Transcription
Whether you're thinking about becoming a vintage reseller or you already sell on other platforms, in today's video I'm going to tell you why it's worth selling vintage on Etsy.
Hey everyone, Andy here! I'm a vintage home decor reseller and a marketing consultant, and today I'm coming at you with another reseller tips video. If you're new here, I am a part-time reseller. I sell on Etsy and then also directly on Instagram. So in today's video, we're going to talk about the pros and cons of the Etsy platform, and then I'm going to give you some tips for success on Etsy.
Okay, so let's jump right into the pros of selling on Etsy.
The first pro is that Etsy has some of the lowest reselling fees of any of the platforms online. When you break down Etsy's fees, their cut is about 10%, which when you compare it to sites like Poshmark, which is 20% of your sale, and then eBay, which can be as much as 15%, Etsy definitely wins the game on selling fees.
So, it's really important to understand the fees that each of these platforms have before you kind of start listing on these platforms because you want to make sure that whatever you're listing, you actually can sell at a price point that makes sense for all the fees that you're going to incur as a reseller on that platform.
Now I'm going to link down below an article that kind of goes over a lot of the reselling fees. Just keep in mind these are typically changing and like eeking up every year, but as of the time of the video, this was fairly accurate.
The second reason I choose to sell vintage on Etsy is because the buyer tends to have much deeper pockets. Because the buyer tends to be a little bit more affluent, I know I'm able to get the margins that I want. So that means I can list my items for much higher price points. This is really important right now because the resale market is exploding, you guys. If you're a reseller, you know it's harder and harder to source anything for your shop, and the thrift stores have gone crazy on the pricing. So you need to make sure that you're able to sell items for a lot more money than you used to because your investment in each individual item has likely gone up.
So another great thing about Etsy buyers having more money in their bank accounts is that they are less likely to want a discount on your item. Other platforms have kind of built make-an-offer systems, and while that can help you close the deal if the buyer is a few dollars away from making it affordable for them, I hate having to negotiate. I hate having to go back and forth, calculating in my mind, “Okay, can I accept that offer? What's my margin? I have to go back and look at what I paid for the item.” It’s just something I don’t want to deal with as a seller.
I love that Etsy lets you either turn on the ability to receive offers or not opt into it at all. I have not opted into it, and so that's one of the benefits. I feel like the buyer that is coming to Etsy is just ready to purchase and will not nickel and dime you on the cost. This doesn’t mean I don't accept any offers, and I don't provide any discounts on the items in my shop because I do, but my strategy behind it is a little bit different than presenting to any buyer like, “Oh, I'm willing to entertain offers on anything.” Because of course, they're going to offer less when they know they can maybe offer less, and that's just part of the process of the platform. But if you don’t give them that option, then they probably won’t use that feature.
The next pro to selling on Etsy is the giant buyer audience. Almost anyone in the world could be your customer, and that is incredible. If you have your own website, you're responsible for driving traffic to your website, and if you don't have a background in SEO marketing, that's going to be extremely difficult for you. It's difficult for brands who have huge teams and agencies to do it, so I love the fact that Etsy is promoting my items and I don’t have to necessarily do anything.
With Etsy, you're not only selling to people in the US; you can also sell to people internationally. Now, some people are a little scared to ship internationally, and I have done this for many years now, and it's not scary at all because Etsy has really streamlined the process.
So rather than having to deal with all the shipping labels, shipping bills, and custom forms that you typically would on another platform that offers international shipping, you actually can ship to a distribution center, and then that Etsy distribution center actually puts all the foreign labels on your packages for you and then ships them off.
Many of you know I offer free shipping on my Etsy listings, but I do not actually offer free shipping to international buyers. My free shipping is only available to people in the United States, and that also includes Alaska and Hawaii. Even though it's a little bit more expensive, I don’t have it continental; I have it so that anyone in the US can get free shipping.
The reason why I don’t offer free shipping to international buyers is because it would be bananas expensive, and there's no way that anything I could sell would cover the cost of it. Just from my experience, the minimum postage is like $100, and then it just kind of goes up from there. Even something small, sometimes shipping something to Canada can be very expensive, so that's why I don’t offer free shipping. The buyer is on the hook for shipping if they're buying internationally.
So the final pro to Etsy, before we get into some of the cons and then some of the tips I'm going to share at the end, is that Etsy is now rewarding sellers for bringing buyers to their site. What this means is Etsy now provides you with customized referral links. Anytime you share those links and someone clicks it and then buys something from your shop, your transaction fee goes from 6.2% down to 4%. You may feel like 2.2% is not that significant, but I'm here to tell you it adds up.
In the first two months of 2024, I have saved $47 in transaction fees. It's nice that Etsy's recognizing that sellers are bringing a lot of traffic to their site and giving them a small reward for that because this is something that most of us are doing anyway just because it's important to promote your business, so it's nice to be rewarded for doing something that we're going to do anyway.
