I'm sure you've all heard various stories in the News about how Etsy are withholding money from the sellers and claiming a variety of reasons for this and often withholding the money for over 3 months and how this is seriously impacting the business of these sellers. Well, this latest move is just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of practices that have been implemented over the past few years that have gradually chipped away at sellers ability to run their stores the way that they want and undermined sellers ability to control their own finances, including no longer accepting Stripe or Paypal, you have to accept their own in-house finance system. They also implemented terms, and put them in black and white, that if a seller does not offer "free shipping" then that seller's items would in no uncertain terms be buried to the back of beyond. No one can afford to give "free shipping", that is just ludicrous. Their solution? Add it onto the item price and charge the customer for the "free shipping". That is just wrong, on all counts. Regardless of whether you charge for shipping separately or add it in with the item Etsy take their cut, they charge sales commission on everything, including the postage/shipping. They also insist that if you do well and bring in lots of customers yourself by word of mouth, craft markets, social media etc and take over a certain amount in sales in a year then you have to subscribe to their advertising charges if you want to keep using their site to sell your goods on. Hang on, hang on, I do well, gets lots of followers and buyers all by my own hard work and without paying for advertisements, you take your cut of my hard work from the sales commission on the amount of sales I've bought in and then you want more by insisting that I pay a certain amount of advertising that I don't actually need? I'm already fighting to be seen amongst all the mass produced cheap imported tat that they claim is not on their website but it is. I'm not standing for this anymore.
I've not been happy for a long time but with Covid and everything else I've let things slide because most of what I make is for weddings and other events, which just were not happening during Covid lockdown, and I just couldn't be bothered to advertise and promote my goods for events that were just not happening. I was still making stuff and spinning and blogging when I could but my heart hasn't been in it and my mental health took a dive like many others during Covid. I used the very long Covid lockdown to undertake a British Sheep Breeds study in fibre form, which I still have to blog about, even though I finished making that about a year ago.
I have spent the entire month of August moving my entire shop inventory from Etsy and setting myself back up in my old shop on Folksy, I never closed the account. I've had to re-format all of the product photos to fit the preferred dimensions on Folksy and re-write the descriptions to fit the smaller space available on Folksy but whilst this has been time consuming it was really needed as Etsy had encouraged the sellers to add so much "un-needed bloody crap" to their descriptions that it was like reading War and Peace. All item descriptions are now slim-lined but still informative and my entire stock is listed on there, including the shawls that I made over a year ago and just never got around to adding to my shop. I've even been able to reduce the prices by an average of 10%, even after adding in the now separate postage/shipping charge, compared to before, that's how much I'm saving on fees and passing it on to you, my customers.
Folksy do not charge sales commission on the postage/shipping costs nor do they insist that you offer "free shipping" or threaten to bury your listings to the back of beyond if you don't. They don't hold onto your money, they don't charge you random fees for stuff, buyers can pay by Paypal or Stripe, sellers get billed monthly with no money being taken from them beforehand if they get money come in from a sale and they don't insist on sellers paying for advertising under any circumstances. Another plus is that everything has to be handmade, no mass produced allowed and they keep checks on this and take action and also no resellers either and everything is handmade in the UK. You have to be living, working, creating in the UK to be a seller but you can live anywhere in the world to be a buyer.
I have also spent time catching up on the blog posts that I just never got around to writing. OK, I still have the British Breeds stuff to write up but that should be done over the next month or so and I will be concentrating on this rather than making stuff for the time being, there are farmers out there that are probably cursing me right now for not writing it up and helping to promote the rare breeds I said I would.
The only drawback right now, that I can see, is that I seem to have lost the ability to tag products on Instagram, I've lost my Instagram shopping rights and my Facebook shop seems to have disappeared from view, even though it is there and there is a Facebook Catalogue and everything but then I have read tonight that Facebook shops are now only available to users in certain countries, and I think that is specific to the US, everyone else can "go get screwed" when you read between the very complex lines of text. I don't understand how a globally used product can resist its worldwide users from a given date and only favour those from one country, very unfair.
Well, if you want to shop with me just click on the image...
