ETSY is a popular foreign platform in recent years. Many people have made higher profits from it than Amazon. There are even many Chinese people who have sales of millions of US dollars a month. They register many ETSY accounts and make very high profits by selling some domestic handicrafts. Some products even make a hundred times the profit and are still very popular. There is still a big gap compared to Amazon because the customer groups are different, so not everyone can do it.
Many people still hold the concept of "pricing = cost x (1 + desired gross profit)". When shopping, the most common thing they say is "How much does it cost? You're selling for..." We must have heard this sentence many times. In Taiwan, where manufacturing has long been exported to earn foreign exchange, I think everyone must have been accustomed to it for so long that their ears are about to get mushrooms. Not only our friends around us say this, but our elders also say it.
Many textbook management books tell us not to just reduce costs, but to add value. Faced with the big sharks who only know how to fight with manufacturing costs, how should we, as small shrimps, face these challenges? I think Etsy.com, which is now one of the top 200 websites in the world and top 50 in the United States, can serve as a mirror and model for us.
Etsy.com is the world's largest handmade product trading platform. Everyone can upload and list their own handmade products. They need to pay a listing fee (only 0.2 US dollars for 4 months, which is really comparable to Yahoo Auctions...) and a transaction fee (3.5% after the transaction). There are currently 1.1 million users in 150 countries, and hundreds of thousands of designers list their products on Etsy.com. In September last year, 23.4 million items were sold in one month. The number and results are amazing. It is much cheaper to list products on Etsy.com than on eBay.com. In addition, if handmade products are placed on eBay.com, they will be drowned by the massive amount of products and will not float in the information flow. It is called "Handmade 2.0" by the New York Times.
Purely handmade, added design and creative value
As for the concept of manufacturing cost we mentioned at the beginning, if we want to change the environment where competition is based on material cost, what can add value to compete is innovation, ingenuity, uniqueness and rarity. Etsy.com is such a website. It only uses and restricts handmade products to be sold on it, and they strictly check and restrict the qualifications of sellers. Etsy.com has the right to check and ask you to hand over the production videos and photos to prove that your products are handmade. In mainland China, some sellers who directly "buy goods to sell" were directly "caught" and deprived of their seller qualifications.
Limited quantity products, no bulk orders
Because all products are independently made by pure handmade designers, we refuse large-volume bulk purchases and price-bargaining, and we also prohibit factories from manufacturing. Because only handmade designers can make them themselves, the quantity is small. You can't buy more, and you can't sell more. If the sales volume is too large, the system and website management will be suspicious. Therefore, we create a culture and atmosphere of "If there is no stock, buyers have to wait, because it is handmade", "Because it is handmade, it is so unique". In addition, the products are all creative and designed, so once you enter this website, you will often be stuck and don't know when you will leave, creating a unique and indispensable website feature.
Specially designed products have their own characteristics
Previously, when we discussed the social design flash sale website Fab.com, we mentioned that beautiful design products themselves have interesting points that are worth spreading, reposting and reporting by consumers, so they are a good promotional subject. For example, Big Bear’s lazy bones and products with curled beards are interesting and worth sharing. The latest data analysis report confirms that Etsy.com is the largest source of content for the latest popular interest graph site Pinterest.com. Users are accustomed to sharing Etsy.com products, which in turn leads to huge sales on Etsy.com.
Etsy.com was valued at 300 million US dollars in the last round and was oversubscribed ten times. They have no shortage of funds and their scale continues to expand. Not only are they being promoted in the United States, they are also currently increasing the scale of their European-language websites. They say that Etsy.com is not in a hurry to go public because it is not ready yet. Etsy.com knows where it is going but it still needs time. This is what makes Etsy.com attractive. In Taiwan, there is a similar website, Pinkoi.com. They have a beautiful layout and have received a lot of media coverage. It is now one of the top 500 websites in Taiwan! We hope that these creative and ingenious websites can not only bring a better life to us consumers, but also bring different culture and power to e-commerce.
