What is Etsy?

If you haven’t heard of Etsy before, it’s a marketplace for handmade goods. It is similar to Ebay, but Etsy is designed for talented crafters and artists selling their handmade products. It’s a great way to get your business selling online.  

The competition on Etsy is high and it’s growing which makes is harder to sell. Some Etsy store owners complain about low sales volumes and increases competition due to the increasing volume of shop owners selling their handmade goods.

There area few other disadvantages that come with an Etsy store compared to your own website. Let have a look at them! 

Fees & Usability

You pay £0.15 to list an item and then once that item sells you pay a 5% transaction fee. A listing lasts for 4 months or until the item is sold.   

So Etsy does look pretty attractive to get your business going as creating a listing is easy, you don’t need to be technical, there is already a built in user base who will be interested and buy your products and overall it’s very cheap to get started. However, once you launch an Etsy store, you’ll learn how limiting Etsy can be compared to running your own online store. Here are a few reasons why 

Customer Base: You are limited to only Etsy clients 

Etsy’s ecommerce market share is tiny compared to places like Amazon. Etsy only generated £450 million in marketplace revenue. By comparison, Amazon made £212 billion! Etsy holds about 4% market share which means you are missing out on the other 96%!  

Credibility  

Customers have a general perception that people selling on Etsy are just trying to make a bit of money on the side, other known as a side hustle and not full time endeavours. We agree at Dynamic Loops that we would much rather buy from an online store if they have their own domain as it looks more legitimate, professional and secure.   

Brand & Design: You can’t create a brand with an Etsy store 

Unfortunately, all Etsy stores kind of look the same as there is little variation to what the store owner can do to make their store stand out. The problem with Etsy and Ebay is that a lot of copying and pasting goes on within the product titles and descriptions which means loads of other products listings will look and sound exactly like yours. With your own website you have free reign over design so you can develop your own unique brand.  

You don’t own your customer base  

Repeat and loyal customer is where your business will grow. However, on etsy, every sale you make is a one off sale as they do not allow you to add buyers to an email list. You can’t communicate with buyers after a purchase which really limits your sales potential. With your own website, customer will have to set up an account with you in order to check out. You can then communicate with them through their email to ensure repeat purchases creating loyal customers.  

Etsy stores are hard to rank in google searches  

If you search for products in google, you’ll rarely find individual Etsy product listings on the front page. Search rankings are largely determined by the volume and strength of the backlinks pointing to your site and they take a lot of hard work and patience and you’ll be doing it to strength Etsy’s position in the search rankings, wouldn’t you much rather be doing that for your own store? As all of your hard work would be gone if Etsy were to put their fees up, stop business or you simply thought they weren’t for you anymore.