… if you don’t want the stuff you buy on Etsy to become more expensive, start making the kind of noise about Etsy’s fee changes that y’all made about Patreon’s fee changes.
Sooner or later, those costs become customer costs, one way or the other.
Make some noise, because this is ridiculous. Etsy isn’t giving us anything new: for the new features not only will we be getting hit with these raised transaction fees but we’ll also be required to pay a subscription fee. So what we’re getting for these increased fees?
Nothing. Just more fees. No more features, just more costs.
(And yes, I am looking into alternatives, but omfg, make some noise on social media, please. Patreon backed down from their ridiculous fee grab with enough user pressure.)
Please everybody listen to this. I try to keep my prices as low as I can but with these fees I’m going to have to start increasing process or find somewhere else and lose alot of my customer base.
Please make some noise and help out small business owners on Etsy by protesting these fee hikes.
Oppose the fee hikes! Support autistic businesses!
Also the fact lies that it isn’t even just fees on the actual product you’re selling, it’s also on the shipping cost. So say I know exactly to the penny how much a package will cost to ship, so I charge the customer that much. Etsy now is taking a percentage of that fee away. So either I have to overcharge knowingly for shipping, passing that cost down to customers right off the bat, or I have to make up for the lost currency. Small businesses and artists who even just make some extra cash off of Etsy can not always easily afford the cost of buying and hosting their own separate E-commerce business. People who have built up followings on Etsy can’t force customers to move to other platforms. The entire situation is poo and people who want cool merchandise for the reasonable prices artists are currently able to offer need to make noise.
And Etsy calculates that for some of us, too. So they’ll calculate it. And then add 5% to it? Do they charge the customer (like when they do sales tax for us) or just us? Am I gonna have to add a handling fee to cover the shipping upcharge?
Though honestly, the processing fee hike is… it’s terrible.
For those of us who do this full time, we already live in the literal margins of what we make. Etsy deciding to just snatch 1.5% of what I make out of my hands without offering me anything in return is… that shit adds up. I already only make – at BEST – maybe 40% of every dollar that a customer pays me, once you account for all costs.
Let’s assume I have an amazing year and we do 30K in revenue. Etsy’s fee hike means they’ve taken an additional $450 out of my hands. Which, in this assumed scenario, they’re taking that out of the hands of someone whose profit, that is, the money that’s really mine (assuming I owe no income tax, heh), 12K?
That’s … it’s brutal.
Oh yeah, and:
This ain’t about shit but making Josh the CEO, talking down to us peon sellers in that awful video, richer.
Fuuuuuck that.
Added: the hashtag I’ve seen so far on Twitter is #etsyfees.
In any case, please update your bookmarks – find us at www.nerdykeppie.com! Whether or not we break up with Etsy, you can always find us there.
How do we make noise? Seriously I would love to but where do I complain? I also have serious concerns that these new “premium paid” options are basically Etsy saying “If you don’t go premium, we wont give you any exposure.” You know, basically like Facebook did with business pages.
Contact Etsy on social media and email them.
The 5% Shipping Fee is bogus: they provide a very meager discount if you buy your shipping labels through them, but they don’t provide you with actual supplies to print your labels, they literally DO NOT need to charge this 5% fee. Now they are going to charge it REGARDLESS if you purchase your labels through them or not. There goes my discount, and now I will get charged 5% whether or not I use their site to purchase labels vs using USPS or UPS or FedEx. What are they using it for? Who knows. Why are they charging it? Who knows. No information has been given other than vague “we’re investing in bringing more business to etsy”
How are you investing it? With whom are you investing it? And how will it help us, as businesses? How does this not translate to higher prices for customers, potentially causing smaller shops to close up bc they lose business? What is the PURPOSE?
Make some noise. Call them out. This stuff hurts both small businesses and large ones. It hurts customers. If I raise my prices to counteract these fees, I risk losing business. As a budding company, this isn’t something I can afford to do.
As for their subscription plans, they don’t tell you WHAT tools are coming to the expanded and premium toolset, but they sure do have a price nailed down. For only $10/mo (From July to Jan 2019, then it bumps to $20/mo) you get Advanced Tools. What are they? Who knows! Etsy hasn’t said a damn thing about it, except that it’s on sale for $10/mo. The premium subscription is even more vague: a complete toolset but cost to be determined in Jan 2019.
