A few months ago I decided I was going to “close” my Etsy shop, and I let the listings expire. The last one expired on July 24th, so now I’m gonna write a wrap up post on my experience with Etsy and why I decided to move all my listings on Ko-Fi.

This is not going to be a post about Etsy is good/bad, but mostly about my experience with it. Ultimately, it didn’t work out because I didn’t put enough work into it because after the initial obsession, I drifted towards other creative endeavours.

1) My Etsy never took off.

I made 5 sales in total, and they were driven by paid ads on Etsy. I was never able to keep driving traffic consistently with or without ads, and there’s a couple of reasons:

• Not enough consistent new products: Initially I tried to publish a new pattern a month, but when I started in art school, I dropped the ball, as I diverted my artistic energy to it. My designs are all original from my messy brain and it takes already several hours to wrangle them out my head onto paper.
• Low social media activity: it’s very hard to get traffic from Etsy search without ads. SEO is very important according to online sources, but I was never able to nail it. On the other hand, posting regularly on Instagram/Facebook is hard work and I couldn’t keep up. A lot of traffic is driven by sharing in dedicated Facebook groups, and while I’m in many, I’m more of a lurker.
• Too many cats on the on the internet: while everyone loves cats, that means that there is a sea of cat cross stitch patterns available. While I tried to make my designs original and funny, it’s hard to emerge in an highly saturated market.

2) It’s a lot of work!

A lot of internet gurus will tell you (in exchange for some outrageous fee) how easy it is to make a passive income with minimal effort. Not that I ever bought in this bullshit, but as I worked on the first few patterns, I realized how many more tasks need to be done to be able to publish a new one: pictures, descriptions, links, etc etc. and while I managed to streamline it with templates and excel, it still took me about 2 hours to get all the extra bits ready and to upload a new listings. This in addition to countless of hours to design and create the pattern itself.

3) A few pet peeves

While the failure was mostly due to waning attention, there are a few things that really really I mean really annoyed me:

• Scam messages: in the year my shop was open, I’ve received countless scam messages, which wasted my time as I needed to open Etsy on my laptop and spam them.
• Passive income gurus and the like: the constant stream of ads and messages I got on Instagram from these people promising me to get rich quick, which disappeared as soon as I stopped using any Etsy related hashtag.
• Pattern mills and AI stuff: there’s just too much stuff out there and Etsy does very little to keep out non handmade stuff.

4) Etsy Vs Ko-Fi

Finally, a few points as to why I moved to Ko—Fi.

• Creating a listing on Etsy is more time consuming, there are way more fields to fill than Ko-Fi. I find Ko-Fi quicker.
• Etsy has an initial investment with the listing fee, plus various fees and tax. Ko-Fi will charge you only after a sale. I haven’t made any sale on Ko-Fi yet, so not sure how it compare fully in terms of sales. On the other hand, since Ko-Fi has no listing fee, I could list my free patterns on it, so I know when they are downloaded (which it makes me very happy because someone liked them).
• Ko-Fi doesn’t have a product search like Etsy, and it needs traffic to be driven to it from social media. On the other hand, I got so little traffic from Etsy itself, so it makes very little difference. This seems to be a general problem as Etsy introduced a discounted fee when someone purchased from a link shared outside Etsy.

So, that’s a (partial) wrap! I will be back with more patterns, I have a few ideas and a few sketches.

What has been your experience with Ko-Fi and/or Etsy?