Etsy News
In Etsy news for July, just a couple of small updates since last month. The big update is that Etsy has introduced a new feature allowing sellers to accept offers on listings if you want to put more pricing flexibility into the customer’s hands. At first, the option will provide you with a list of suggested listings in your shop to start accepting offers. You can choose to include or exclude listings from that list of suggested ones, or you can also select an option to start accepting offers for all your listings. Right now you cannot select manually select individual listings but that is something that they are working on adding, so eventually you’ll be able to specify the exact listings that you want to accept offers on. But let’s talk about why I don’t think this is a great feature for print on demand sellers.
First, I don’t really think it’s intended for us to begin with. If you think about the type of sellers that Etsy tends to create features for – or who is usually the target of their communications – it’s sellers of handmade and vintage items. And by handmade I mean like sellers who make their products from scratch themselves, not print on demand sellers. For these sellers, especially vintage items, this feature makes a lot of sense. If you’re selling antiques or vintage items on Etsy, some specific items are probably going to sit around for a very long time and not sell. That’s the nature of running a shop like that. But if you can accept offers on your listings, maybe some of those items won’t sit around as long because you can take a lower offer for it and then move on to more profitable items. As the seller, you never know what the trigger price is for a product, so when you offer coupon codes or run sales, you don’t really know if what you’re offering is enough to trigger a purchase. But if you can accept offers, that will immediately tell you what customers are willing to pay, and that can be very helpful for sellers of vintage or antique items. I could also see using the feature if you make your own products and some of them are very expensive. For example if you make jewelry, and you make a few pieces that are much higher priced than your other items, those could sit in your shop for a long time without being purchased if people think the price is too high. But you’ve still got some cost tied up in those pieces so you’re better off selling them for a discount than just sitting on them for years. And again, accepting offers could help them sell faster.
But now let’s consider our print on demand business. We’re selling brand-new products that are made to order, some of which are personalized with a customer’s name or something like that. Our products are also not ones that the general public is used to buying with a bidding system. There are classifications or types of products that customers would expect to buy through a bidding system where they can bid or make offers. This would be things like used products, vintage or antique items, even cars. But a brand new t-shirt or mug is not generally a product type that customers would normally expect to submit and offer on – they either buy it for the retail price or they don’t. Retail coupons or sales are very common, but they are dictated by the seller. Sometimes we may get requests from customers for a discounted price if they buy a higher quantity, but again, this is different than making an offer.
I don’t personally love the idea of accepting offers for print on demand products, because I think if a few sellers do it, that will potentially open the door for a new trend or type of buying behavior in the space of brand new, made to order retail products, at least on the Etsy platform. I don’t want to create the expectation that you can haggle over the price of a mug. Hopefully most customers wouldn’t find it to be worth their time to make an offer on a mug that retails for $13 anyway, but I’d hate to see that type of behavior encouraged by sellers. Many print on demand products don’t have a very high profit margin to begin with – I personally get anywhere from 25 to 40 percent depending on the product and the niche. You can also generally get a little bit higher profit on personalized items. That’s not at all the same thing as a seller of vintage items or antiques. If I bought something at an estate sale for $10 and list it on Etsy for $50, I could accept an offer of $30 and still make a 56% profit margin after Etsy fees are taken out. If I list a t-shirt for $22 with a cost of $13, my profit margin is 29%, but if I accepted an offer for $18 then my profit drops to only 16%. There just isn’t any room in there for accepting offers to make any sense.
So for me, I don’t see this feature as one I would ever use in a print on demand business. I think it would create more headaches than anything else because it’s another thing you have to respond to in a business that is supposed to have as much automation as possible. But let me know what you think – I will likely be making a video about it in the future and you can also feel free to comment on the blog post.
That’s it for Etsy news this month, let’s move on and talk about some print provider news.
Print Provider & Industry News
I’ve got some news from Printify and Gelato for this month, so let’s start with Printify. To start with, I noticed an unexpected change this past week – an updated site navigation layout. All your navigation options used to be across the top of the page on Printify’s site, and now everything has moved over to a left menu. There are links for all the important sections including the catalog, your listings, and orders, as well as quick access to your Printify payments and account settings. I don’t think there is anything significantly different other than the difference in how everything is laid out, but it was a surprising change to see.
Some bigger news is the first major event being hosted by Printify, the Amplified event happening on September 14th, 2023. This event is intended to be like a virtual summit for print on demand sellers, like Etsy Up but focused all on print on demand. The speakers will include some print on demand sellers that you likely know from YouTube or the Printify Experts Program. You can register now to attend and if you register prior to August 14th, you’ll also be entered to win a backstage pass which includes travel to Printify headquarters in Riga, Latvia, to attend Amplified in person including airfare and lodging. There are no details on the exact topics of the talks yet, but I will link to the page for the event in the blogpost for this episode so check the description for a link if you want to check it out. I’ll be sure to share updates over the next month if more details become available.
