EP 349 ETSY! Boycott the Platform or Use it as a Tool for Growth?

2:27PM Apr 21, 2022

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

etsy

business

people

pricing

selling

jewelry

website

shopify

sales

episode

strategy

hammered

branded

strike

instagram

build

podcast

week

platform

sellers

If you don't have a way to explain your story or the meaning behind the piece, or your technique, or the artistry that goes into something, then someone doesn't know. And they're going to, you know, want to haggle you on pricing if you can't communicate that. And so this is a very important part of brand positioning. Welcome to Thrive By Design, the podcast for ambitious independent jewelry brands, looking to profit from their products, get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love, without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product-based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing, and scaling your business. So you can spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? All right, let's do this.

Welcome to the Thrive By Design Podcast, Episode 349. Hey there. I'm Tracy Matthews, your host of the show today. And as usual, I'm excited to be here to talk about a controversial topic: Etsy, should you stay or should you go? I am recording this episode before this event is actually happening because I'm going out of town. But apparently, there is an Etsy strike that is happening on April 11. So by the time this episode drops, the Etsy strike will have happened. I won't know what has happened at Etsy strike and the impact of it. But I am curious, are you on Etsy? And if you are on Etsy, shoot me a note over @tracymatthewsny or @flourish_thrive on Instagram. And let me know how it's going for you. I really want to know. So if you want to take the time out, do it.

Now I am not against Etsy. And I haven't been in fact, the first time I ever heard about it was about back in 2006 when one of my employees, she's a part-time employee art student who was working for me in San Francisco. She's now a well-known jewelry designer. She started selling her work on Etsy, she made very structural modern types of jewelry. And she showed me she's like Tracy, look, I'm selling my jewelry on Etsy now, check it out. I didn't even know what Etsy was. But to me, in my mind, the place that it always held in my mind was for art students or people who were hobbyist who didn't have an established business yet. And so over the years, Etsy obviously has changed and grown and many people have grown very successful businesses on Etsy, sometimes too successful, in my opinion.

And I'm going to share why I think that in a minute. So a few weeks ago, I got a message from the Etsy Strike Instagram handle. And they asked if I would talk about this topic on my platform. So I decided to say yes, and we couldn't fit it in on the podcast earlier than now because we are already pre-recorded and had episodes planned. We had a window this week. So I'm doing it. And part of the thing is they're like, rise up with the sellers. They're increasing the fees. This was the message that I got: they're increasing the fees. And it's like really hurting the sellers. And so my team and I started doing some research and we started looking into the changes that Etsy was making. And it looks of all we could really find was that they were raising the seller fees from 5% to six and a half percent. And I did a Instagram live yesterday when I'm recording this. And one of my students who is in our Momentum program, mentioned that it's not just the Etsy fee increases, it's also that they're getting away, or getting rid of, I should say, of their customer support. So you can't talk to a live person at Etsy anymore. Honestly, I never thought you could talk to a live person. So that confused me a little bit. I'll take that person's word for it. I'm sure that's true. And I always thought that it was part of the frustration that people had with Etsy is because they couldn't pick up the phone and call someone and that they had to use like a virtual help desk, that if they couldn't get the answer that they were fighting for it was causing a lot of frustration.

In fact, I know several people who were out of business and didn't have any recourse from selling on Etsy. And they couldn't even pick up the phone and call to ask why or even plead their case. And this goes back to my earlier thing about how some people have built their business on Etsy, too big of a business. In fact, one of our students, they were in our community for a long time. They came to us to help optimize their business. They wanted to get off Etsy and start transitioning all those online sales to their website. But they were unwilling to actually dig in and do the work because they were so busy with their Etsy store they were doing maybe $500,000 a year. And I get it because I'm one of those people I'm very I can get very reactive in business. And if you don't take the time to slow down and step back, it becomes really hard to fix the problems in your business. They did not fix this problem. And their entire Etsy shop got shut down. They lost a $500,000, a year in revenue jewelry company, and they went on a business and in a way, they're kind of like this was actually a gift. But also, it was a huge struggle because one of the founders who it was a husband and wife team had to go back and get a job somewhere, and then work on the evenings to start making the jewelry. It's like they were just starting over, because the balance of sales 500,000 coming from Etsy and 50,000, coming from their website only. And they had to sustain expenses and stuff like that. So for them, it was really tragic. And we have some other designers in our community who have a thriving robust, very successful Etsy businesses. And they are in a mad dash many of them, especially the ones that are Momentum program to get off Etsy, or to transition some of those Etsy customers to their branded website so that they can make more sales to those people and own the customer base.

