We have all experienced it: Some organization or service starts out good — or great, even — and then as time goes on, either costs and fees go up, or

I do hope this fits here, in case it doesn’t feel free to remove.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/2383962

Finally, there’s a no-tech-knowledge-needed alternative to Etsy. I’m really excited about where this will go!

  • Squeak@lemmy.worldEnglish
    311·
    7 months ago

    They still have 9.5% commission(or this drops to 8.5% if you pay $1000 artisan fee!), compared to Etsy which works out to be around 11-12% on most of the items I sell.

    It also doesn’t link with my inventory management software. Etsy does, eBay does, Woocommerce does, Facebook does. It also doesn’t integrate with my shipping software, so I need to manually generate labels.

    The benefits seem very minimal for a lot of caveats. If you have 1 or 2 products then fine, but when you have 10’s or 100’s of products, the time to list these on a site that will have a lot less traffic is way too long. I have a 2% gain in my profit margin, but a tonne more hassle.

    • ProdigalFrogMAEnglish
      34·
      7 months ago

      Looking into it; depending on how much time you contribute, you apparently would share in the profit of the store.

      It also appears to be taking steps to prevent drop shippers from plaguing the platform like Etsy suffers from, and ensure everything is actually handmade. Personally I like what they’re going for, but I’m not a seller.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
        34·
        7 months ago

        The junk sold on Etsy completely killed that site for me. It’s just shit from temu/wish now and very little is actually hand made.

    • MiltownClowns@lemmy.worldEnglish
      113·
      7 months ago

      It’s an immature platform but with adoption it could be a viable alternative. Sure, it’s a 2% increase in margin today with a lot of extra hassle so that’s why it’s probably going to attract more idealistic and smaller creators in the beginning to try and build a platform free of the Chinese dreck. In a year this could be great and we all know Etsy is not getting any better. So it’s for people who have a certain vision for the future. It’s much easier to follow trends than set them though, so I can see why it’s not a great business proposition for established companies just looking to keep turning a profit.

      • rishado@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        7 months ago

        Yeah but eventually it’ll be sold and become Etsy. So whatever benefits it does have, it’s temporary.

      • Squeak@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        7 months ago

        I use Nembol. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s cheap and does exactly what I need it to do.