If you have just started your human-scale business, Etsyhelps individuals to find their place in the market. Central to Etsy is the craftsmanship and authorship of businesses. Categories of products sold at Etsy include art, vintage, jewelry, home and living, and many more. At Etsy, you can discover and sell new and unique items easily. In principle, Etsy is the place for new businesses to test waters and see their potentials in big markets. As much as Etsy provides for growth of new ventures, its scalability also offers flexible functionality and features for the development of the business. Most Etsy online merchants said they just started the shop as a hobby, and now things have grown enormous with high investment returns.
Overview of Etsy
Etsyworks as a marketplace for homemade items and small businesses. Taking pride in its simple but reliable templates, Etsy offers varied categories that local economies can use. The administration panel allows the seller to add items easily and smoothly adding necessary details including SEO value. The Etsy Circle is a massive community architecture that allows customers to pro-actively engage into a marketing venture.
With Etsy, customers can discover new vibrant products of communities throughout the globe. It fosters wider scope of market to engage with most number of customers through communities. Within these communities, businesses can converse with customers, bringing the products closer to buyers. Like eBay and other marketplaces, Etsy is best for selling and buying items. However, there have been complaints that Etsy is not making a step to safeguard customers from unscrupulous and fraud shops. Undelivered items and overpriced additional fees are common issues raised by customers.
Website Design
Creating an attention-grabbing and eye-stunning Etsy shop is easy and fun. You can customize the storefront to increase its capability to draw customers and drive more traffic to your store. Adding a banner can be tweaked for a better branding of your store. On the other hand, you can create store announcements to tell customers you are on sale or giving discounts on selected items. With the aid of the announcement, you can hype up the shopping or buying behavior of consumers.
Nonetheless, you don't need to put all things on one place within the store. Organizing items, especially if you are selling different products across various categories, can help customers find the right product they need without wasting time. Hassle and inconvenience are two cores why shopping carts are abandoned by most consumers.
Back Office
Step-by-step administration of Etsy shop offers novice online merchants an opportunity to focus more on promotion rather than control. Uploading images, managing items for sale, and changing the design of the shop are few of the things you can do through the Etsy shop administration dashboard. Customizing titles, descriptions, and tags of items can be done in few clicks and you don't need to suffer the drawback of long and tedious coding processes. A template for adding new products guides online merchants on sorting categories of sold products. Few of the items you can edit in Etsy shop administration dashboard include: images, product information or description, review and post, and product name.
Shopping Features
For a topnotch customer shopping satisfaction, Etsy offers a Relevancy Search tool. This tool can look up and retrieve information from the Etsy shop database for specific products customers are locating. It cuts the time spent on finding new items that meet needs of customers. The tool increases the conversion capability of your Etsy shop. However, as a setback, the Relevancy Search Tool does not offer a fine architecture on how to coordinate attributes to the filtering tool.
One of the things that online merchants should remember when using Etsy is their Do's and Don'ts. In theory, you own the store you setup on Etsy, but in practice. Etsy reserves the right to suspend, deactivate or delete the shop when their review teams judged the store having a violation against Etsy rules. To avoid these situations, online merchants must ship their items from the their shops and avoid drop shipping. It may add a tremendous amount of work, but it will retain your store's presence on Etsy's selling platform.
Payment Options
After shopping and finding new products, paying for the order is the next big concern. Customers can pay orders through Paypal without sticking to the email address preset in the PayPal account. It gives customers an opportunity to choose the most convenient shopping address at the moment without changing anything on their PayPal account.
Aside from PayPal payment gateway, Etsy shops also accept credit card processing, money orders, check payment, and several others. Varied payment gateways provide a wider scope of market and caters to most number of customers. In any payment method, Etsy offers simplified checkout processing to avoid abandonment of shopping carts.
Tax Customization
Aside from the capability to ship items on various locations across the globe, Etsy supports full compliance on government statutes concerning taxes. For international shipping, you must inform customers that they will be paying custom duties and taxes. By giving heads up on consumers, you can avoid losing your market. Full disclosure is very important that concealing information for the sake of triggering sale at the moment.
Aside from the capability to ship items on various locations across the globe, Etsy supports full compliance on government statutes concerning taxes. For international shipping, you must inform customers that they will be paying custom duties and taxes. By giving heads up on consumers, you can avoid losing your market. Full disclosure is very important that concealing information for the sake of triggering sale at the moment.
For concerns of VAT taxes, you can add the tax cost on the total price of products. It is the best thing you can do with Etsy because the selling platform has been silent on giving options to include automatic tax calculation. However, you may create customize fields for tax options. You may add a zip code mapping of customers to evaluate taxes applicable on the sale.
Marketing Features
Through Etsy communities, online merchants can collaborate with other businesses to give reviews or comparison of products with the aim of promoting products in various approaches. Online merchants may approve or not any review created in the community; in the same manner, review request can also be declined by other members or past customers.
The Etsy Showcase gives online merchants a lift on promotions and advertising. Advertising spots are sold every month to help new businesses find customers. With the functionality, you can add products for showcase on the homepage of Etsy for a wider scope. The good thing about internal Etsy advertising is the low cost. You can get much from customer engagement for the conversion sales, but you don't need to suffer the drawback of paying hefty advertising fees.
Security Features
Using the secure socket layer (SSL) security feature, credit card information or any form of financial data will be protected from frauds or identity theft due to hacking. The database and server of Etsy comply with the requirement of PCI environment. Consumers are also assured that any information or data supplied to Etsy will be not be shared with other parties.
Various professional bugs are used to check traffic. Authentication and certifications must be provided prior to retrieval of information, in whatever transaction done on the Etsy shop. In the same way, Etsy mobile is also supported and protected by reliable data security technology.
Customer Support
Etsy shop owners have complained on the lack of resources or guides on how to use Etsy in selling products. Information on how to add tags, title products, use attributes, or use the Relevancy Search Tool with regards to SEO, and many more are vague and not clear, which adds a problem to online merchants.
Cost
When a product listing is published on Etsy, online merchants are obliged to pay $0.20 per 4 months, or such time when the product is sold. Renewal of the listing costs $0.20 and you can do it when the 4-month listing period expires or the item is sold already. Etsy's pricing policy has changed and you don't need to pay additional fees for adding images to the listing. The listing fees will be added on the total bill you should pay to Etsy for hosting your store.
