I opened my Etsy shop in February 2020 when I decided on a whim that it was long past time to sell all the Beanie Babies that my dad bought in the 1990s. For background, I had a fantastic beanie baby collection. But it was not as incredible as my dad’s collection. When I was young, I thought he would buy a duplicate of each beanie baby I got, preserving it in pristine condition to (in theory) sell for a profit. In February 2020, I learned that he often bought five or six extras or more than twenty of his favorite Christmas bears. There were a lot of beanie babies.
We all know the story of so many beanie baby collectors: He never sold them, the price went back down to about the same price as their original cost, and my parents now had an unfathomable amount of untouched beanie babies packed away in their attic. By 2020, the beanie babies from the 1990s counted as “vintage” on Etsy since anything at least 20 years old is vintage. This made Etsy a great choice for selling the absolutely ridiculous number of beanie babies in my parents’ attic.
I put in the work to set up the shop, create listings, package, and ship the beanie babies. My parents provided the product. We split the profits. It was a simple process to send the cute toys to folks who would appreciate them daily rather than hide them in the attic.
Etsy proved to be a great forum for our needs, but there are certainly positives and negatives of using Etsy, like just about any platform. Since it is a popular platform for vintage products and self-made products and often serves as a side hustle for individuals, I am sharing my experience with Etsy for anyone considering using it for their own side hustle.
Pros of Having an Etsy Shop
Easy to maintain: Once you set up a shop, running it on a day-to-day basis is quite easy. The Etsy app allows you to see new orders, contact customers, and even set your shop to “vacation mode” if you are away from home for an extended period of time. You can add new products as often or as sparingly as you wish. Once the shop exists, it pretty much runs itself. Etsy even uses direct deposit to send the profits to your checking account so you magically get more money arriving in your account each week. Easy profits.
Flexible to change style and products: My shop started entirely as a beanie baby shop but has diversified to have various vintage products. Patrick inherited his father’s coin collection when his father passed away. Patrick kept the most meaningful parts of the collection, and the other coins went on Etsy. My mom decided to downsize her Phoenix Bird china collection. Etsy. When my grandmother passed away, leaving behind some stylish products that we simply could not use, Etsy. Having a vintage shop in particular provides a lot of flexibility, but even if you are a creator, having a platform that already has a reputation for providing good service gives you an instant launching point for new products.
Rewarding customer stories: I once had a terrific customer review from a customer who bought some beanie baby cats for foster cats that had lost kittens. When she bought a second order, I sent her extra beanie baby cats that did not have tags from my collection (not my dad’s collection). While I did not sell the beanie babies without tags since their low value did not make it worth it, she was a customer who could actually use them. She and the foster cats appreciated the extra “kittens,” and I will never forget the adorable pictures of the foster cats with the beanie babies. Other stories include folks finding something that resembles a meaningful heirloom or sending a loved one a gift. Seeing love from other folks adds joy to your day when you least expect it, an aspect of opening an Etsy shop I did not expect to find but now value highly.
Credit card points: About half of my gross revenue from Etsy gets spent on shipping items and buying packaging materials, but running a business with physical products leads to a lot more spending on my credit card that is immediately paid off in full when Etsy sends me my weekly deposit. In other words, I get to “spend” money on my credit card that I am not actually spending (because I will get it right back!), earning credit card points with almost no effort. Having more money run through your accounts can lead to great perks beyond cash, like travel rewards.
Cons of Having an Etsy Shop
Hard work at first, slow to start earning: Your Etsy shop will not gain traction until you add multiple products to your shop. Just adding one item will almost certainly not get you shop visitors. For each of those items, you must add a photo, description, categories, pricing, and more. This takes time, especially when you are adding your first few products and cannot copy any part of the data from another item. Even after adding the products, it can take a month or two to really get your products noticed by potential buyers. Adding a lot of similar products is helpful, and creating categories of similar items so folks who visit your shop can peruse similar products they want to buy will make your shop more successful. It took a couple weeks to get my first sale, and the first few after that trickled in slowly. Then, a global pandemic hit, and I was lining up 30 beanie babies on the back of the couch every Monday morning to package and send out to customers. Your business will pick up eventually if you add enough products, so be patient.
