Like many other Etsy sellers, I put my Etsy shop in 'vacation mode' for the last week to protest Etsy's fee hike. Also, um, to have a week off the same week as my partner. Have I lost some credibility there? I might have lost some credibility.
The closest actual competitors are Amazon Handmade, which has a strict vetting policy, or Ebay, where customers are looking for the cheapest possible options, not the handmade quality that has come to be associated with Etsy. Those in the UK might have looked at other possibilities like Folksy, MadeMe, Nomonday, and others, but none have the massive audience of Etsy. Which leaves Etsy sellers in a position of feeling angry but trapped. Truth be told, I think the strike isn't really about the fee hike - that's just one more bone to pick in a big, big pile of bones.
Look, I'm not all gung-ho against Etsy; I don't think they're all that great either. They've cornered the handmade market and then allowed it to be flooded with cheap wholesale crap - I'm not happy about that. They've imposed impossible standards with their 'Star Seller' program that mean if I don't answer a customer's message within 24 hours - even if it's a weekend or I'm super stressed or just having a bad day - their algorithm takes money out of my pocket by showing my shop to fewer potential customers. I'm not happy about that. And when I first started out, they took 75% of my income and held it for long enough that many other people in my position would have gone out of business - because I'd done enough research to actually get a few sales, and that was apparently suspish.
OK, I might be a little angrier at Etsy than I was letting on. The trouble is, there's no other market out there like Etsy. When you ask around for alternatives, the main competiitor that people suggest is Shopify - which is absolutely nothing like Etsy. You pay huge amounts upfront for Shopify, and you have to do all your own marketing because there's no inbuilt customer base. Most people building a Shopify store are operating on the 'build it and they will come' fallacy, and they fail miserably.
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If you're a customer and wanting to help your favourite Etsy sellers, the only thing I can suggest is to look at their social media pages and see if they're pushing a non-Etsy version of their store. You might never have heard of this particular type of store before, but give it a try and see what happens. If you're worried, use a credit card instead of a debit card, because this gives you better protections in case something goes wrong. You might even find the seller is offering a discount if you use the non-Etsy store, or that the prices in the non-Etsy store are lower.
My own Etsy-Escape plan is still under construction, but if you'd like to stay posted, you can head over to www.bluechalice.co.uk and sign up to the mailing list. You'll get a discount code for my Etsy shop as well as future discounts for any other store I might decide to open.
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