Etsy, Should I join or

[safeinOhio]

buy the stock.
Any sellers here? If so, how are you doing.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Here is a site that discusses the problems sellers are having.

http://www.dailydot.com/business/etsy-brave-new-economy-crumbling/

In short, sellers who actually make their own products are being squeezed out.

I am not clear on what you mean by "shall I join". ???
Do you mean becoming a seller?

[safeinOhio]

2. Seller

Small vintage stuff.
Wish I could see what sold and for how much. Thanks for the link.

[hippywife]

3. It's definitely not worth the time

and expense if you don't have a lot of stock to move and are just looking to unload what you have. There are so many sellers there, it can take a large inventory of listings (among other things) to be found. It's more geared towards those wanting to sell as an ongoing business.

You can see what things have sold as there is a link in all shops on the left sidebar to their sold items. It won't display the amount the item sold for but if you know how to view a page source and the HTML coding of a given page, you can find out the price it was listed at.

[Vinca]

5. Thanks for the tip about finding the original price in the coding.

I never thought of doing that and every so often when I'm researching an item an etsy "sold" pops up without a price.

[Vinca]

4. I gave it a brief try and was totally unimpressed.

[hippywife]

6. As with selling online anywhere

it takes a whole lot of knowledge and work, more than anyone just jumping into it can even begin to imagine.

Need to learn SEO (search engine optimization), which is how to properly list your items to appease the search algorithms of both Etsy and Google in order to be found. Even with all the internal traffic at a destination site like Etsy, this is not an option if you wish for buyers to find you at all. Also a lot of promotion on social media. With the number of sellers on most venues, especially one as large as Etsy, you have to work at marketing and promoting to build a following and drive as much of your own traffic and target market to your shop.

There are a lot of tools out there to learn how to do all of this, both on the site and off. No way anymore that folks can just list items and wait for sales to roll in, and really hasn't been that way for quite some time.

The two venues to avoid are Artfire and Zibbet. They look good but no traffic at all, glitchy sites, no to low staff, not much money and it shows in the terrible programming and operations. can't even be trusted.

The trend these days is getting your own domain and building a stand alone site with providers such as Shopify, Weebly, SupaDupa, Indiemade, etc.

There are some of those to avoid to for various reasons, such as Volusion.

[dump2020trump]

7. Worth it

It is worth selling on etsy. Amazing customer service and the customers are similar to people on this forum.

They are always willing to help and very nice.

[KS Toronado]

11. Welcome to DU!

[wyldwolf]

8. I have an etsy shop. I've never gotten much out of it.

I sell vintage items, don't make my own.

[safeinOhio]

9. Doing well at the mall.

80% of my sales are to dealers. Tax exempt.

[yellowdogintexas]

10. Etsy does have an excellent rating on Progressive Shopper

if you don't have it already, Progressive Shopper is a Chrome add on. If you open a website for a company they have researched, a cute little donkey pops up with the data on the company.

Etsy was a surprise; so was DSW Shoe Warehouse. Ulta Beauty; Estee Lauder products;

the review on Southwest Airlines: do not shop here you can do better