Sell on Etsy

Etsy wants you to succeed. There’s so many resources available and they will nudge you in the right direction to get more sales and to bring customers your way. I’ve been running my small business off of Etsy since 2018 and every year my business grows more and more, something I can easily see with the stats available right at the front of this app. I can organize my orders, message customers, and read reviews perfectly with this. For the first few months I used to just go off of emails. The emails I receive are still important (especially the ones alerting me that I’ve made a sell), but downloading this app has made everything much easier for me. If it weren’t for Etsy I don’t think I would have ever started my business, let alone be as successful as I feel I have been. This app is extremely user friendly, if you’re just starting you can take it at your own pace. There’s so many handy dandy features. For example, you can set your shop in a temporary vacation mode for when you’re out of town or unable to do orders. I personally can’t think of a way to improve my experience, thanks to the developers and whoever else is on the Etsy team.

Am I the only person who despises this app? It’s honestly so bad that I hate the thoughts of listing something. First of all, (with the iPhone X at least) it can be ridiculously easy to just swipe off of a listing that you’re working on. So, basically, after spending what feels like forever jumping through the hoops to create one — titles, pics, description, variations, etc. — it’s gone. Just gone, after all that time and effort. Why can’t there be a “Are you sure you want to leave this listing?” or “Would you like to save this listing as a draft?” or some other option that MAKES SENSE. Instead, there’s nothing. You accidentally slide your finger too far across your screen, then you just have to start over. WHICH takes a lot of time and work considering (my next point) that there isn’t an option to save variations to use on future listings. PLEASE consider those of us who do custom clothing. Gildan, Comfort Colors, etc. have A LOT of color options to choose from. I WANT to give my customers options, but I don’t feel like it when I have to manually type in 30+ colors every time I post a different design. It’s 2020. Etsy has been a thing for years now. Why isn’t this figured out already? Even if this is different on a desktop or laptop, it’s just not as convenient. That’s the point of an app. I’m glad to be able to work (mostly) from the app, but I really just wish it was better.

I Used to love selling on Etsy, I opened my shop a little over a year ago and while i don’t get a lot of orders I feel like my shop is successful, I get great reviews and haven’t gotten anything other then five stars. But then they changed how payments work just before Christmas. pay off the fees once a month and buy postage out of pocket which wasn’t a big deal, I would pay under $4 in fees a month and $2.75 for postage. I preferred it that was so I could get my entire payment from my very inexpensive product. The new system withholds the money from my orders and then subtracts the fees and postage from that money until I can get it into my bank account (it will only deposit money on business days). I tried to see if i could pay for postage at the time of purchase like i used to, but they have no option for that anymore, instead the fees sit in your payment waiting to either be paid off at the end of the month or for you to get another order so it can take a large amount of that money. I’m not making any money off of my product because they keep subtracting the fees from the purchase. I have a four dollar fee sitting in the payment that I can’t pay until the end of the month. I love being an Etsy seller but unless they go back to the old method or give us the option to pay for postage and fees before the billing cycle ends then I’ll have to close down my shop.