September 06, 2018

Etsy rant



It has been a looooong time since I've been happy with Etsy. Have you been there long enough to remember the "Etsy Etsy Etsy Etsy" video? I have. That type of enthusiasm has long gone.

I made do with all the changes...but now I am at my wits' end. My shops had been doing relatively well, but they killed all competitions (A Little Market and Dawanda, that were my main shop sites, were bought by Etsy)...and I got nothing out of it. Worse, they seem to have done something to SEO which make my shops invisible.
According to the stats (provided by Etsy...) my views are OK...still no sale. And I have been promoting and adding new items on a very regular basis. Worse, I get ZERO custom inquiries, and I got quite a few of those in the past. I  bought some promoted listings, I didn't  break even with the 2 measly orders they brought. A stark difference to last year when I basically had no time to look after my shops and still had regular sales.
I know you can longer count on people browsing Etsy to get orders and I kind of suck at networking so this seems like an unsolvable problem.
But really, with shop one and  with with  moderately narrowed search terms my first item is on page 5 and with shop two, it's on page 10. Buyers rarely go beyond page 3.
I tried Pattern for a year, that really sucked. I had linked the shop to my domain and, seriously, I had less hits when it was linked to my Pattern site than to my crummy html page.
I think they deliberately make invisible any shop that doesn't subscribe to their new plans. I still haven't caved in.
First I'll try Shopify once I have more new items available.


Cute new items like this one ;)  (in case you haven't seen it yet...)
Rainbow cat patch available here.

2 comments:

StaroftheEast said...

Yes Etsy has lost its magic many years ago :(

Stephanie Kilgast said...

So sorry to hear about it!
I have stopped using Etsy for a while and just put a few items there, but indeed, it seems a bit pointless.
The best is to social networking to be honest and drive traffic to your own website, but it's a lot of work.
Best of luck!