Etsy definitely does a lot of shady shit now and really takes a lot of what you make, forces you into offsite ads if you do well and then takes 12-15% including

Etsy definitely does a lot of shady shit now and really takes a lot of what you make, forces you into offsite ads if you do well and then takes 12-15% including from the shipping, which is the worst when you already legit have to pay $80 to ship something and get shorted twice. Lots of crap shops with Chinese production, which they are supposed to list as a "production partner", but they make it really hard for the customer to find. It IS a great place to open a shop and make money though, you can pay zero dollars and start selling if you figure out their internal SEO system well enough and have the right products. Even without knowing the SEO, if you have the right niches, people will just buy your shit out of the blue, it's crazy! We've been growing our laser cut wood art shop for over a year, got up to like 432 sales by November and now we are over 1000 sales a few weeks later, which has been insane. My other shop I started in the summer grew slow, but is now up to like 5-6 sales a day and I think I can get it much higher as I add more and more products, it's also 100 times easier, cheaper, and faster to do than the laser cut stuff. If we can figure out digital stuff, we'll be laughing. My one friend pays for his monthly Tesla 3 bills with his Etsy shop. Will you save more money if you just use Shopify and co? Yes, but you will have to market and bring your own people in, which is the tough part until you've built a huge brand, email list, social strategy and figured out ads, which you can avoid almost entirely for a long time with Etsy and still see success.