Etsy vs Shopify vs Amazon Handmade | Pros & Cons

hey guys it's charmese eaters here from charmed bath and body and today i'm going to give you guys the pros and cons that i have found of the top three platforms to sell your handmade items on that'll be etsy amazon handmade in your own website for this sake we're just going to say shopify because that's the website a lot of people use for e-commerce and i have actually used all of these platforms i'm on them currently so all of this is from my experience so let's just go ahead and get into it so first we'll start with etsy so the first pro i'm going to say for etsy since i started on etsy is that it's great for beginners it has a very low startup the listings when you start up are 20 cents each which i think is pretty much unbeatable for me um when i started up because i didn't have a lot of money didn't have any money really so it was great to just be able to spend 20 cents on each listing i started off with five listings so one dollar to start my etsy shop and it was easy to fill in all the information so it'll have like the title and you just fill in the blanks from there like description item weight so easy um and i recommend that to everybody who's starting with handmade so that's just my bias opinion on that one the second pro would be that it is a marketplace so i didn't have a lot of people when i started up i didn't have a lot of people supporting me i didn't have a lot of people who even knew that i was making soap and body butters and stuff like that so to be able to put it on etsy and just have a marketplace of people who are already looking for handmade soap and all that stuff that i was selling was so much better than trying to find those people and bring them in to trust me to make their handmade soap over them buying dove and stuff like that and my last major pro that i'm going to give to essie is that since it is known as a handmade marketplace most people generally know what to expect so you know there's a person behind that business there's probably just one or two people behind that business making that stuff just for you um so your customers are a little bit nicer i have seen someone say that etsy customers are terrible i don't think that well that's not my experience at all so my customers are amazing um of course you always have people who are going to ask questions even though it's in the description of the product but that's just life that's any platform but other than that people understand so they know that maybe you can go to amazon and just buy a bar soap for one dollar okay that's what you're looking for you want that specific bar so but you go to etsy and it's all handmade and you may spend five to ten dollars for one bar of soap people pretty much know what they're getting they know it's just handmade so they know it's gonna cost a little bit more and when it comes to the reviews they're a little bit nicer because they understand that there's a person behind that it's not just some company that you don't even know what you ordered from you know what i mean so that's my last pro now the first con for etsy would be the fees now if you um are coming from a website you know you already have your own website then you're not used to paying just extra fees you probably just pay your credit card fees and you know the monthly or yearly feed is for the website and the domain but etsy has more fees than that so um yeah it's a little difficult a little irritating sometimes because the more you sell the more fees there are and the next con would be that you don't it's not your own website so you don't have control over etsy you have control over your shop to an extent but you have no control over etsy so a lot of people complain about the policy changes so i think last year there was a policy change to where if you made your shop 35 if free shipping for 35 dollars and over then you would get priority placement a lot of people were angry about that and i understand that because you know if you're selling a table you don't want to ship it for free basically what it may cost like fifty dollars to ship that and you don't wanna put in your price because then it looks like you charging too much so i understand that and then there's other policy changes that have happened this year that have made people just leave etsy but that's because you don't have control over etsy you are on their platform so you have to understand that say okay so one third of my cells a little over one third of my sales are from bath salt tubes if tomorrow etsy decides they don't want to sell bath salt tubes anymore that's one third of my income out the door but i have to understand that because it's not my platform and the last con i would give for etsy would be that there's less brand recognition for some shops now for my type of shop where i sell bath and body products my label is on there charmed bath and body you're going to see when you're opening stuff up you know so you're going to want to order that same thing but for shops that do like invitations or just graphic design type stuff or even jewelry people will ask you where you got it from or someone will ask one of your customers hey where'd you get those invitations from and i'm like oh i got it from etsy they're not saying oh i got it from charmed bath and body or whatever your store name is same with jewelry i've seen that in person where they have nice little set with the earring in the necklace and somebody asked is just safe from etsy they don't know what shop it was they just know they got a handmade and it was on etsy so yeah so the next platform we're going to discuss is amazon handmade and for the people that don't know there's amazon.com and then there's amazon handmade and amazon handmade is a department of amazon.com so like when you do the drop down you'll see like furniture electronics you'll see handmade there as well but it's just the marketplace for all things handmade on amazon so for smaller creators like myself um i've been on there for a couple months so i do have a small list of pros and cons but i don't have as much experience with amazon handmade as i do at sea and having my own website so let's talk about the first pro which is that it's amazon it's a huge marketplace it's a huge trusted marketplace um especially during this pandemic people are buying everything on amazon so that's giving you way more exposure than maybe having your own website and not having your own clientele already like if you don't have a social media following being on amazon is so much easier because you can even just say my products are on amazon people like what so yeah which leads me into my second pro would be that you can do amazon fba and fba stands for fulfilled by amazon um so that's what i use amazon for because i already have my etsy and i have my own website and i don't want to have to do inventory for a whole nother platform so i just make a bunch of stuff and i ship it to amazon and it has the prime label so it ships in two days well approximately two days from their warehouse to the customer so that is amazing because people love prime some people don't even buy things if it's not prime there are cons though so the first con is that you must apply and it's not going to be a con for everybody but not everybody gets in so i've in my research i found that some people have had to do three applications and they finally got in some people still can't get in for whatever reason i was able to get in the first time i applied and i was told the next day that i was in so it may not be a con for everybody but it is more exclusive than etsy the next con is that the fees are higher than they are on etsy so etsy already has a nice chunk of fees but then amazon steps it up and has even more even if you're not sending your