An online buddy of mine sells her jewelry and scarfs on Etsy at Chrysalis Jewelry TX, she offered me a bit of advice once I decided to give a shot at selling my fine art photography images there. She helped me and I appreciate it, but I haven’t really done my part.
If eBay is an online flea market, than Etsy is an online Craft Mall. Like real world craft malls, there is an interesting array of items for sale. The prices range from really cheap to really not so cheap. Like eBay it’s up to the seller to set the prices, post the photos, write the descriptions, and promote their shops both to the larger world and to other Etsy users.
I found a pretty cool Etsy tool not too long ago called Craftcount which tracks the best sellers on Etsy. The top seller is called CLBeads and has been on Etsy since 2008. They have sold over 275,000 items and have over 6400 items in there shop at the time of this writing. They seem to have an average price of about $3.00-which boils down to $165,000 a year. The most successful photographer seems to be Eye Poetry and they have been around since 2007 and have sold over 13,000 items, and have 463 items in their shop at the moment-at about $30 an item that’s close to $65,000 a year. These numbers are before taxes and fees and are pretty much wild guesses.
I’ve been on Etsy since 2012 and have had two sales. This isn’t really Etsy’s fault, like everything else online, it’s up to the user to drive traffic and promote sales and so on and so forth. Moving down the list of best selling photography shops you quickly leave the rarefied air of $50,000 plus a year and free-fall down to shops that make about $2000 a year-Craftcount doesn’t rank shops with sales below 1,000-which is still light years ahead of me, but not exactly retire to the South of France Money. There are successful shops that started about the time I did, but I’m guessing they did a lot more work than I did on their way to 20,000 sales.
Etsy is interesting and there’s always the possibility that I might put more time into listing and promoting my fine art photography. I’m also looking at the images that are selling and sorting through my own work to see if I have anything similar and at the very least looking for common elements over the shops.
Here are a few of my images from my Etsy Shop, Fine Art Photography By-
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