Minority marketplaces of interest: Etsy

Sometimes, it seems that there are only two or three marketplaces, but on other occasions we have already shown you that there are alternatives to Amazon, Aliexpress or eBay that can be much more interesting than the more traditional and well-known marketplaces.

In the spirit of discovering these alternatives in depth, we have decided to analyze those we believe may be more interesting for you among these not so popular options. In this way, we hope to open up a new way for you to improve your business performance with complementary income from other channels that you may not yet be exploiting.

And today, we start with one that we are sure you are at least familiar with: Etsy.

Before we get into the subject of Etsy, let´s have a brief reflection to serve as a framework, context and starting point.

There is much debate about the advantages and disadvantages of the marketplace model of online sales. Obviously, having to pay a commission or the risk of losing control of the product makes us doubt it, despite the volume of business we can achieve.

The key, from our point of view, is to see it as an additional channel but not as a substitute for your own store. In fact, the ideal situation is to take advantage of the sales generated in the marketplace to build customer loyalty in our eCommerce (where we will always have more margin and can work on other strategies that benefit us as a brand).

Having made this point, let's get down to business.

Now, let´s go straight to the point and get into what it is, how it works and how much it costs to sell on Etsy. Everything you need to know to start assessing whether it is worth it or not to diversify your business on this platform.

Etsy is a marketplace with a considerable trajectory, one of the most veteran ones. Although it is not exactly unknown, the truth is that it is not particularly popular among the general public.

This is partly due to its focus and segmentation, which is aimed at turning Etsy into a platform for artisans, artists, creators and small or medium-sized businesses specializing in the sale of products made by hand or with manual processes.

Having said all this, its business volume is interesting and has a sustained but irregular growth over time. According to Statista data, its revenues in millions of dollars have been increasing since 2012, with a very important jump between 2019 and 2020.

Actually, Etsy is a certain "anomaly" that is a bit difficult to label. Is it a vertical marketplace or does it belong to the horizontal category? Is it closer to working a niche or, on the contrary, does it have such a diversified catalog that this definition falls short?

In particular, we think that it could be considered in a way as a hybrid. It has a sufficient number of categories to understand that it is not vertical at all, but that layer of craftsmanship on its inventory works as a way of relating all the products under a common denominator.

The registration itself has no mystery, it is as simple as creating a profile on any web service such as a social network or similar. There are a few minimal configuration steps.

Then, we choose a name for the store (which is actually more of a seller profile than a store as such) and start uploading products, entering in our private area the photographs, descriptions, quantity of product in stock, product variants (colors, for example), price, shipping methods, data for payment through Etsy Payments...

For any questions you may have, Etsy has a seller's manual that helps to sell and inspires you in matters ranging from photography to marketing through logistics tips or sales strategy. It is very complete, so I recommend you take a look at this knowledge base.

Selling on Etsy, logically, has a cost for you. Not so much the creation of the store itself which, in fact, is totally free.

They do charge for three other concepts which are: publication, transaction and payment processing:

These are the main costs along with the payment processing fee, which varies by country. Additionally, we have other optional costs, such as the cost of joining Etsy Plus with extra options for brands.