Up next for Printify news, a couple of smaller updates. There is a pricing update effective on July 26th, which includes updates from several print providers. However, this time it’s not all bad news. I will include a link to the update in the episode description for you in case you missed the email from Printify about it. I scanned over the price adjustments for SwiftPOD and Monster Digital because I use them in the US, and was pleasantly surprised that many of the price adjustments were actually small decreases. I did notice that print provider The Print Bar in Australia does have several increases in this update, so it’s not all good news. But thankfully this update doesn’t seem to be a massive increase across the board. Unfortunately, I do have some bad news when it comes to shipping prices. There were also some adjustments to shipping prices in this update, which is a separate link. I was disappointed to find that mug shipping rates from District Photo in the US are increasing for both the 11oz and 15oz sizes, by $1.10 for the 15oz size and $0.70 for the 11oz size. This brings the US domestic shipping for an 11oz mug to $6.29 and $9.89 for the 15oz size. That’s enough of a change that you probably want to take a look at your shipping profile for mugs if you use District Photo. Thankfully there are not shipping price updates for all print providers, and many of the apparel-focused print providers like Monster Digital and SwiftPOD do not have shipping updates.
The last update for Printify is a small one – they’ve added support in the custom text layer tool in the design editor for emojis as well as some additional fonts. They’ve added over 800 emojis in the hover menu when you’re adding your text layer so you don’t have to copy and paste emoji’s from outside the editor if you want to use one in a design. They’ve also added support for more languages with the text layer tool as well, including Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, and Cyrillic. Not every font supports all the available languages, but still this is pretty cool because it opens up more flexibility to create your designs right in the design editor. I will link to a page on Printify’s site with a full breakdown of these updates in the blogpost.
Next up I wanted to mention something for Gelato as well. In the past couple of months Gelato has made some adjustments to their prices and also introduced quantity discounts for all sellers, including free accounts. So I guess this update should come as no surprise, they are reducing the shipping discount provided in the Gelato+ and Gelato+ Gold effective August 30th of this year. It seems like they are backtracking a little bit here – shifting some benefits of better pricing to all sellers including free accounts and reducing the benefits in their paid subscriptions. However they’re not eliminating shipping discounts completely. If you are a Gelato+ subscriber, your benefit will drop of 30% off all standard shipping to 15% off standard shipping for orders under 25EUR and 30% off for orders over 25EUR. If you are a Gelato+ Gold subscriber, your benefit will drop from 50% off standard shipping for all orders to 25% off for orders under 25EUR and 50% off for orders over 25EUR. So that’s kind of a bummer because you’ll be paying more for shipping on most single-item orders than before. However with quantity discounts, your multi-item orders with a cost of over 25EUR will be getting pretty good pricing since you’ll get both the quantity discount and the higher shipping discount. Really the big winner of the last couple months with Gelato is the free account, because they reduced some base product pricing and introduced the quantity discounts – so free accounts really only gained better profit margins without losing anything. I will link to an updated breakdown of the subscription tier benefits in the blogpost of course.
That’s it for print provider news this month, let’s move on to answer a couple more questions from the YouTube channel.
Your Questions
We’ve got one question this month from YouTube, and it’s about selling in the UK.
This was brought to my attention in a recent comment on a video about monitoring your print on demand profit but it’s a great point to be aware of for international selling if the UK is one of the markets you sell in, especially if it’s your primary market. I’m going to link to an important page in Etsy seller help articles in the blogpost on this so check that out if you’re a seller in the UK. The question was about how pricing is displayed for customers in the UK and VAT. What I found is that Etsy will automatically add estimated VAT to the prices displayed on your listings if the shopper’s location is the UK and your item is being shipped from outside the UK, and the product has a value of less than 135 pounds. For example, if your item price is $19.99 USD and your print provider ships from the US, a customer in the UK will see your product price converted to British pounds with estimated VAT addd to it. This is going to be impacted by currency conversion rates and Etsy does this automatically, but when I checked on July 26, 2023, a price of $19.99 USD was displayed as 19.79 British pounds when I changed my account location to the UK. The currency conversion on this date indicates that $19.99 USD is equal to 15.49 British pounds, so that means the estimated VAT added by Etsy is 4.30 pounds. I should point out that the product listing page does say “VAT included” in small text right below the price.
So let’s unpack a couple of important things here. First and foremost, what control do we have over this? Well, we have no control of what Etsy is doing here. The only thing we can control is where our products are fulfilled. The key to why Etsy is adding VAT to these listings is because it’s being shipped from outside the UK. So if the UK is your primary market, the best option you have is to use print providers located in the UK whenever possible. If your shipping profile for a product indicates the UK is the country of origin, Etsy will not add VAT to the display price. So if you are able to use a UK print provider and have the shipping profile set up correctly, your prices will display as you’ve intended without the added VAT, and on top of that, your customers will have a better experience because delivery times will be much more reasonable if the package is originating in the UK. For core products like t-shirts and mugs, Printify does have UK-based print providers you can check out, and I would encourage you to look outside of Printify as well because having orders fulfilled domestically is really better for everyone if you can do it. If prices look higher, keep in mind that VAT won’t be added to your prices, so it may actually end up being the same or lower pricing, with faster delivery times.
