Did you know that on April 11th, many Etsy shop owners will be going on strike?
This is in response to Etsy announcing that on that date, transaction fees will increase from 5% to 6.5%, which appears to be the last straw in a list of several other grievances. Etsy claims that the increase is in response to record sales over the past two years and a way for them to fund more improvements and services to the seller community. Many see this claim as laughable since the seller-facing customer service of Etsy is known to be more than lacking.
So What Does an Etsy Strike Look Like?
Participating sellers will put their shops in “Vacation Mode” for part or all of the week from April 11th to April 18th. Vacation mode temporarily closes your shop to prevent new sales from coming in. The hope is to show Etsy how much they might lose if all of these shops choose to permanently leave Etsy in response to the fee increase.
The strike is also organized around a petition started by an Etsy seller to cancel the fee increase and address other demands. You can find the petition with over 33,000 signatures here: https://www.coworker.org/petitions/cancel-the-fee-increase-work-with-sellers-not-against-us
You might know by now that even though I don’t think Etsy is a perfect company, I have weighed the benefits of the site to be worth staying for now. So how do I view the petition’s demands? I agree with all of them.
1. Cancel the fee increase
The phrase that caught me most from this demand is that fee increases are “nothing short of pandemic profiteering.” Yes, I think that's a great way to describe it. Etsy made record sales because new businesses were started by people stuck in their homes, and established businesses that likely made many offline sales had to pivot to online only. For example, before 2020, I had less than 300 Etsy sales because it was not my primary income, now I have over 2,100 Etsy sales!
2. Crack down on Resellers
Etsy searches have been muddied by mass-produced resellers masquerading as handmade sellers. This goes strictly against Etsy’s own claim to only allow handmade, vintage, and antique items, so they need to enforce their own rules better.
3: “Golden” Support Tickets
Although I have not personally experienced the nightmare that is Etsy customer service, that doesn’t mean problems don’t exist. Plenty of Etsy sellers have stories of their shops being forcibly closed due to false copyright claims made by bots (while real infringements are left unchecked,) funds held without explanation, and more issues that keep them from accessing their livelihoods. Etsy needs a way to fast track these support tickets to get legitimate sellers back to selling faster.
Being denied your funds can be scary. One reason I had left Squarespace was because they required you to use Stripe to accept payments and I had heard horror stories from another potter about her money being withheld and essentially stolen by Stripe. While this doesn’t make Etsy’s failings ok, it is a reminder that problems exist on all platforms.
4: End the Star Seller program
I’m not a fan of the Star Seller program, and I’ve let Etsy know that in every survey opportunity that I have had. The program scores you on maintaining a 95% or higher average on 24-hr or less message response times, 5-star reviews, and “on-time” and tracked shipping, in order to earn the “Star Seller” badge. The tracked shipping requirements are difficult to maintain for sellers of stickers, cards, and bookmarks that could normally ship through a stamped envelope, and I saw testimonies from UK creators that the shipping requirements are even harder to meet for sellers outside of the U.S. The message response requirements do not promote a healthy work-life balance for an individual running a small business.
Here’s my personal story: One weekend in October I got a message on a Saturday and I patted myself on the back that I wouldn’t answer until Monday to keep work out of my weekend. Then Monday morning I remembered the Star Seller program and realized I just ruined my shot of getting the badge. I didn’t qualify for star seller again until March because my number of messages was never large enough to make the 95% success ratio from just one message. (Right as that first message expired, I had accidentally missed another from a customer that had messaged me through two different accounts.) Unless you have over 20 messages in a 3 month timespan, one missed message will make it impossible to achieve 95%.
A message of hope for other sellers: As annoying as the Star Seller program is, did I ever feel like I lost sales because of not being a Star Seller? NO. But, I get that it’s frustrating to not meet a goal someone has set for you. Also, one improvement I noticed this month is that they have divided each criteria into their own badge now. So your shop might show the “Smooth Shipping” and “Rave Reviews” badge, but not the “Speedy replies” badge, making your successes in some areas not be completely ruined by a “failure” in another.
