Barely any sellers are profitable on etsy. They're all housewives or hipsters that sell at amazingly low profit margins. It's a steal if you want to buy handmade stuff though.
A lot of people selling on Etsy are doing so for some kind of fulfillment, as a way of covering the cost of their hobby and feeling like their work is bringing delight to others.
Then, there are sellers that are based outside the US with far different production economics.
And of course, there are the deluded sellers who are trying to be profitable and can't get there.
Many of the sellers ARE profitable but it takes a while to get them there. The actual 'formula' to figure out how to correctly price their items is passed around in the forums. Nothing wrong with this but it does show you that most sellers don't have a clue when they first open a shop. They just want to sell anything at any price.
I know! I love it as a place to shop, would never try to make money as a seller. But if they wanted to change that, they could -- run calculations for sellers as to how much they should charge to be profitable, all the stuff that the average seller wouldn't think about.
When you have a marketplace of 600K sellers, the competition is fierce. Etsy tries hard to make them profitable by offering classes online and attempts to lower costs of supplies.
I hope they can find a way to pool the cost of materials to bring low cost overhead to sellers. That would make the industry explode.
aliexpress,taobao,ebay,amazon-stores,paypal button,bitcoin,square in a busy location. lots of competition on the ad-hoc sale tip. tightly coupling this with a particular kind of item is not my cup of tea either