And this is a really important point here. I've never been against people selling on Etsy, I think that they're putting their business in jeopardy, if that's their primary source of revenue, a lot of the jewelry there is underpriced. And I just did a Pricing and Positioning workshop this week. And the jewelry is underpriced there often it becomes a race to pricing to the bottom to try and get the best thing. And a lot of times the shoppers on Etsy are like popping around to see if they can get the best deal. And then there's a lot of people ripping other people off and trying to resell similar items, the whole thing is just a mess. So unless you have something that's super unique and different and original, and you've really developed a strategy on Etsy, it can be really challenging. And if you're advertising on Etsy, I heard that the fees are in like 20 to 25% range or something like that, which is great because it helps get your products shown. But it becomes another issue because it's even so much more of a percentage that they're taking, you might as well be selling at wholesale. At that point, you know, it's different, but almost the same. So I've always maintained that Etsy, if you're going to do it should be a way to capture passive traffic, and to get just random one-off sales here and there when people stumble across your shop. And if it ends up being a great revenue stream, then awesome. Same thing with Amazon Handmade or any of these other third-party sellers.

And so a lot of people were asking me like, what should we do? Should we participate in this strike? And I don't know, how would you approach it, Tracy? And so I came up with a couple of talking points that I want to talk about. And I think one of the biggest issues here really comes down to 'Are you pricing and positioning your products right? So if you're not sure about that, and you'd like some help, and or you are really trying to get to that six-figure in annual sales mark on business, but you feel like you're always broke or you're struggling to get the sales and you don't know why you're competing, you feel like you're competing against all these other people. And it's hard to stand out. Well, we have an amazing program that I love to invite you to check out called Laying The Foundation, that is a 12-week program, you get access to my team of coaches for an entire year while you're implementing, and you get lifetime access to the course content, and materials. So if you want to build a brand that is positioned so that you become the only choice in the eyes of your perfect customers, you start building a system of repeat sales, and building a really strong direct to consumer revenue stream, in addition to your other revenue streams like wholesale or Etsy or, you know, whatever social media selling, then it's a great program, you can check it out. I'll also have the link in the show notes over at flourishthrive academy.com/ltf. Or you can just reach out to us over at support at flourishthriveacademy.com.

Now I'm just gonna get right to it. Here's what I would do. The first thing that I would actually say to someone is like, where do you want to put your energy? And it seems like people there's a lot of people putting a lot of energy into this strike and getting all up into a half. They want to put Etsy out of business which, okay, maybe and at the same time, like if you're only selling on Etsy, are you it's a really strong revenue stream for you. If you put them out of business, you basically just cut your arm off, is it worth it? Or do you want to focus your energy on something that's actually going to serve you? So one of the things that I like to think, you know, there's I was at a workshop a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about impostor syndrome, versus being in a place of co-creation for your business.

