Selling off Etsy

[Former_Member]

From my understanding some people sell their items on other sites besides Etsy. What I have found, by far, Etsy has the lowest selling fees. For those of you that sell off Etsy, do you raise your prices, price the same as Etsy and bite the bullet or do you raise it on other sites? I dont have any leads to any stores on the other sites, they are self contained, but I worry about someone seeing the price differences.

As a side question, has anyone ever sold their handmade goods on Amazon.com? Any luck?


Thanks,
Melissa

[Former_Member]

There is a site for UK sellers called notonthehighstreet. They have a £700+VAT joining fee and then take 25% commission (the reason I decided to decline their offer)
Sellers that sell on there and Etsy have to,and do, raise their prices somewhat to make the same profit.
I guess it's down to sales though at the end of the day, and if you're happy to charge more, have more costs, but then have more sales from it.

[Former_Member]

Hi Melissa,
Ideally I try to keep things at the same price. This means that in some cases I get less profit on a single item. However, if the venue will generate more sales, this makes up for it in volume. If it won't generate more sales, it's generally not worth it to me to to take the cut in profit.

Sometimes though, items sell better at different prices at different venues so you kind of have to customize for each place you do choose to sell. I'd be more inclined to change my prices for a gallery or brick-and-mortar shop, and keep all my online prices the same.

[Former_Member]

I also sell on WePay, which has LOWER fees than Etsy and processes their own payments. Etsy gets much better traffic and the stores are nicer and stuff.

Amazon.com has really high seller fees, so I've not sold there... yet. It's only cost-effective if your sales volume is higher than mine.

I know many sellers also sell on Ebay. I don't because I had too many issues with buyers not paying for purchases when I sold off some collectable toys there. But there are those who do it successfully.

[ForgedMettleJewelry]

I used to have a shop on Smashing Darling, it was COMPLETELY free to have as many shops and items as you wanted with as many pictures as you wanted, but they would charge 18% if and when your item sold. not too bad since they handled all the money themselves, didn't need a payapl account or anything.

Sadly the closed the beggining of this month...

[herie7]

I sell some items on the eBay site but keep my prices the same even the the cost are higher. I make slightly less profit but still make a profit. For the brick and mortar shops my prices are definately higher than online but my fees are much higher for those locations. The items are also completely differnent within those 2 venues.

[Former_Member]

I sell on tophatter.com (an online live auction site), they take 10% of final sale, which is not too bad.
Ive sold 5 items on there, 2 were below what i usually sell for on etsy, but 3 were way higher, so it works out pretty good!

[Former_Member]

Great input everyone! I sell on Etsy and eBay. I keep my prices the same for Etsy and eBay (which caused me to raise my prices on Etsy) I switched from a regular account to a store account on eBay and got a lot more sales, making it totally worth it ($15 additional each month).
For a while, after opening the store, I was getting more sales on eBay, particularly international sales which they make so easy to create postage for.
I recently got approved to sell on Amazon, its terribly expensive $40 a month plus commission fees. I don't know what I was thinking, but it is only temporary trial run. I plan to focus Etsy, eBay and my own site.

What sites are good for creating your own web page. I want a simple clean site with it's own checkout, linked to paypal is fine.

Thanks again everyone!

[Former_Member]

I sell on a number of different venues and I make sure that my prices are identical on every venue.

The last thing that I would want would be for someone to buy from me on one site only to find out after the fact that they could have purchased the same item from me somewhere else for less!