Q&A Will you keep The Craftsmen Guild Etsy Shop?
Hello everyone and welcome back.
Today's question revolves around my Etsy Shop, The Craftsmen Guild and whether or not I will be keeping it as I go forwards with SewnbySabrina...
I will not be deleting the Etsy shop but I will no longer be using it. I will let all the listings naturally expire and I will not be renewing for the time being.
I have made the choice for now to solely move forwards with the Shopify site, SewnbySabrina. For a multitude of reasons.
Over the past years I've had thoughts and situations where I have wanted to leave Etsy, and those thoughts have become more constant in the last few months. I'm not a huge fan of how Etsy has evolved and changed.
Its mostly a place where the site is full of drop shippers, Etsy is a place for handmade, or at least it was. Obviously it isn't anymore.
That paired with the rising costs of fees that the site pushes onto sellers and small business owners who want to sell there is crazy. There's a certain point where you can't keep adding the cost of the fees into your product total and still expect to make sales.
Etsy also pushes for sellers to offer free shipping to try and attract buyers, they also push for you as a seller to pay for ads as well. Siting that you can put the cost of shipping in your product price to cover it...
As of March Etsy is also taking away a seller's ability to add a handling fee into the price of their shipping. The way that this worked before was that a shop owner could impute a value on domestic and international shipping, you could pick what you wanted to charge, and both could be different.
As a customer you would never see this fee as a additional fee, it was factored in to your shipping costs automatically.
This was probably the news that made me sigh and realized that I had enough, thankfully in January I had made SewnbySabrina, and now in February I am in the process of counting all my inventory, taking new product pictures, making new products and building up this site as I leave Etsy behind.
As of the day I'm writing this February 6th, 2025, I have a 30% off sale running on Etsy shop until March 3rd which is the date that this takes effect. The no more handling fees.
In my shop, my handling fees were under $5 for both Canadian and International orders. This isn't a lot, it was mostly to help me when it came to the ink I used in my printer for the shipping label. I always saw it as something that just helped me buy and pay for the shipping materials themselves.
It wasn't a lot, but if you're from Canada you know that Canada Poste went on strike in late November of 2024 and stayed on strike for a majority of December 2024. In January of this year, the cost of shipping went up dramatically and that hurt my shop as I know it did many others.
Due to the strike I was forced to give more in refunds than I actually made those two months. Why, how is it possible that you refunded more money than what people paid for? You might be saying it makes no sense.
But yes it does, Etsy charges fees on top of the refund, transaction fees, and of course this all happened at the height of the holidays shopping period.
I'm pretty sure I can say I was like other small businesses, who never expected the strike to happen in the first place, the money that was deposited into my account went directly to paying towards bills associated with my business. Little did I know, I would lose that and more going deeper into the red.
Even if the package was sitting in a warehouse, it wasn't lost, it had a tracking number. It didn't matter that I asked to have the items shipped back to me when they received it.
I never got my products back, I lost my own money and struggled a lot because of it.
My holidays were stressful, they were spent wondering how I was going to pay for my bills, how I was going to keep going and what I was going to do. It demotivated me so much that I couldn't even go into my workshop, I couldn't sleep and I was questioning why I had wasted this much of my life doing this if it just ended like this.
I closed The Craftsmen Guild, I turned on an automated message and stopped checking my phone and computer.
I tried to focus on spending the holidays with my partner.
After that is when I really started working on the Shopify site, with my partner's help, it was frustrating and I had little patience for it. I was burnt out.
Slowly though I started becoming more patient for it, I started spending more time with my computer and figuring things out on my own.
I launched a site I wasn't too fond on visually, but it was open.
Now I spend more time making it look better than it did that first time I hit make live. I get a bill at the end of the month with my Shopify fees. I don't have to worry about listings that I made and set to manual renewal suddenly pop up as auto-renewed without me checking the box for it.
I'm hoping that Shopify will be better for me in the long term, however it is still sad for me to say that it's also in a way the end of an era. Its still the same business, just a new name and new place to sell. So I can't really be all that sad about it.
Until next time,
Sabrina
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