5: Let All sellers opt out of Offsite Ads
I think the excerpt from the petition covers this well: “We should be in control of which listings to advertise, how much we spend on ads, and whether to advertise at all. There should be no level of “success” that forces sellers to foot Etsy’s advertising costs, unless we choose to. That “success” level being well below the federal poverty line only adds insult to injury.” If you did not know, Etsy denies sellers who have ever made $10,000 annually the option to opt-out of offsite ads, and charge 12% on any sale made by a buyer within 30 days of a clicking an ad.
A message of hope for other sellers: Every business is different, so all I can do is share my experience. Even though I am in that compulsory group, I only made 4 sales through offsite ads in the past 12 months. Is it frustrating? Yes, but luckily it has not hit enough sales to destroy my overall profit margin.
So What Do I Actually Like About Etsy?
If you have watched my video “Why I Still Use Etsy + Left Squarespace,” you know that I started out with my own shop hosted by Sqaurespace in 2016. Sales were great at the beginning, but fell over a year and a half even though my social media engagement increased. I polled my audience and found out that 60% of my customers preferred buying on Etsy over buying on an artist’s personal website. The most popular reasons were that they could trust Etsy with their credit card information but didn’t know if other sites were secure, and they liked that they could keep all their art sales in one place for easy recall. I go over even more customer behavior in the video.
I actually made the switch to Etsy right around the time they were increasing fees in 2018 and a lot of the discourse in the seller community was similar to now with talks of leaving, so I was nervous to just be joining. But, the Etsy shop manager turned out to be so much more user-friendly than the nightmare that was Sqaurespace’s backend and in 2020 when I had to move my business totally online, Etsy meant easy growth.
Here are some benefits:
Customers can “favorite” your shop or individual items - they are then notified on their Etsy account anytime you restock or run a sale, which happens outside of social media algorithms and keeps you on their mind
Etsy listings are easy to copy and change for quick listing. (The variations options aren’t perfect, but they were better than what Squarespace had when I switched.)
Listing histories means that Etsy will promote listings with many sales, so keep reusing sold listings
Etsy does offer shipping discounts compared to over-the-counter USPS costs. I compared these to Pirate Ship and they were almost all the same in my package sizes (6 oz. to 6 lbs.) I couldn’t compare to Stamps.com because you need an account to see prices. It’s a free trial, but $17.99 a month after that.
Carbon-Offset Shipping - is it a little green-washy? I suppose. It’s not as good as preventing the carbon to begin with, but it’s better than nothing. I looked up and Shopify does offer carbon offset, but it looked like in many cases sellers have to opt-in and pay for the offset themselves.
Collecting and remitting sales tax. This is possibly one of the most important and often overlooked benefits of Etsy. They handle sales tax and VAT without you even needing to know the laws. Every state is different, but handling NY taxes from Squarespace was a nightmare. In New York you are supposed to charge sales tax based on the delivery location of the item, not the shipping location. Sales tax differs by county, but Squarespace set its tax profiles by zip code, which can cross county lines. I ended up charging the lowest county sales tax statewide to avoid illegally overcharging sales tax, and then paying the rest of the sales tax out of pocket. Since I have a sales tax ID for PA as well, that means I’d have to track online PA sales too. The fact that Etsy collects and remits sales tax for you is one of its best benefits to me.
Etsy is getting a lot of hate right now because of the fee increases, and I do think the criticism is deserved. Just look at the CEO’s salary and you know that they didn’t need to increase fees to make the internal changes they have planned. But, I do want to highlight one last benefit that reflects that someone somewhere in the company championed a very human decision. On the customer side, Etsy lets you opt-out of email marketing for holidays that can be upsetting to some people like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day - I’ve never seen another company do that. I never thought Father’s Day would bother me when I first lost my dad, but it still stinks every year. That little choice to not be reminded about it in my email? That’s a huge impact.