Okay, so let's get into some of the cons of selling on Etsy. Many people's hesitations on Etsy have been that they've heard all the bad press and especially all the complaints from former vintage sellers. Many of them are valid, and we're going to talk about those below.
The one complaint that I feel like is not valid—which we discussed a little bit earlier—is fee increases, like selling fee increases. You can't expect a business to never raise their fees; that's just not how it works. As much as we would love it to be flat forever, you know, that's just not how it works, so that to me is not a very valid complaint.
But some of the other complaints we're going to talk about are very valid. The first con to selling on Etsy is just the sheer volume of cheap Chinese goods on the site. Now you may be thinking, “Andy, that doesn’t matter; I'm selling vintage; I'm not selling something new.” But it actually does matter because it is a search game on Etsy, and anytime you're flooding the marketplace with crap, that's going to dilute your ability to show up in search.
The trouble begins when something is vintage-inspired because then you're using vintage in the search term, and that's going to dilute the entire search results when someone is searching for a particular object with the word vintage in their search query. When all of these vintage-inspired and Chinese goods showed up on the platform years ago, a lot of sellers definitely saw a considerable dip in sales because there were just so many more things showing up in search.
So that's kind of the problem on the platform; that's probably not going away. You're going to want to make sure you're tailoring your inventory, using the right tags, the right descriptions, and the right headlines to make sure that you're not going to be competing with something that could be manufactured right now.
Another con of selling on Etsy, in my opinion—and this is an opinion shared by other vintage resellers who use Etsy as their primary platform for sales—is that Etsy doesn’t prioritize or consider vintage sellers when they're making any changes to the company or their platform.
An example of this is years ago when Etsy decided that everyone needed to offer free shipping on their orders. As a vintage seller, who is selling one-off things all the time, each item is unique. You don’t know what the item is going to cost every time you ship it; that's just not something that you generally know compared to a maker who is making the same earrings, packaging it in the same box with the same dimensions and weight every time.
The worst part about this change was that Etsy basically said, “If you don’t offer free shipping, then we're not going to prioritize you in search.” Of course, being in search, showing up when someone is typing in "vintage studio pottery," obviously that’s the only way you’re going to make a sale. The fact that they kind of strong-armed everyone into offering free shipping definitely soured a lot of people on the platform.
The free shipping thing, while a headache at the time, ended up working out just fine because many of us have realized how to bake the shipping price into the cost of the item. It works out because people expect free shipping, and I do feel like when people see two listings of kind of similar objects, they're going to go with the one that has free shipping versus the one that doesn't. That's generally everyone's mindset.
So it ended up being good, but at the time, it really felt like us vintage sellers weren’t even considered in that new change. With every rollout they do, it often feels that way. Now, sometimes it works out fine; other times it’s just very annoying, but that's something to kind of know about Etsy.
While vintage is a part of their business, you know, the handmade portion and now, of course, this like Chinese goods portion are large percentages of their business, and so they're always going to prioritize changes for them over vintage sellers.
The final con to selling on Etsy is that the listing process is kind of involved. So if you're not particularly tech-savvy, I really don't want to discourage anyone because frankly, you can learn anything. But from walking people through the listing process and walking people through setting up their shop, even from the beginning, most people are kind of overwhelmed. It is overwhelming even for me now. When I go to list something, I'm just like, “Oh, there are so many fields to fill in.”
So I frankly don’t probably fill in as many as I should because the more you fill out your Etsy listings, you know, the more apt you're going to be found in search. So it's definitely advantageous, but for someone who barely has enough time to do anything, I do the bare minimum on this stuff, and so for Etsy to require so many things up front in order to list something in your shop can drive me a little crazy, and that definitely can be a non-starter for a lot of people.
So now that you know the pros and the cons of selling on Etsy, I'm going to give you some rapid-fire tips for selling on the platform.
My first tip is your Etsy shop needs to have a brand to be successful. I feel like you need to have a brand, and that's because the Etsy buyer wants to see a shop that is aesthetically pleasing, that looks professional, and the best way to put your best foot forward is to make sure your shop is branded.
I know some of you are like, “Andy, I don't know how to do graphic design. I can't hire a graphic designer. How am I going to brand my shop and make my shop aesthetically pleasing for my buyers?” The answer is a free account on Canva. Canva is a free online design tool that is incredible because they have tons and tons of templates, and it makes the design process a breeze.
The next tip is to make sure you have well-lit, quality photos. I know this should go without saying, but I'm amazed every day how poor people's photos are, and there's no reason for it. Most phones, if you have a decently updated smartphone, are perfectly capable of taking really good photos. You should not feel obligated to style and stage everything that you're selling.
