Still, I have hundreds of items up with a custom domain and it's all fine (link in profile).

Another good site for artists/craftspeople who want more customization than Square offers is Big Cartel, which is only useful if you give them a monthly fee (which is not too high). However, they've been around for a decade and they're not funded by VC and the product is solid and handles the specific needs of people who make things by hand fairly easy. I'm favourably inclined towards businesses that say "this is our core competency and we're going to stick with it and earn a reasonable profit and that's it."
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:27 AM on April 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

I almost exclusively used Etsy to buy Christmas gifts during the pandemic, so I could buy from little shops without having to go to them. You can limit by location so I bought some things like cookies from a lady down the street, that was neat. I hope they win.
posted by joannemerriam at 10:47 AM on April 12, 2022

I make and sell premade book covers and digital backgrounds online (in addition to working directly with clients), and moved to Etsy because the two major premade selling sites take 30% and 40% of the price of the cover when it sells, and the people buying from those sites don't want to pay more than $50-100 per cover. So once you factor in the costs of digital and photographic assets, which aren't cheap if you want good, the cut to the company, sales tax because my state taxes digital assets as if they're physical and the companies don't take it for you, the cost of the Paypal processing, and my time and labor, I'm making practically nothing.

I could sell on my own site, but I don't have the search engine ranking that Etsy does. Lots of premade designers sell via Facebook and Instagram, but that requires constant promotion and being on fucking Facebook to keep your work visible.

So far, Etsy's the least annoying of all my options. The 5% (now 6.5%) cut, passing the payment processing on to me, and the stupid $.20 restocking fee every 4 months or so for every item and that 15% cut if customers find me via Google Ads, balanced with their reach and SEO and the fact that they charge and collect sales tax for me comes down on the side of "use them, while not being happy about it." Still less than the 30%/40% chunk that comes out of the other sites.

I named my shop with the name of my business and mention my business in the description so they can find me offsite easily, and frankly if someone emailed me and said they didn't want to use Etsy, would I sell them a premade cover offsite I'd probably do it.

All that being said, I still put my shop in vacation mode this week, and I'm not shopping on Etsy either. I don't know if it'll do any good at all, probably not, but I'd rather not cross a picket line.
posted by telophase at 12:06 PM on April 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

new things have to be put up EVERY DAY or else you aren't found in the searches I mean that makes sense if you are making jewelry but no sense if you make quilts or knit sweaters. If you are a wood carver, or do metal work like I do this makes no sense. It is not my full time job, I would never give ETSY than much control.
posted by boilermonster at 12:08 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the report didn't say anything about whether or not you have a more intensive craft, just literally "you can't be found if you aren't updating daily." Though I will dig through pages and pages of searches for anything, maybe I'm just unusual.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:11 PM on April 12, 2022

I expect the algorithm prioritizes frequent updaters. That is, at least, the good part about selling a reasonably rare item (premade book covers): I show up in the first couple of pages.
posted by telophase at 12:30 PM on April 12, 2022

Honestly 6.5% feels reasonable on first read, I work in the hospitality industry where the standard is 20% for these online marketplace platforms!
posted by amaire at 1:33 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

As always, there's complications which can make it more expensive. It's 6.5%, but shipping costs also count against it. And there's, per above, the Offsite Ads program, which you can opt out of if you make less than $10k/year in store revenue, which takes 15% (or 12% if you can't opt out) of any purchase from an advertised item/store within 30 days of clicking on an ad for that store. And the Star Seller requirements have understandably been under a lot of scrutiny. (I know I'm no fan of the modern algorithmic trend of "Anything less than 5-star is terrible")

From one perspective this was expectable (new CEO, ex-eBay, pandemic boom prompting more automation to scale, general state of capitalism), but more practically I think it caught a lot of people by surprise. Speaking carefully, but I hope the all the sellers come out of this satisfied.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:50 PM on April 12, 2022

WaPo: It’s the last day of the Etsy strike. Here’s what comes next.

The Etsy sellers who were on strike are still hammering out the details of exactly what comes next, according to Boyd and Cassidy. But for now, one thing’s certain: They don’t intend to stop organizing even though the strike is ending.
They instead plan to form a “solidarity organization … basically the equivalent of a union for Etsy sellers,” Cassidy said.
Sellers also plan to take individual actions to protest the fee hikes and changes to the platform if Etsy executives don’t respond to their demands. For many, protest will come in the form of either migrating off the site — as Cassidy and Almeraz said they plan to do — or begrudgingly increasing the price of products they keep on Etsy. Some sellers say they will encourage other aspiring entrepreneurs to stay off the site.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:27 AM on April 19, 2022

The IRS certainly needs to make sure an ebay seller declares income. Why, they might be making MILLIONS off these sales. The gummint NEEDS that income tax. They certainly can't collect any from the billionaires.
posted by BlueHorse at 1:12 PM on April 19, 2022

There's been pretty much no response from Etsy (shocking, I know) so they've switched to a decorated letter campaign.

Though really, I kind of wonder at this point what would work. Since even the strike people admit that dumping Etsy isn't really feasible.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:17 PM on April 21, 2022