My Advice for Seller’s Wondering if They Should Leave - Try Out Pattern
What is Pattern? Pattern is Etsy’s response to sites like Squarespace and Shopify. It hosts your Etsy listings on a separate domain - you can either buy a domain or use their free one. The benefit is that sales made through Pattern DON’T GET CHARGED TRANSACTION FEES. You still have to pay the 3% processing like everywhere else, but sales made on Pattern won’t get charged the 6.5% fee. You can choose to keep your listings on Pattern and Etsy, or make them Pattern-only, but everything goes back to the same shop manager. Something to note is that Etsy searches will only go to Etsy listings, so Pattern is best if you don’t solely rely on Etsy search traffic. Pattern costs $15 a month, but if you direct $230 or more of your sales a month, you’ll be saving more than $15 in transaction fees.
So How Does This Help You Leave?
Use the free trial to see how your sales will look without Etsy’s traffic. Use the free domain to keep your experiment free. Make sure all your social media accounts link to your Pattern site instead of Etsy to test your self-directed traffic. You can also use that month to keep your sales streams open while setting up another website if that is your choice.
My Other Advice? Stop Offering Free Shipping!
Many people cite Etsy’s pressure to offer free shipping, and I see so many breakdowns of Etsy fees include shipping costs in the total fee percentage making it seem like there are barely any profits from an item. If shipping is killing your profit, you’re not pricing correctly, so go back to charging calculated shipping. Items come in so many shapes and sizes, so it is difficult to declare a hard and fast rule for handling shipping, but as a pottery seller that often ships packages between 6 oz. and 6 lbs. I can say that charging accurate shipping saves me AND my customers money. My typical mugs now cost $17 to ship to California. Classic mugs are $30 - I’m not going to take a 57% cut to profit, and I’m also not going to charge $47 to everyone for a classic mug. BUT, if someone in California wants to pay $17 for the service of shipping one of my mugs, I am honored by their decision. Do I feel like not offering free shipping makes me lose sales? Maybe some, but I have more customers who are willing to pay shipping than those who are not. You can read more about my shipping practices here, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel for a video on updated shipping coming soon.
My Advice for Customers Looking to Support Small Businesses?
Support sellers during this strike - if they are putting their shops on vacation mode, then you don’t even need to worry about the option of buying from them on Etsy. Look to see if your favorite sellers are offering alternative buying options during the strike.
If a shop is still open, it is probably because they need to be. Ask about alternative buying options, but don’t stop buying from Etsy for good, because that will just hurt the small shops more.
Create a bookmarks list on your web browser with the individual artist sites that you want to support - one of the major benefits of Etsy is the “favorite” shops and items feature, which even I use a lot, so find another place to collect your favorite artists
Don’t click on Etsy ads - like the kind you see on Facebook with a carousel of pictures from different Etsy shops. These are the ads that Etsy charges sellers 12-15% of their sale if someone buys within 30 days of clicking their ad. Instead, make note of the listing name or shop name and search it in the Etsy site itself to find the creator. Ads within the Etsy search are voluntarily purchased by a shop, so feel free to click on those if you’d like.
I’m going to say it one more time: Don’t stop buying from Etsy for good. Many small businesses rely on the traffic they get through Etsy searches and so can’t leave without a detrimental drop in sales. If you stop supporting artists just because they happen to sell through Etsy, you’ll just be hurting the artists more in the long run. Check out some of my favorite artists here.
What Will I be Doing During the Strike?
I want to support the grievances expressed by my fellow Etsy sellers and hope it does inspire change in the company. I am currently in the free trial period of my Pattern account, which means I haven’t paid Etsy for its use, and they won’t get transaction fees from purchases made on the site. For the length of the strike I will remove all Etsy links from my social media accounts/ website and only link to my Pattern shop to hopefully reduce Etsy’s profits from my shop.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the strike and your reasons to leave or stay on Etsy. Feel free to comment below, comment on my Etsy YouTube video, or reach out on social media!