If you aren't familiar with Etsy.com, it is a marketplace devoted to all things handmade, everything from crocheted toys to custom made corsets, as well as vintage items and craft supplies. Etsy is the largest selling venue online for handmade products with $12.9 million dollars worth of goods sold in December 2008 and growing. Etsy has kept its fees steady and low with constant improvements, the latest being the addition of Google Analytics for users to track their visitor stats. You can read Etsy's FAQs on selling here.
There are a number of third-party tools that have been developed to help Etsy sellers. Here's a list of the very best Etsy tools for sellers.
Etsy Hacks
This is a collection of Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that tweak how Etsy looks and works in some useful ways. You will need to download and install Greasemonkey before you can use Etsy Hacks. Among a long list of features include a printable receipt enhancer, copy listing, item zoom, bulk image uploader, renew listing from item page, and more.
Let's Ets
This tool pulls the information from your shop and formats it for uploading to Google Base. Etsy recently retooled their RSS feeds to make them Google Base friendly, but Let's Ets is much easier to use.
Etsy Fee Calculator
Of course you could do the math out for yourself to figure out what $0.20 + 3.5% of an item's price works out to, but this is much faster. This one can even calculate with Paypal fees as well, making it an easy way to work out exactly how much of each sale you get to keep.
Heartomatic
Before Etsy implemented Google Analytics support, this was the best way to check your Etsy stats. Even now it's still useful as a quick check for real-time views on newly listed items and to see who has marked your shop or items as favorites.
Right now there are only a handful of really good third-party tools for Etsy sellers, but that will soon be changing. Etsy is currently beta testing an API (Application Programming Interface) for developers. In the next few months expect to see an explosion in great new tools for Etsy.
About the author:
Sheryl Westleigh is an artist based in Maine who creates unique sculpture and jewelry designs in polymer clay and mixed media. She is owner of Noadi's Art Orginal Sculpture and Jewelry and sells on Etsy, eCrater and Artfire.com.
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If you aren't familiar with Etsy.com, it is a marketplace devoted to all things handmade, everything from crocheted toys to custom made corsets, as well as vintage items and craft supplies. Etsy is the largest selling venue online for handmade products with $12.9 million dollars worth of goods sold in December 2008 and growing. Etsy has kept its fees steady and low with constant improvements, the latest being the addition of Google Analytics for users to track their visitor stats. You can read Etsy's FAQs on selling 