Mon, 10 Jul 2023

I'm back on Etsy, because I think it's the lesser of two evils.

Etsy's downsides are its infamous fees, and the proliferation of fake-handmade stuff.

I can't do anything about the latter, but the former isn't quite as bad as it could be. Sure, they're higher than every other side out there, and they're higher than they used to be, but... the alternative is spending a lot of time on self-promotion to make up for the "marketplace" effect there. And I'm not great at that.

I've been doing some Facebook/Instagram (and even Threads) self-promotion and it ain't great. You need to either hustle a lot, start your own Groups and sink a lot of time into building them up, or sink a lot of time into pushing your things via alts ("Look at this wonderful thing I, a totally real person, made with a Silver Seams design!") which I just will not do, or pay people to do it for you (which involves finding people who are willing to embroider your stuff, who write good text, and take good photographs - just a lot of peopling), or pay Facebook to run ads. None of this is really "me."

Facebook's also, let's be honest, pretty evil. Not "high fees" evil, but "genocide" evil.

I can pay Etsy to, I hope, promote my stuff to its audience. The "I hope" is the problem, of course: Etsy really wants you to pay even more to explicitly get off-site ads and whatnot. I don't know what its baseline traffic even looks like anymore.

I've put a couple of listings up (the peach fob design, and one of each of the Cupcake Dragons) as test balloons. Earlier I reactivated all the existing dice trays with no nibbles, but I'm not sure how the deep magic treats renewals versus new listings. It favors them, but how much? I'unno.

Not wasting my time trying to gin up Facebook traffic: that's the first of the things I'm changing up. There will be a few more.