Crafty Tuesday What is a Crafter to do?
Posted By Kathleen David on March 10, 2020
t can be difficult to get your product in front of the right eyes.
There are a lot of online courses about how to get your art in front of an audience and how to use social media to boost your ‘brand’.
Then there are the almost hostage like gambits to make one spend money to make money which is can be a bit of a fallacy to totally useless.
One of these was launched on Etsy which has gone from handmade to manufactured in many cases and the ‘vintage’ label was a dubious one at best. They have a new offsite advertising program that is not optional for the shops of Etsy. “When a shopper clicks on one of those online ads for your products and purchases from your shop within 30 days, you’ll pay an advertising fee,” wrote Etsy. “You only pay an advertising fee when you make a sale — eliminating the risk you could pay for ads that don’t work for you.”
Why is this a bad thing? Seems great for more traffic headed for one’s products. Until you read the fine print where it starts to look like a serious cash grab off one’s sale.
“When this service launches, you will automatically be enrolled and you’ll see exactly how many sales you are getting from Off-site Ads on your dashboard. You will be charged later in April, but if you don’t want this additional traffic to your shop you can turn off Offisite ads at that time.”
You have to opt out rather than opt in.
What does this mean in terms of money? Well according to Etsy…
The offsite advertising fee depends on the revenue you’ve made on Etsy in the past 365 days:
- If you made less than $10,000 USD, you’ll be charged a 15% fee for an order attributed to an Offsite Ad on the the amount you made from your sale before the advertising fee was applied.
- If you made at least $10,000 USD, you’ll get a discounted fee of 12%.
The offsite advertising fee for an order will never exceed $100 USD, regardless of the order total for an order attributed to an Offsite Ad.
If you’re a seller with a shop currency other than USD, your revenue total is calculated from your order amounts converted to USD with the currency exchange rates Etsy used at the time that the sale was processed.
We’ll take a look at your sales each month to determine your rate.
Esty is making another revenue stream on the backs of its site participants.
I understand charging a fee for listing things on the site. That seems reasonable and under my control as to how I am going to spend my dollars.
This new ad policy rubs me the wrong way for so many reasons. First being that I have to find the button on the site to keep them from charging me an ad fee for something I may have done on my own.
Esty shop owners know they have to promote their shops to get sales. They spend money on various advertising means to get their site out there. But it is their choice to do so.
Esty is becoming another Amazon or Ebay and that is killing the idea that it was started out with.
So what is a crafter to do?
Well I started my own website www.nostringsattachedpuppets.com to sell my work. I know I have to rely on myself to get the word out about it and direct traffic to it.
That doesn’t work for everyone who do better in a group setting or a conglomerate.
Well currently that would be Zibbet and Artfire being the best of the many sites. Indiemade is another one to look at.
Spotify is more of a shop on your own with fees spelled out.
Amazon has Amazon handmade which is more expensive than Etsy but it is Amazon so more eyes one would assume.
It is a tricky time to get your production in front of the audience that will buy from you. What works for one shop might not work for another.
I am still working on how to get my work in front of people who will buy my puppets. I do feel better about it than I did last year but I also know I have a lot of learn.
I am grateful for the sales I made so far.
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