etsy Archives - exportfeed

What is Etsy marketplace? Is it suitable for my business?

January 26, 2021 Nishant A. Comment

Etsy is the biggest marketplace for handmade items, vintage goods, and craft supplies, with over 2,500 active sellers and 33.4 million buyers!

What makes Etsy so attractive for DIY entrepreneurs is its community of makers, small-business owners, and shoppers who share a passion for rare goods.

If those points resonate with you, you’ll definitely reach new heights for your business by joining Etsy.

Do I need a business license to sell on Etsy?

As of 2021, Etsy doesn’t require its sellers to have a business license to sell on Etsy.

That said, you must still follow any regional laws that apply to you as an online business.

We suggest that you consult a professional business lawyer before joining Etsy to ensure that your business idea is legal.

How much does it cost to sell on Etsy?

Listing fees: You will be charged a listing fee of $0.20 USD for each item that you list for sale on Etsy.com or Etsy’s mobile apps.

Transaction fees: You will be charged a transaction fee of 5% of the price you display for each listing plus the amount you charge for shipping and gift wrapping.

Etsy will automatically deduct all fees owed from your payment account.

What do I need to get started on Etsy?

Getting started on Etsy is fairly straightforward. Here’s a basic list of everything you need.

Create a new Etsy account
Create a unique name for your Etsy shop
Prepare the details for your product, which include
- Digital product photos (800 – 1000 pixels wide)
- A list of words that best describe your product – use these for tags and titles.
- Know the appropriate selling price
- Keep shipping costs into account
Go live with your Etsy shop!
- Creating an account is free of cost
- You’ll need to link a debit/credit card
- Your checking account info (account and routing number)

Setting up your Etsy shop the right way

Banner and shop logo: Upload high-definition images that represent your brand’s style and make a strong first impression on potential customers.

Shop announcement: Share a brief welcome message with shoppers.

In the About section, Explain to your customers how your business came into existence, your vision for your brand, and the story behind your products.

Shop members: Introduce any other members of your team or people you collaborate with.

Shop policies: State policies for shipping, returns, exchanges, payments, custom orders, or any other guidelines that are important for shoppers to know before they place an order.

If your business is based in the US, we suggest purchasing USPS Shipping Labels on Etsy. You can save up to 30% more than the USPS retail rates you would pay at the post office or elsewhere online. Learn more about USPS here.

Listing your products to your Etsy shop

Once you fill in all the information required for your shop section, you can add products to your Etsy store.

Displaying your products for sale is called a listing.

Things to remember while listing your products

Optimize your Etsy shop for Etsy search.
Add your location to make your store visible to local buyers
Link all of your social media accounts to benefit from Etsy’s exposure
Explore paid advertising for keywords related to your products
Promote offers to incentivize the value of your products
Join the Etsy community and teams and network with your niche’s best-sellers

At this point, you might be wondering whether it’s better to sell on Shopify or Etsy.

Take a look at this article, where we discuss whether selling on Shopify or Etsy is better for your business!

Have more questions about Etsy? Feel free to contact our support!

Visit Digital Product Labs’ Etsy Blog Series for more tips, tricks, and tutorials on selling successfully on Etsy!

Dropshipping on Etsy in 2021: Pros and Cons

May 29, 2020 Nishant A. Comment

The popularity of dropshipping over the years has led almost every new and aspiring entrepreneur to consider this business model at least once in their lifetime – especially with Etsy.

The main question is, however, not if other people are dropshipping on Etsy – its whether it is legal.

Let’s get right into it.

Is dropshipping on Etsy allowed?

Etsy’s policies do not directly mention anything related to banning ‘dropshipping’ on their entire website.

What they do admit is that they allow reselling in some cases.

“‘Reselling’ is selling an item that you, the seller, did not make or design.”

Technically, this is all dropshippers need as a loop-hole to the anti-dropship policies.

Another crucial point to remember is that Etsy only allows reselling in vintage and craft supplies categories.

If you’re thinking about reselling from a third-party supplier to Etsy, then it is outright illegal and you’ll end up behind bars.

Why is dropshipping on Etsy so popular?

As of 2019, close to 45.7 million buyers had purchased goods through the Etsy ecosystem.

Biggest targeted audience: This audience is specifically shopping for hand-crafted, artisanal or vintage items.