Fees are substantial and can change: There are fees on every single sale on Etsy. This makes sense since sellers are using a reputable platform. However, these fees went up last year, meaning sellers either had to raise their prices or let these fees eat into their profits. For me, this was not a big deal since Etsy is a side hustle, and I sell vintage items. However, if I was a creator of self-made products, these fees would have hurt. In particular, the fees hurt creators making physical products since Etsy takes a cut of both the product and the shipping fee. As a result, I would not recommend Etsy for creators of physical products: In the long run, it is probably worth setting up your own website and selling your items to avoid the fees. For those selling vintage or printable items, though, the ease of using Etsy is still well worth it. Additionally, the fact that the fee structure can change rapidly means I would absolutely never feel confident relying on Etsy as a main hustle. For a side hustle, these changes are absorbable, but it would make me nervous as a main income.
Difficult customers: I had a customer complain that a product called a Phoenix Bird Double Egg Cup was too large for one egg, giving me a low rating for the product. Yes, most double egg cups are large enough for two eggs and a bit big for a single egg. Some other customers will think you control the U.S. Postal Service, and while I wish I did, that is simply not the case. Most customers are fantastic, but there will always be a few that give you poor ratings because they failed to read your listing properly or wrote their address incorrectly. Additionally, some folks will ask strange questions. For typical questions, I make sure to respond quickly and thoroughly, but if anything hits me as odd, I usually provide the minimum amount of information required to deter the customer from purchasing the item. Etsy is a side hustle for me, and I do not need the stress of dealing with difficult customers. By avoiding some of the difficult customers from the outset, running the Etsy shop is a lot more enjoyable.
How to Earn Money
Become a Star Seller: You become a Star Seller on Etsy by shipping products on time, responding to customers within 24 hours, and consistently receiving good reviews. Shipping times are whatever you set for yourself: Etsy encourages you to set 1–2 day shipping, but I choose 1–3 days because it is always better to under-promise and over-deliver. This also leads to better reviews because customers are expecting timelines where I may not ship a product for three days, but I almost always ship within two. The 24-hour responses sound more difficult than they are: You can set away messages for up to five days without setting your shop to vacation mode if you are out of town or just busy for a few days, and you can set an away message with vacation mode if you are gone for longer. These auto-responses count as on-time responses. If you communicate well with customers and fulfill your promised timelines, you will get the reviews to become a reputable Star Seller on Etsy.
Add new products regularly: If I am on a stretch where I add products regularly, my Etsy shop will make $1,000+ each month. If I am on a stretch where I am not adding items regularly, it will not. Once you have an established shop, this is the simplest correlation between actions on your part and customer purchases. Luckily, you still get some sales when you are lazy. But the more substantial sums of money come when you are posting new products.
Get your products featured first in searches: This factor is a little bit trickier to achieve than the other two, but I search my products semi-regularly to track when my items are featured on the first page or first five pages of general searches in Etsy. Over time, I learned that when I have many items of the same category (for example, at least 50 beanie babies) and I am posting new products to that category at least monthly, my shop is usually on the first page of Etsy listings for that specific item. There was a time when my shop had about a third of the items on the first page of the search “beanie baby,” but now most of my beanie babies have sold (thankfully), so I am not typically on the first page. The same is true for “”Phoenix Bird china” thanks to my mom’s hard work downsizing her china collection. It would be much more difficult to get on the first page of searches like “necklace,” but if you can offer products with more specific qualities like “peridot necklace,” this becomes more achievable.
My Best Etsy Win
In 2021, I was at the Washington Nationals versus Boston Red Sox series here in DC the first weekend of October. It was the last series of the year, and the games actually mattered as the Red Sox battled for one of the Wild Card spots. It came down to the last day of the season, the Sox won, and Patrick and I went to an unforgettable Wild Card game in Boston a few days later against the Yankees.
For the big games, I always wear the Red Sox hat that I have had since middle school. I got that hat before the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918, and it has since seen four World Series wins (2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018). It is just unique enough and clearly has a seen-a-lot-of-games look. At one of those Nationals-Red Sox games, someone offered me $1,000 for my hat. When I said no, they upped the offer to $2,000. But it was that hat. The hat I wore when I went to Fenway Park with my grandfather before he passed away after seeing two World Series championships.
I said no and kept my hat. But I still earned about $2,000 during that same game: Someone bought the most expensive coin in my Etsy shop for just under $2,000. That purchase covered that entire series, the tickets, and the travel to and from Boston for the Wild Card game.
Etsy side hustles for the win.
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