Now, there are a lot of really great shops and some of the top shops that are doing that because it always helps to show the item in use. But if you're someone like me who's a little lazy and short on time, I just basically take the item, put it against a blank white wall on a white surface, take the photo, and boom—that's it. The important thing is that it's well-lit and it's high quality. That's all that people want. So just know if you're taking photos on an old phone and it's grainy or poorly lit, that's not going to sell your items.
The next thing you need to do for success on Etsy is make sure you're listing weekly, at a minimum, if not daily. I know some sellers that do really well, and they try to list a couple of items a day. Of course, it depends on how much you're sourcing; if you're not sourcing a lot, then you're not going to be able to do that every day.
I am not sourcing that often. I know it seems like I'm sourcing all the time, but compared to my other reselling friends, I'm not sourcing as much as them, and I'm not bringing in as much. So for me to source or to list daily would be a struggle. But I do make sure I'm listing stuff weekly, and because of that, that is stimulating my shop and the algorithm, and so my things are showing up more, and that means I'm going to get more sales.
Another tip is to make sure you have really good, thought-out descriptors, tags, and headlines. Think of every way you could describe the item and make sure that is included in your listing. If you struggle with this, then you need to sign up for a free account with ChatGPT and have AI help you with that. That is one of the biggest tips that I can leave with you today.
If you struggle to figure out what you should describe something as, just give it over to AI, and they will come up with terms for you, and then you're done. So there's really no excuse not to have really good quality listings with tags and descriptors.
Another tip is to make sure you're taking advantage of all of Etsy's promotion and discount tools. One thing that Etsy allows you to do is send offers to people who have put an item in their cart or have liked something in your shop. So I will use these on occasion where I'll send like a 10% off coupon to someone if they're sitting on the item. That can be really helpful and can drive sales for people who are just kind of on the edge and they're not sure if they want to buy, but sometimes they don't want to miss out on this coupon, and so then it encourages them to sell. I would definitely look into those tools and make sure you're using them.
The final tip is just to make sure you are sharing your referral links in your listings on social media. A lot of people want to set and forget their Etsy shop, and that's totally fine; if you don't want to do any marketing, you can let Etsy drive that train. That’s one of the benefits of the platform; they are going to constantly be driving your listings into search if they qualify for that particular search query.
But if you want to increase your sales significantly, then you need to do some marketing on your own. I know this seems like a given, but most people are terrible about putting a shop link in their Instagram profile. That's a bare minimum. If you're selling on Etsy, you should have a link to your Etsy shop in your profile.
On top of that, anytime you're adding new listings, you should be featuring them on social media with a link to your shop, specifically your referral link because then you get discounted transaction fees. I can't tell you how many times I'm surprised to find out that someone has an Etsy shop, and the reason is that they did not link to their Etsy shop on their social media. I mean, at a bare minimum, you should have a link to Etsy in any of your social media accounts because anytime you do anything, someone could click back to your profile, click on your shop, and then look at your items that may be purchased.
So, at a minimum, please, everybody, at least put a link to your Etsy shop in your profile. On top of that, anytime you're listing something new or having a sale, I mean, those are things you need to promote too.
Now I'm going to plan a separate video on Etsy marketing strategy because I feel like so many people need that, and you guys have told me that you need that. But for someone who drives 50% of their traffic to their shop, like I’ve mentioned before, it is amazing how much more I am making because I am doing more. When I did an analysis of my entire year last year, the months that I took off—and I took them off because of important things like surgery recovery—those months that I took off from doing really a ton of YouTube videos or social media posts, I definitely saw a major dip in my Etsy sales. It definitely showed me that all the work that I was doing for marketing on my own was definitely paying off.
To drive this home even more, this year I decided to focus a lot on my YouTube channel, and you guys probably have realized this because I went from like a few videos a month to two a week, which has been crazy. But I can say confidently that these videos have boosted my Etsy sales considerably, and I have sold twice as many things in the first two months of this year than I did last year.
So marketing your business definitely pays off, so I would highly encourage you to start doing at least the bare minimum of posting a link in your account, like I mentioned, and then also anytime you're listing anything new or have anything interesting. You may think it sounds boring, but you really never know what's going to drive a person to click and then buy.
Okay, so that's all the pros, the cons, and the tips. Obviously, at the end of the video, it's obvious I'm a big Etsy advocate, and so I would encourage you, if you're not looking at the platform and you're a reseller, maybe give it some consideration. If you're getting into selling, make sure you evaluate all the platforms, all the fees, and make sure you watch the pros and cons of the other platforms too to kind of make a judgment on where you want to sell. Because while you can—and there are tools to sell everywhere—sometimes it makes sense to kind of put your sole focus on one or two platforms where you can do really well.
I have a few more Etsy tip videos that I'm going to link below. Thank you so much for watching, and let me know in the comments below if you found this helpful and what other Etsy strategy tips you would like to see. Thanks again for watching, and I can't wait to see you in my next thrifting and tips video. Take care!