How Much Does It Cost to Sell on Etsy?

From time to time, in response to a complaint about Etsy's customer service, we'll see a cheerleader point out that Etsy is a great deal for sellers, or that it's the cheapest place around to sell your handmade goods. Clearly these people are lacking some fundamental math skills.

Let's think about a hypothetical high volume supply seller (I know, we're supposed to pretend they don't exist, but humor me here). Say this seller lists and sells 1500 items a month, which is about the level some of our top supply sellers do (I know this because I used to look at Etsy Tools before the site was hounded out of existence). If those items sell for $5 each, that seller pays $300 in listing fees and $262.50 in final value fees. That totals $562.50 per month, or $6750 per year. That's a shitload of money to pay for an ecommerce store that doesn't even have an integrated shopping cart function. For seven thousand dollars, you could buy yourself a lovely independent website and advertise it pretty well, couldn't you?

What about the more typical low volume seller of handmade goods? Let's say you make beaded jewelry and add your work to the HALF MILLION jewelry items listed on Etsy. If you've got 20 items in your shop, and by renewing something 3 times a day in the desperate hope that someone will notice your stuff during the few seconds it appears at the top of the category, you manage to sell 10 pieces at $15 each (which seems to be the average Etsy price), what do you pay for your $150 in sales? $4 in listing fees. $18 in relisting fees. $5.25 in final value fees. You get to spend a whopping 18% of your gross sales, or $27.25 - at that rate, assuming your sales are consistent, you're paying Etsy $327 a year for the privilege of floundering in the sea of jewelry on the site. And that's before your PayPal fees.

But for that money, you get the exposure that comes with being part of this beautiful collection of handmade goods, right? Well, if someone can find your pieces among 500,000 others, that's great. But Etsy will help you get some exposure by promoting itself and your shop for you, right? Oh, no, I forgot - admin are constantly telling us to get out there and spread the word OURSELVES about Etsy's handmade goodness. You should buy a tote bag from the labs with a funky picture that in some cryptic way tells the world about Etsy, and once the people passing us on the street notice it, they'll rush right over to the site and spend a couple of hours fighting with a useless search function to dig through the huge jewelry category and buy a pair of earrings from your shop. Or not. You could pay another $15 for one day's worth of showcase exposure - do that twice and you've more than doubled your monthly fees. I don't think there's a business advisor out there who would tell you that spending 15 to 30 percent of your sales on advertising is reasonable (but remember that business school is so un-hip, and it's not the Etsy way).

So maybe you spend that advertising money elsewhere in the hope that you'll get some traffic to your shop. And then you can look at your views and see whether your advertising expenditure has been worth it.

Oh, no, sorry, your views are being reset, so you can't figure that out, either.

Etsy. What a bargain!