I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale outsourcing of production is the only way.
These days you can outsource original product manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't mean that you're not the artist behind them.
I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
>I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
I don't have a problem with "manufacturing partners" in this sense. It's when that loophole is used to justify or hide countless sellers simply white labelling items that is the problem. If I make a design and have a manufacture stamp out copies in the thousands, but then offer customization that I add JIT for each order (a hallmark of etsy) then that's fine. But if I take a $0.50 beaded necklace bought in bulk on Alibaba and resell then at $10 with not other value added, that does not fit the supposed mission of Etsy. Take that to Amazon, Ebay, & it's okay. But it's absolutely not within the handcrafted marketplace, even when "handcrafted" is loosely defined, that Etsy is supposed to be.
Yes I agree, Etsy used to make sure you were original or had manufacturing partners. They had some kind of vetting for the partners until Josh Silverman(?) came on board. I think that is when those rules loosened and AliBaba became a legit partner on Etsy. It's been a slippery slope. My segment on Etsy is not conducive to mass production and I think we have simply priced ourselves above it as a way to keep separate . I have started seeing furniture made in Turkey and Poland and Romania that is now beating us up a little on price, not sure how they get the shipping so cheap but that is a different issue
IIRC the US offers a steep discount on international shipping coming from countries that it has designated "transitional". It's possible that Poland and Romania are on that list: I have highly specialized, custom tools that I bought from a machinist in Romania, and shipping was about $5. Whereas I could be at the US side of Niagara Falls and ship a light package 100 feet to the Canadian side and it would still cost me about $14.
Credit where it's do though, the tools I bought from Romania are amazing, unique, top quality. For some reason there's a few countries in Eastern Europe (Ukraine actually is one of them) where leather crafting has become somewhat popular and there are a few Etsy stores with fantastic items. They don't use the absolute best quality leather, but it's good: orders of magnitude above what you'd find in stores, and the construction is solid
(also leather is an area where price increases near exponentially with quality. Cheap junk like PU leather is maybe $0.25 per square foot in large bulk. Lowest quality real leather is about $1, and is actually still a fine choice for certain type of items if used carefully. Okay leather might run about $5 a sqft, good to very good will be $10, $20, $50, and the absolute best can be $100 to $200 per sqft. Although it's important to know that not all leather is suited to ever task. And sometimes the price:quality ratio is about product consistency. You might pay $20/sqft for a side of leather that has near perfect consistency in thickness and lack of surface defects. Very important if you're making large items, and they have a usable portion of 80 or 90%. But you can also buy miss-split that are uneven thickness and have some surface defects for $3. The usable portion may only be 60%, but if you're making small items you're still getting the same very high quality leather, you just have more scrap left over. You can even find a use for that too: some people really like the "character" that natural imperfections add to an item. Or I use it as practice pieces testing out new designs, no Sorry, more than you probably were looking for on leather detail. But it's HN so I figured there's often people interested in the minutiae of non-tech fields)
8% is actually a about what they take, at least prior to any fee increases going on now:
Keep in mind Etsy only takes a cut, and it's close to 8%. If I sell a $100 item they take about 7% in transaction fees. Then there's merchant fees for payment processing. I'm sure Etsy take a cut of them, and they are about 3%, so assuming they get 1 point of that their total take is 8%.
In comparison Ebay w/ PayPal merchant fees is a few points higher at about 14%. Which if you're selling high volume low margin race-to-bottom Alibaba junk then the extra 3-4% profit explains why Etsy's loosing of seller restrictions has attracted so much junk.
The bank payment processing probably isn't doing an even split, so I would guess that Etsy's take really is right about 8% of seller revenue.
I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale outsourcing of production is the only way.
These days you can outsource original product manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't mean that you're not the artist behind them.
I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.