If you’re a seller in the US and the UK is not your primary market but one that you do include in your shipping profiles, I personally wouldn’t over-stress about this. The best thing to do is use print providers located in your primary market so that your listings display domestic shipping prices and times for the bulk of your customers. You can manually edit the prices and estimated shipping times for your additional countries in shipping profiles to reflect the print providers that you intend to use as I’ve shown in some of my shipping videos, but keep in mind that your customer will pay VAT even if you intend to have orders fulfilled domestically by changing the print provider on an order, because your shipping profile is going to say the US is the country of origin. The only way to prevent a customer in the UK from paying VAT would be to create duplicate listings with a special shipping profile just for the UK, which is an option you have, albeit an inefficient one. This can all be frustrating, but one thing you need to keep in mind is that Etsy is not a platform that was built with international fulfillment in mind. It was built as a platform for sellers who operate and ship their products from one location, not sellers like us who can have orders shipped from multiple fulfillment locations around the world. That’s the primary reason why it can seem like we don’t have the options or flexibility we need on Etsy sometimes.
The last thing I want to mention on this is that if you’re a seller with the UK as your primary market and you just don’t have a good UK-based print provider for your products, you will need to keep in mind that VAT will be added to your display prices. I would recommend doing some competition research for each new niche that you create designs for, to check the competition’s pricing. If you are located in the UK also, click on a few listings in the search results and check to see if other sellers also have VAT included in their prices to give you an idea of whether your prices would actually be higher or not. If a lot of the listings you’re seeing are saying VAT included, it means these sellers are also having orders fulfilled outside the UK and if they’re on page one of the search results, it must not be stopping them from making sales. Don’t forget to check what other sellers are charging for shipping as well, because they could be charging more for shipping to display lower product prices. If your prices will have to be set significantly higher than the competition for that niche, you may want to reconsider spending time creating a lot of designs for it. If you see a range of prices and some would be in the range that you will have to charge, then go ahead and proceed as normal.
That’s it for questions this month, that was a good one because it reminded me to keep in mind that things may be different in each market when it comes to pricing and taxes, so it’s something we all need to check out when deciding which markets to sell in.
Niche Ideas & Seasonal Trends
Alright it’s time to talk seasonal trends and niche ideas. We talked about back to school designs last month and you guessed it, it’s time to think about Halloween designs because by the time this episode is published it will be late summer. Last year in the US, search volume on google started to pick up significantly for “halloween shirt” around August 28th. In the four years before that, the average time is around the first week of September that the search volume starts to increase sharply until it hits the peak around October 20th. So the month of August is a great time to work on new designs and scan your expired Etsy listings for any that you want to renew the first week of September. As I mentioned in last month’s episode, you certainly can work on Halloween designs at any time of year, but I wouldn’t recommend publishing them until about the first week of September. If you published new Halloween listings too early, like in mid-July, then you would be wasting that one-time bump Etsy gives new listings in search results because very few people are actively looking to buy a Halloween shirt in mid-July. If your new listings are published between the last week of August and second week of September, they will still be out there for the duration of the peak Halloween shopping and you’ll also be getting that little bump at a time that at least some people are interested in buying a Halloween shirt.
Once you have Halloween all set, the next natural thing is Thanksgiving and then any and all Q4 designs. Designs for Q4 are very wide-ranging, because you don’t have to only focus on holiday-themed designs. Of course you can make designs that are specific to the major Q4 holidays, but people don’t only buy those products in Q4. Christmas is one of the biggest gift-giving holidays of the year, and it’s not the only gift-giving holiday in Q4. You’ve got Hanukkah and Kwanza as well and I’m probably forgetting more. And gift-giving means customers are shopping for specific items that gift recipients might like, so that could be anything. Here’s a few general categories to keep in mind when designing for the 4th quarter in addition to just creating designs themed for the actual holidays:
1. Core products like t-shirts, sweatshirts, and mugs are very popular gift items regardless of the niche or style. So go about your normal niche research process and keep an eye on social media for potential trending gift themes over the next couple of months.
1. Personalized designs can be great gift items, so if you are ok with selling personalized items, include at least some new personalized designs in your Q4 planning. These don’t have to be complicated either – personalized designs can be as simple as adding a custom name or year to the overall design, it doesn’t have to be full-on custom artwork. As you research niches, be on the lookout for ones where personalization could make your product more unique.
1. Designs that you may have made for other holidays could be selling again in Q4, like designs you made for mother’s day and father’s day. People tend to give mom and dad themed gifts at both times, so if any of those are expiring in September because they haven’t sold since May, you might want to renew them if they made sales in the past.
Conclusion
I hope you found some helpful information in this monthly update. Don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite platform and head over to podinsights.net to check out links to resources. And visit me on YouTube on the POD Insights channel and on Twitter for video guides, selling tips and product reviews. Also a quick reminder if you want to submit a question to be included on an upcoming episode, use the contact me form on the bottom of the homepage on podinsights.net or post your question in a comment on YouTube.
Thanks for listening.