stuff to their web their warehouse um you're just you know making it at home and then you get an order and you ship it out directly to the customer there are more fees on amazon than there are on etsy so that's not that's not desirable to everybody and then if you do fba then there are even more fees because you have to store it in their web warehouse and then that leads me into my next con is that you have to ship fast so if you're not doing fulfilled by amazon where you put in their warehouse and you're just doing it yourself you have to ship fast so like on etsy you can put that you know you ship things out in three weeks amazon expects you to ship it fast and even more so your customers expect it to ship it fast even if they're not getting in prime they're so used to amazon being able to be right there that you just need to ship it fast another con for amazon handmade is the dashboard so i'll just post a picture of it here it's a little more complicated actually a lot more complicated than etsy or having your own website so i'm still trying to learn everything on there because there's a lot of buttons there's a lot of drop downs from drop downs so it's it's it takes more to figure out amazon than any other platform i think i think it's a little more difficult but that's just because it's so easy for people to shop there they gotta add a little bit of difficulty for you not really but that's just how i feel um and then the last uh con is that it's easier for people to return things i haven't had anybody return anything personally but i've seen other creators say that they had a no return policy but amazon still let people return things so that's a thing about amazon in general not just amazon handmade is that you know if you shop on amazon you can return pretty much anything especially if you go to amazon customer service and complain whether it be because something's broken which you should return or you just you know decided you didn't want it anymore or you tried it and just decided never mind uh that is a terrible terrible con for me because i have a no return policy on my etsy and on my actually everything so to have somebody return something when there's nothing wrong with it or you know they just needed some money back then that's annoying one thing i almost forgot to state about amazon handmade which is a major pro is that there is no startup cost so um they do have the 15 referral fee for whenever somebody buys one of your products 15 comes out of that and goes to amazon but they don't have a listing fee so when i listed my first product which was i think my rose clay mask there was no fee at all so etsy would have charged me a 20 fee for that so zero cost of startup and the professional selling plan that you have to have when you sell on amazon is actually waived for artisans on amazon handmade so that's forty dollars you don't have to pay a month when you sell on amazon handmade as well so the last place we're going to discuss for selling your handmade products is having your own website whether it be shopify wix squarespace i don't know too many others but you know what i mean so i'm just going to say shopify for general terms first is you can have your own branding so that's the first pro it's your branding it's your colors it's your photos it's you so um that i think is the best pro you can have because when people look at your website they get the feel of how you want them to feel honestly like they're not looking at etsy where it's just a big old etsy logo and then they're orange and then you get to post your pictures no it's your whole thing it's it's you so uh the next pro would be that there are no ads on your um website sending you to somebody else's product or sending your customers to someone else's product so if you go on etsy or you go on amazon and you scroll down there are like i think they're similar items or whatever the phrase is they're just sending you to other people's pages other people's listings that may be close to yours so there's none of that on your own website so the third pro for having your own website is that it generally looks more professional so if you're trying to have like a brand ambassador or trying to do influencer marketing or anything like that it's just better to have your own website because you can do it from your amazon handmade or your etsy but you're sending people to that and they may end up on somebody else's uh listing just because of what i said just a second ago about scrolling down and finding somebody else's listing up under yours so yeah it just looks more professional even on business cards it just looks just a little bit more professional which is one of the reasons why i did my own shopify actually now this next pro is specifically for shopify not for wix or squarespace or anything else at this moment of this video anyway um shopify has a thing where you can tag your items on facebook and instagram so just like you tag a person in a picture and they can click on it and go to that person's page you can tag your items from your shopify website and people can click that tag tab sorry that tag and then it'll open up um like a little marketplace to be able to buy your products which is so cool and then the last pro is that you can add on apps to your shopify website so whether you want to change the way you do your shipping if you don't like the regular shipping layout you can download like ship station or shippo even if you want music to play when somebody clicks on your page you can do that there's so many other things you can have different little pop-ups to show people where other people have bought these products you know at that at certain times and wherever they're from or whatever so the first con i'm gonna give to shopify is the cost of startup um as opposed to the other programs so you have etsy with the 20 cent listing fee and then you have amazon with the zero dollar listing fee but then you have shopify and products like it where you pay monthly or you can pay annually and i think shopify is 29 a month so that's higher obviously than the other two but it's still not outrageous though so it's not too bad and the only other major con that i can see with having your own website is that you have to drive um customers to your website now that has been extremely hard for me which is why i've had three different websites i've started and stopped twice and then this is the last time i'm not going to quit anymore i'm just going to do the hard work and bring customers to me to charmedbathenbody.com to shop on my website so for shopify you have to be better at marketing but like one of the pros i said there are apps on there that can help you with that as well so of course there are other platforms that you can use to sell your handmade on you can do uh facebook groups facebook marketplace mercari uh ebay you can use all of those i have never used any of those so i did not want to go into that in this video i only wanted to speak on what i know personally um but if you have any insight you can drop that in the comments below and if you do have any more cons or pros that i didn't say because this was a video about how i felt about the platforms if you have any more information at please put that down below as well to help out other creators whether it be beginners or people who want to you know just jump onto another platform to see how it works out for them so yes thank you so much for watching please subscribe if you know you like my channel and then like the video if you like the video uh thanks

Channel: Charmeas Edris

Views: 12,808

Keywords: etsy seller, pros and cons, etsy, amazon handmade, ebay, mercari, shopify, wix, squarespace, platform, selling handmade, cosmetics

Id: 9nC9pgFd6yQ

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020