Why am I not making any money on Etsy?

You're either not selling enough, or you're selling plenty and each order is quietly paying you next to nothing, and those 2 problems look identical from the outside while needing completely opposite fixes. Most of the advice out there lumps them together as "not enough sales", which is how a maker who is already flat out ends up being told to list more.

I sold on Etsy myself for years, quilts and bags sewn from cotton I imported from America, and later glitter hairbows made at the kitchen table the year there was no money coming in and going back to work early was the alternative. So none of this is theory to me. I've lived the version where the shop looks busy from the outside and the bank account never seems to hear about it.

Is it that I'm not selling enough, or not earning enough per sale?

Sit down and answer this one honestly before you touch anything else, because the 2 answers send you in opposite directions.

If the orders simply aren't arriving, you have a visibility or conversion problem, and this article isn't the one you need. Go and read why you have no views on Etsy if nobody is finding you, or Etsy views but no sales if they're finding you and not buying, and come back to this one when the parcels are going out.

This article is for the other maker. The one who is genuinely busy, orders every week, evenings at the table, and still nothing that looks like a wage at the end of the month. Busy is not the same as paid, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see that, because busy feels like the responsible thing to be. It looks like effort. It looks like the opposite of giving up.

How do I work out what I'm actually earning an hour?

Backwards, and on paper rather than in your head.

Start from what pieces like yours genuinely sell for, not what you'd like to charge. Then take off Etsy's full cut, take off your materials and your packaging down to the thank-you card, and take off your own time at a real wage, priced the way you'd have to pay somebody else to do those hours.

Whatever is left tells you whether the product works at that price at all, and then dividing it by the hours tells you what you're actually being paid for one of them. I've walked through the whole method properly in how do I price my handmade products, so I won't re-teach it here.

What I will do is show you mine, because I'd rather you saw a real sum than a tidy example.

Sells for	£5.00
Fabric, £2.50 a sheet, 2 bows to a sheet being conservative with the placement	-£1.25
Clip	-£0.20
Etsy's full cut, 22.8% on something this cheap	-£1.14
Left	£2.41

At an hour a bow, which is what hand cutting and gluing took me, that is £2.41 an hour. About a fifth of a living wage, for skilled work, at my own kitchen table.

And I was being kind to myself in that table. I left out the plastic top sheets I got through and the blades I wrecked, both real costs, so £2.41 is if anything generous.

One thing worth noticing in that Etsy line, because it catches a lot of makers out. Two of those fees are flat, and a flat fee doesn't care how cheap your product is, so the smaller the thing you sell the harder the whole stack bites. On a bare £5 sale with no postage Etsy takes £1.14 of it, which is 22.8%, where a £20 order with £4 postage on it comes to £3.65, a little over 15%. Same fees, half again as much taken, purely because the item is small. Under about a tenner, budget nearer 20% than 15%.

So should I just put my prices up?

Probably, and I'm the wrong person to promise you it'll work, because I never tried it.

I had decided the market had looked at a glitter hairbow and settled what a glitter hairbow costs. £5. And I believed that so completely that in all the time I made them I never once put a higher price on one to find out. Not £6, not even £5.50. It is entirely possible the bows would have carried £7 and nobody will ever know, because I never asked.

That's the confession, and I'd like it to save you from doing the same thing, because the belief that your price is fixed feels exactly like knowledge from the inside. Mine was never tested even once, and testing it costs nothing at all. Put the higher price on a few listings, watch what actually happens, and if you're nervous about how to do it, I've written about raising your prices without losing customers separately.

But there's a second lever, and it's the one I actually pulled.

How do I fix it without touching the price?

You go after the hour instead, because your hour is the one part of that whole sum you can change without needing anybody else's agreement. The market gets a say in your price, Etsy sets its own fees whether you like them or not, and your supplier decides what the fabric costs, but nobody outside your own house has an opinion on how long a bow takes you.

So I stopped hand cutting.

I had a Cricut, which had cost me £249, and the glitter fabric went through its blades faster than I could keep replacing them. What actually worked was a die cutting machine that cost £50 and ran the fabric through like a pasta maker. Then several layers of fabric at once instead of one. Then batch cutting the popular colours into little boxes ahead of time, so the last job of the night was just the glue gun.

About 25 bows an hour on a good day, in the end, which once you do the sums honestly is somewhere around £30 an hour. The bow was still £5. The same kitchen table went from paying me a fifth of a wage to paying me a proper one, because every one of those moves went after the hour and left everything else alone.

Now the honest bit, because this advice has a losing condition. It only works if you are actually busy. The £50 machine only pays for itself when there's fabric to feed it, the batching only pays when there are orders waiting for the popular colours, and if the orders are not there then the hour was never your problem, and making them faster just gets you to the end of the queue sooner. Which is why the first question in this article matters more than everything after it.

Once I could make 25 an hour, the question changed underneath me. It stopped being whether I could make them and became whether I could sell 25 of them, and those are rather different jobs with different tools. Solving the hour hands the bottleneck straight over to demand, which is what a launch is actually for, and building that towards a date you've picked is the argument I make for launching instead of listing. Though I'd go at the hour first, if I'm honest, because there's not much use learning to sell 25 of something while you can still only make one.

Your supplier invoices you, Etsy takes its cut the same afternoon, and the only person in the whole business quietly waiting to be paid is the one who made the thing