About selling on etsy & how paypal works?

Hi there!

About Etsy, It doesn't cost anything to have an account only when you list a item. Then its $0.20 per listing. When you make a sale there is also a fee of 3.5% of the item price.

&& About paypal, there is also no fee to get started but if you sell something its 2.9% + $0.30 per sale. On Etsy there is a section for shipping and you just put in the price for shipping, so you dont have to pay for shipping. Also, When you sell something the money stays on your paypal account and if you want it in your bank account you just have to transfer the money to there.

The hardest part for me is figuring out how much to price my things. XD
But the way you can do it, is calculate how much it cost to make the product and then how long it took you to make it (like how much you want to charge yourself for the time),

Hope that helps ^-^

Etsy becomes kind of a pain to work with after a while. Etsy only promotes established shops that make them tons of money in commission fees unless you pay a lot to advertise.

PayPal is easy to use and useful for everything. You can connect it to a credit card or a bank account, and if you make enough you can even get a PayPal debit card so you no longer have to transfer the fees into your bank account, which can sometimes take a week.

As far as pricing goes, reasonable prices that are competitive will help you sell more, but you should still factor in materials and labor.

Etsy is kind of a cool site. I would recommend doing a little market research to see what similar items are going for and use that as a starting point. They have some tools you can use to being more traffic to your store, and there are definitely stats to see how it's all paying off.

If you go to the 'Your Shop' tab and look on the left, under Promote there is Search Ads. For a few bucks you can set aside a number of your items to consistently come up on the front of search results for your category for the span of a day. I did this with my photography and noticed a HUGE difference in traffic to my store, which leads some to favorite it, which leads to more views.

Like every business you just need to promote the crap out of it at every turn, use social media, connect it all. It takes time to build it up, but that goes with anything. Paypal is very easy, just link it up with your bank account, and the site does the rest of the work for you. They take a very small percentage for the service out of any payment made to you. The money sits in your Paypal account until you transfer it to your bank account. I don't know if you can have that done routinely and automatically, I always just let the money sit in there for when I wanted to buy something online, the money was already squirreled away. Hope this helps at all!

I have been selling on Etsy for several years and love it. Yes, it is a lot of work, but whatever venue you choose to go with for your selling, it will be a LOT of work. Making your business successful is a full time gig.

Starting with a formula for your pricing will be very helpful. You will never make money if you are giving away your product. Here is a great article on how to price your work: https://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2012/a-simple-formula-for-pricing-your-work/

As far as promoting, I have never found the Ads on Etsy to be useful for me, but some swear by them. I use tons of social media: Pinterest, Twitter, FB, Flickr, etc. to promote my shop. Join some Teams, do a lot of research! If you have more specific questions you can always message me