So impostor syndrome looks like being in victim mode, being reactive all the time. You know, being the martyr and stuff like that being in creation mode is like acting like a creator or coaching or being strategic with the way that you show up. But one of the things that really struck me is this victim mode like "Woe is me,this is happening to me and we need to do all these things and, you know, fight for our rights", which is great, you know, I'm fully supportive of that. And there's maybe a different way to approach it, which is if you are coming from a creator mode and thinking, like, how can I use this to take a look at my business and see what I'm doing to make some changes? And so that kind of puts you in a place of power, as opposed to a place of victimhood, and allows you to strategically say, okay, they're raising their fees, they're taking away support, is this a time for me to think of my business differently, maybe I've put too many eggs in this basket. Maybe it's time for me to, you know, think about how I'm selling, and maybe there's some other sales channels that I want to investigate right now that are going to serve me better in the long run, because they will be more profitable. And I'm going to have full control over my revenue, and the sales that I'm making in my business, which means at the end of the day, I'll probably get to take home a little bit more money. So I want you to first think like, where do you want to put your energy?

Now the second thing that I want you to be thinking about is, it could be as simple as just increasing your pricing by 1.5%. My guess is that a lot of the people who are stressed out about this pricing thing or not pricing their jewelry properly, Etsy is one of those platforms that people completely underpriced their jewelry. In fact, a couple years ago, this was probably like 10 years ago, I was designing a hammered band, actually two wedding bands for some friends that I knew from San Francisco. They were yoga teachers. And they really wanted to work with me because they know me for a while. And I was just kind of launching into my custom jewelry, business, all the things. So they were looking for examples for inspiration. I did a lot of things with hammer texturing. At the time, they had seen my work. And I knew that I would design things in this vein, but they had sent me a bunch of examples from Etsy, the exact same hammered kind of style bands that I designed and sold for at that time, I think it was $1,200, I probably sell them more for $1,500 now. They're about six millimeter wide hammered men's bands with engraving. That person was selling them for $300 on Etsy, and I sold them for how much I sold them for, I think $1,200 at the time. If you think about that, like I know how much those things cost to make. I know what the labor is I know how much the gold costs, that person was not making any money, like maybe 10% markup on the cost of the materials. And I don't even know how they incorporated the labor in there. I mean, I'm assuming that they probably made it. And so people are way underpricing their jewelry on Etsy. That's why people shop on Etsy because they're getting like this cool stuff for such a great deal. But it's not really positioning you as an artist or someone who can command a premium price point, right? And so, you know, it was always fascinating to me that they had seen the price of this thing that they showed me for inspiration, the ring I designed from them was quite different. But at the end of the day, they were showing me this piece for inspiration, I had the same pieces on my website for that I sold for $1,200, now 1500. And they were willing to pay that much more for something designed by me. And I want you to think about why that might be, why would someone be willing to pay more a lot more, almost three or four times more for something that is positioned the right way, as opposed to something that they could find on Etsy.

So it's a completely different frame in the eyes of someone like there's this amazing artist who I'm friendly with her name is Ashley Longshore she was I think Episode 4, maybe on the podcast, you should dig it up years and years ago, I asked her to interview her because she's like, at the time was charging like anywhere from five to $20,000 for a painting. Now her paintings are much more expensive. She flies around the world on private jets. And she is not afraid to charge for her work. And there's a lot of people designing things or making things are ripping her off, and probably knocking her off and selling similar types of styles for way less, you know, on a platform like Etsy or wherever. And she just keeps moving forward and doesn't care. And she's like, this is what I'm worth, this is what it's worth. And I'm willing to charge that.

So I want you to really think about your pricing structure. Are you pricing enough? And if you don't know you probably need to take a program or a course. It's going to teach you a solid pricing strategy like our Laying The Foundation program. The coaches and our diamond insiders, Nicole, Dawn and Sarah and Lauren, our community manager, they say the number one question that they get, the number one thing that baffles the most people when they're taking Laying The Foundation is when they go through their Pricing module, because we go so in-depth and their mind is blown for a very specific reason. It's blown because they hadn't realized that they were charging less than wholesale pricing to the general public for years. And they can't figure out why they're broke or why they're struggling or why their business can't pay them. This is why this is one of the main reasons why it's massive, and also being able to design to elevate the value of your pieces, which is called perceived value. Most people don't know how to do this, they don't understand that concept of perceived value. But if you don't have a way to explain your story, or the meaning behind the piece, or your technique, or the artistry that goes into something, then someone doesn't know. And they're going to, you know, want to haggle you on pricing if you can't communicate that. And so this is a very important part of brand positioning, if you don't get it right, you're going to be stuck in this same pricing loop forever.