Reputation: Etsy has a special place in every artist-turned-entrepreneurs’ hearts. They are strict with not letting any corporations take over their marketplace and promote originality.

Supportive community: Etsy has a huge community of active sellers who help each other out that makes it feel like a family rather than an E-commerce website.

However, its not all sunshine and rainbows. Let’s look at some downsides of dropshipping on Etsy.

Cons of dropshipping on Etsy

Hefty fees: Etsy charges a $0.2 listing fee along with a 5% transaction fee. Combine that with the shipping charge and wrapping costs and you have the actual number.

If you’re thinking about redirecting your Etsy visitors to your dropship store, don’t even think about it because it is strictly prohibited.

Termination of Wholesale program: On July 31st, 2018 Etsy terminated the closest thing to dropshipping program that existed making it almost impossible to safely dropship on the platform.

Listings expiry: Your listings expire after four months. This means doing the whole listing process all over again if you do not have too many customers dying to buy from you.

Sanctions policy: This policy allows third-party payment services like PayPal to have the authority to independently monitor purchases and block them if necessary.

Limits for scaling: Etsy, by nature, is not designed for people who want to mass-sell their products, which is the exact plan of most dropshippers. If you ever reach a state where you have so many orders, it’ll be time to leave the marketplace.

Uncertain future for dropshippers: Almost every dropshipper on Etsy is anxious about when they’ll implement a strong policy that strictly forbids any loophole that is allowing them to dropship. Most think it’s only a matter of time before a strict policy is in place.

What is the best option for dropshipping on Etsy?

We’d strongly suggest that you not stay entirely dependent on Etsy’s marketplace and operate your own dropshipping store at the same time.

Your standalone E-commerce store will also allow you to sell to other merchants such as Amazon, Google Shopping, eBay and more.

However, doing it manually will take loads of time and effort on your part.

This is where ExportFeed can help you shorten and automate the whole process.
Get started for free and jumpstart your dropshipping business today!

Bonus Tip: Not sure whether to sell on Shopify or Etsy? Click here to find your answer!

Trending digital products on Etsy during the Coronavirus phase

April 7, 2020 Nishant A. Comment

Coronavirus has affected individuals and businesses worldwide on a massive scale.

When all of the consumers are limited to the periphery of their residence, there’s not much to sell besides digital products.

One of the rather unsurprising results from this pandemic has been a peak in internet usage – people depend on the virtual world to keep them entertained while trying to hold on to their sanity.

Despite all of this, there have been some digital products that have been trending on Etsy starting from December when the Coronavirus was just being discovered.

If you’ve been on the fence about investing in a different business model, here are some products that might be of interest to you.

You can find the search volume, SEO & paid difficulty along with keyword ideas to help you get started on selling these digital products on Etsy.

Printable Stickers

Stickers are one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing for businesses.

You probably have seen custom stickers on cars, signs, bathroom stalls, doors and so forth.

While people staying at home might not be going around showing off stickers, they are still printing them out of boredom or just to give their room an upgrade.

Greeting cards

There is nothing quite like a greeting card that can send a special message to someone you care about.

They combine the power of beautiful images along with poetic words to make the receiver of the card grateful for the gift.

While any of the other digital products might go out of fashion, these are definitely here to stay.

Printable coloring pages

The search volume alone for printable coloring pages should give you an idea about how popular they are from kids to adults alike.

There has been a significant increase in printable coloring pages’ search volume ever since December which clearly shows a lot of isolated individuals have turned to them to ignite their creative side.

Printable business cards

You might be wondering who could be interested in printing business cards at this time but the numbers clearly show no sign of decrease in its popularity.

Printable business cards let entrepreneurs showcase their business while facilitating the networking process.

Snapchat filter

From house parties and weddings to coffee shops and campus-wide events, Snapchat offers a filter for everything.

You can target a niche audience and create a filter that has a special place in their hearts.

While the average order value might not be too high for these filters, you should definitely consider creating and selling a wide variety of Snapchat filters to make a decent profit out of them.

Printable wedding invite

While it is obvious that no one’s really planning on getting married any time soon, printable wedding invites still have a significant search volume with the hardest paid difficulty in this list.

Printable wedding invites are a great way of cutting costs since you do not have to hire a designer and make the design from scratch.

