I've sold on Etsy for a while as a hobby side business. The change seems to happen after their IPO. It felt like pretty quickly after that there began a trickle of incremental changes. A rule that allowed "manufacturing partners" really opened a huge loophole though, and in general things went down hill rapidly over the last 2-3 years.
Depends on what you consider "scale". I did 5k+ orders in about 5 years. I scaled back a bit after that because I had some large projects at my main job, but that's not bad scale for hand-made items on a hobby basis. If I'd been devoted to it full time & increased efforts to get more exposure (which I avoided since I had all the sales I could handle already) then even as a solo creator I could have scaled to 25K in that time period & earned a nice salary doing this FT even after setting aside $$ for PTO & retirement funds.
On the other hand, if you consider "scale" to be > $300k/year, then yes it's hard to do it without a manufacturing partner. And that can be a legitimate route even within the traditional Etsy framework! Design something, punch out countless copies w/ the "partner", and do final finishing/customization yourself. Or a few other similar models. The problem is this opened the door for sellers & etsy to rationalize keeping all sorts of definitively not handcrafted items in the marketplace. At best it's handmade by the "partner" through mass cheap 3rd world labor. At worse it's white labelled junk.
Anyway, the entire point of Etsy is that, even if "there's only so much you can get from handcrafting", that was what Etsy was for. The place where true, actual, real handcrafters were selling their items. Sure, it represents a cap on scale, but that was Etsy's mission. Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Scale is value and the potential to sales increase. Software license sales have infinite scale, Gwyneth Paltrow egg sales is high scale and $200 hand crafted in spare time earing sales is no scale.
> Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Yes, it was intended a storefront for handmade junk for 2x the price... With occasional interesting things.
I think that's what they targeted as their market niche post-ipo. It may even have been non-deliberately incremental. I'm cynical enough to think it's deliberate though.
For my part, a fair number of my items are non trivial to duplicate without a distinct loss in quality, so I still get reasonable sales and could probably ramp things up of I wanted/needed to.
However some things I sell have been SEO squated with crap quality items that don't even look remotely the same quality, but I don't have the energy or need for additional sales to optimize my own SEO. So, right now, I sell items that mostly average out to $40/hour profit, which isn't too bad for a hobby I enjoy.
About 80% are items that are pretty routine but still fun to make knowing the recipient will like them. The other 20% are truly unique items that I love making as more of an artistic endeavor, even though the time:cost ratio is much less in my favor than the other 80%. But that's also why mass producers can't poach my sales -- the market is way too small for these niche items to create a production line to copy them.
I'm working in a medium (leather tooling) where you really can't reproduce handmade quality at a mass scale. At least not economically: custom die cuts w/ embossing plates and personalization aren't economical for unique designs where I can offer 50 variations even though some of them might only sell 1 every 3 months, and the handmade version looks better than the mass produced stamped-out design anyway.
It's very hard to find a niche like this though. A lot of things are easier to replicate in exact detail than hand-carved leather.
That's a little cynical. We don't make the screws that go into our furniture or smelt the iron ore that goes into the steel pipe fittings or grow the trees or generate the electricity that supports distribution of this thread. But we do feel like we make each piece that we sell on Etsy.
I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale outsourcing of production is the only way.
These days you can outsource original product manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't mean that you're not the artist behind them.
I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
>I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
I don't have a problem with "manufacturing partners" in this sense. It's when that loophole is used to justify or hide countless sellers simply white labelling items that is the problem. If I make a design and have a manufacture stamp out copies in the thousands, but then offer customization that I add JIT for each order (a hallmark of etsy) then that's fine. But if I take a $0.50 beaded necklace bought in bulk on Alibaba and resell then at $10 with not other value added, that does not fit the supposed mission of Etsy. Take that to Amazon, Ebay, & it's okay. But it's absolutely not within the handcrafted marketplace, even when "handcrafted" is loosely defined, that Etsy is supposed to be.
Yes I agree, Etsy used to make sure you were original or had manufacturing partners. They had some kind of vetting for the partners until Josh Silverman(?) came on board. I think that is when those rules loosened and AliBaba became a legit partner on Etsy. It's been a slippery slope. My segment on Etsy is not conducive to mass production and I think we have simply priced ourselves above it as a way to keep separate . I have started seeing furniture made in Turkey and Poland and Romania that is now beating us up a little on price, not sure how they get the shipping so cheap but that is a different issue
IIRC the US offers a steep discount on international shipping coming from countries that it has designated "transitional". It's possible that Poland and Romania are on that list: I have highly specialized, custom tools that I bought from a machinist in Romania, and shipping was about $5. Whereas I could be at the US side of Niagara Falls and ship a light package 100 feet to the Canadian side and it would still cost me about $14.
Credit where it's do though, the tools I bought from Romania are amazing, unique, top quality. For some reason there's a few countries in Eastern Europe (Ukraine actually is one of them) where leather crafting has become somewhat popular and there are a few Etsy stores with fantastic items. They don't use the absolute best quality leather, but it's good: orders of magnitude above what you'd find in stores, and the construction is solid
(also leather is an area where price increases near exponentially with quality. Cheap junk like PU leather is maybe $0.25 per square foot in large bulk. Lowest quality real leather is about $1, and is actually still a fine choice for certain type of items if used carefully. Okay leather might run about $5 a sqft, good to very good will be $10, $20, $50, and the absolute best can be $100 to $200 per sqft. Although it's important to know that not all leather is suited to ever task. And sometimes the price:quality ratio is about product consistency. You might pay $20/sqft for a side of leather that has near perfect consistency in thickness and lack of surface defects. Very important if you're making large items, and they have a usable portion of 80 or 90%. But you can also buy miss-split that are uneven thickness and have some surface defects for $3. The usable portion may only be 60%, but if you're making small items you're still getting the same very high quality leather, you just have more scrap left over. You can even find a use for that too: some people really like the "character" that natural imperfections add to an item. Or I use it as practice pieces testing out new designs, no Sorry, more than you probably were looking for on leather detail. But it's HN so I figured there's often people interested in the minutiae of non-tech fields)
8% is actually a about what they take, at least prior to any fee increases going on now:
Keep in mind Etsy only takes a cut, and it's close to 8%. If I sell a $100 item they take about 7% in transaction fees. Then there's merchant fees for payment processing. I'm sure Etsy take a cut of them, and they are about 3%, so assuming they get 1 point of that their total take is 8%.
In comparison Ebay w/ PayPal merchant fees is a few points higher at about 14%. Which if you're selling high volume low margin race-to-bottom Alibaba junk then the extra 3-4% profit explains why Etsy's loosing of seller restrictions has attracted so much junk.
The bank payment processing probably isn't doing an even split, so I would guess that Etsy's take really is right about 8% of seller revenue.
I've sold on Etsy for a while as a hobby side business. The change seems to happen after their IPO. It felt like pretty quickly after that there began a trickle of incremental changes. A rule that allowed "manufacturing partners" really opened a huge loophole though, and in general things went down hill rapidly over the last 2-3 years.