Now, the next thing that I want you to be thinking about, like, what should you do with this Etsy conundrum? Should you boycott the platform or use it as a tool for growth? Well, my thought is, its like how can you use this to be strategic about growing your business? Can it just be a second source of revenue that you capture an audience for? And then what happens next, after someone buys from you on Etsy? How are you using that opportunity to get them to subscribe to your email list, to build your audience to make a sale later, to follow up and get a repeat sale? You know, there's, that's the same thing as what I just said. But basically, it's the same thing. So there's a lot of strategies that you can use, including putting inserts in the box, offering something for free if they opt into your email list. So something for free could be anything from like a free polishing cloth. It could be a free pair of earrings, a giveaway, it could be a discount by shopping on your website, maybe it's a massive discount for a limited time, maybe it's getting a free gift card or something. If they get on the website, you can also put that gift card inside the box for use solely on the website. So the reason why this is so important is the more that you can move customers off of Etsy, and build your email list and build your own branded audience. And this goes the same for selling on social media and selling other places too. It can become really powerful. Build your audience outside of this platform.

And then once you do, this might be a great opportunity for you. Right now, as you're listening to this episode to really consider; is my website optimized for sales? Do I have a strategy to move traffic from a third-party platform like Instagram or Tik Tok or anything else? On to my Shopify website? Am I doing that? It was funny because this came up in our Diamond Insiders group, this whole conversation about the Etsy strike a bunch of people were like, Yeah, finally looking at Shopify, now I'm taking the energy to do it. And a bunch of people who've been on Shopify for a while have said, Oh, my gosh, it was the best move that ever made. Because besides all the features that Shopify has, it has such an amazing customer support desk, that they will get on the phone with you for hours to help you figure out any Shopify problem that you have. So if you're struggling with whatever, and so that makes it really user-friendly, right for anyone out there who's trying to build their own website.

So I just want to mention this my opinion, just to recap, is to think through where you're spending your energy, and how can you use this opportunity to shift or change your strategy in a way that is actually going to serve you? How can you get out of feeling hopeless into a place of feeling powerful? How can you use this as an opportunity to look at your pricing structure? Is there something that needs to change there? How can you use this as an opportunity to be strategic and use Etsy as another source or a way to move customers into your own marketing funnel?

And then how can you use Etsy to actually build your audience for the long haul? So I've talked about a lot today, but primarily just some mindset pieces. When it comes to this, I would love to really know like what you're doing. So if you want to just shoot me a DM over on social @tracymatthewsny on Instagram or @flourish_thrive, I'd be happy to chat with you about your strategy. Also, if you are thinking about Shopify, I'm going to have a link to a free trial in the show notes so that you can use our free trial you get a couple of weeks for free. And this was a great way to check out and see if Shopify has something interesting for you. And yeah, that's all so if you've enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot and post it on social and if you haven't done so yet, give me a little a rating and review. I would love to hear from you. And if all this sounds great, and you're not really sure what you need help with but you want some help with your business right now. Please head over we offer Free Strategy Audits to jewelry makers, designers, product business owners, who are you know, wanting some support and coaching in their business, but they're not sure how we can help them so if you're someone who's like, hey, you know, Flourish and Thrive has these amazing programs. I'm not sure which one to join I mean, shoot me a DM on Instagram once again and we're happy to help. Thank you so much for listening to this episode today. I am super stoked to be here every single week. And I hope this short sweet episode really helped you think through your Etsy strategy.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. It's my mission to help thousands of creative businesses inside and outside the jewelry space use their creativity to make money. Make sure that you're subscribed to Thrive By Design on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and wherever podcasts are played. And we'd love to hear what you think. Please rate and review the show and if you're inspired, please share this with your friends. Cheers to seeing you flourish and thrive!