Printable planners

Sometimes life can seem too overwhelming just because you have no way of tracking all the things that you’re supposed to do at the same time.

Printable planners are a great way of keeping your daily tasks organized.

This is a great solution for people who are working from home to keep track of their pending tasks.

Printable calendar

Calendars have been used since the beginning of time.

The only difference between the primitive ones and the ones we use today would be the design, really.

Just like any other digital product, you could make a good earning by targeting a niche market and offer printable calendars based on that product/brand/TV-series or whatnot.

Fonts

Fonts come in all shapes and sizes. The choices are endless for businesses to choose one that aligns with their brand.

Every product you’ve ever purchased or the artist you’ve listened to has a unique font that helps them stand out from everyone else.

Since most businesses prefer using a unique font, you can offer numerous templates and let your customers choose for themselves.

Business logo

Logos are another crucial component of your business’ brand.

It is often referred to as the face of a company.

While the paid difficulty is slightly higher than the others in this list, you can definitely earn from selling logo templates of a small size for free and high-resolution options as a paid package.

We hope this list of trending digital products on Etsy was helpful for you to prioritize exactly which business you might want to invest in.

However, you will still need help with sending your products to Etsy than spending countless hours creating a manual product feed.

The best solution to list your products on Etsy

ExportFeed is one of the best solutions that not only lets you list your products on Etsy but also to 40+ other merchants and marketplaces.

It’s pretty logical to make your products’ presence known in multiple platforms if you really want to make big numbers in revenue.

You can give it a free try and see for yourself how it shortens the entire process.

Real-time and metafield sync for Etsy Released!

February 5, 2020 Nishant A. Comment

We’re starting 2020 strong with a much-needed feature that has been requested by ExportFeed’s customers for some time.

Our development team has been quite busy working on new features while making sure they’re quality-tested very meticulously before releasing them.

Let’s dive right into it!

Real-time sync

ExportFeed customers will now be able to sync all of their orders and inventory in real-time instantly. Pretty self-explanatory.

This will be a huge benefit for Shopify stores that have hundreds of thousands of products. You can be assured that you do not oversell or undersell because of slow sync time.

Pricing packages eligible for real-time sync

Since this is an exclusive feature that is suitable for bigger stores, we’re offering real-time sync to two packages:

Super Seller ($89.99/month with 100k SKUs) and
Platinum Seller ($129.99/month with over 100k SKUs)

Metafield sync

ExportFeed is one of the first companies to roll out this exclusive meta-field sync feature.

It will not only help you stay visible across multiple search engines but also help you reach a significantly bigger audience and ultimately result in higher sales.

Here’s what meta-field sync can fetch from your products and feed them to search engines like Google and Bing:

SEO title
Amazon bullets
Custom price
Google Schema support
Search engine friendly data

Pricing packages eligible for metafield sync

You will be able to enjoy the full benefits of ExportFeed’s metafield sync feature with three packages:

Advance Seller ($59.99/month with upto 50k SKUs)
Super Seller ($89.99/month with 100k SKUs) and
Platinum Seller ($129.99/month with over 100k SKUs)

What if I am already subscribed to these plans?

You have nothing to worry about.

If you have purchased any of these eligible subscription packages, you will still be able to integrate the metafield and real-time sync feature through your existing dashboard.

Interested to learn more about these features? Get in touch with our support team and we’ll set everything up in no time!

WooCommerce Etsy Integration issues & how to solve them – Explained

October 23, 2018 Roshan B Comment

Handmade products are highly in demand in the US market, especially post-COVID.

But reaching out to the customers who are looking for them is difficult in the beginning. For that, it is a popular practice to use WooCommerce plugin on the WordPress platform to create an online presence.

This is definitely a good idea. But, more people search for handmade products on Etsy than on any specific retailers’ WooCommerce based site. This is the reason why WooCommerce Etsy Integration is important which we will discuss here.

Sell on Etsy or Sell on Shopify? How about Shopify Etsy sync?

July 1, 2018 Roshan B Comment

Etsy is a marketplace where you can sell handmade products, unique items, and antiques. Its visitors are mostly from the USA and neighboring countries.

So, if you are planning to sell in a specific region, Etsy is one merchant that you should not miss listing your products with. And if you are already selling through your own Shopify-based store, ExportFeed offers you the unique opportunity of Shopify Etsy Sync.