The only tools here are Etsy.
Call them out for it.
Here’s the link explaining some of the things available in the subscription plan:
So… my stuff is made to order. It’s never listed as ‘out of stock’ because I MAKE THEM TO ORDER. There’s .. literally nothing in this package that really appeals to me. And I tried out their ‘abandoned cart’ emails and so on and honestly they don’t increase my sales enough to justify the amount I am spending on them.
I turned off ‘promoted listings’ because it was costing me money and I literally got no sales through it.
Like I said, 75% of my revenue comes from outside Etsy. So this double-dip increased fee nonsense is… I get nothing. At all.
I cannot encourage enough for people to tweet @Etsy and use #etsyfees. Making noise on social media is how we backed down Patreon. If we back down Etsy it will be through social media.
People easily mistake neurodivergent speech patterns and communication styles for run-of-the-mill pretentiousness.
I don’t want to get too specific right now, but a lot of people who are neurodivergent (namely autistic, but there’s lots of overlap) struggle with communication. To them, writing/typing may be far easier and more natural than speaking aloud, but it can still come off as unusually formal, overly precise, or more awkwardly structured than usual. Sometimes it’s interpreted as “pretentiousness” because it doesn’t have the same casual cadence many neurotypical writers may use.
This.
wait people consider this offensive?
Not offensive so much as irritating, I guess. It’s low-hanging fruit and easy to mock whenever people pick up on something “off” about you.
Other times, people assume that you employ formal language or “advanced” vocabulary because you’re trying too hard to sound intelligent or superior. What you intend to be clear and specific may be interpreted as condescension.
I’m autistic. I’ve been mocked for sounding “anal”, accused of being a “snob”, and called plain old “cringey” for being overly formal. Oddly enough, I don’t really have this stiltedness while speaking and I’m much more casual in person. That’s learned from years of interacting a lot in a wide variety of situations. For whatever reason, though, I can’t get that to carry over to the Internet for the life of me unless I’m talking 1:1 with someone I’ve had time to get to know. If you’re not in my inner circle/we’re not DMing, you either get this formality you’re seeing here, or my over-the-top “shitposting” tone.
So, yeah, please try not to assume anything about people based on their written communication. It doesn’t always have anything to do with their personality/character or how they feel about you. We can’t all type like neurotypicals.
I think one big intersection here is when male autistics (am female, but oldest offspring is male) are easily mistaken for “mansplaining” when talking about special interests. Many men explain things women already know to them because they either intentionally or carelessly assume that the woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Autistic men will have a very hard time understanding why telling a woman something she already knows in exhaustive detail would bother her because we’re both very interested in quantum mechanics or trains or whatever, right?
Also! Those of us who do not speak or understand speech are taught a VERY formal way of writing. Until it is pointed out to us that it is not normal conversational English we have no way of knowing. (What’s worse is that it is extremely hard to do for those of us that do not think in words at all.) I took courses in creative writing and speech (yes, speech class is really helpful in learning different ways of presenting words, even in writing). I learned not to worry about being correct, just aim for being understandable. It takes me a lot less time to write posts (although it does annoy some people) when I just slip into Baby’s speech patterns because they are what I hear/see the most.
Sos writed stuff like this lots, but is easier an faster than writing like the firstest part. 🙂
So today I tripped. Fell flat on my face, it was awful but ultimately harmless. My service dog, however, is trained to go get an adult if I have a seizure, and he assumed this was a seizure (were training him to do more to care for me, but we didn’t learn I had epilepsy until a year after we got him)
I went after him after I had dusten off my jeans and my ego, and I found him trying to get the attention of a very annoyed woman. She was swatting him away and telling him to go away. So I feel like I need to make this heads up
If a service dog without a person approaches you, it means the person is down and in need of help
Don’t get scared, don’t get annoyed, follow the dog! If it had been an emergency situation, I could have vomited and choked, I could have hit my head, I could have had so many things happen to me. We’re going to update his training so if the first person doesn’t cooperate, he moves on, but seriously guys. If what’s-his-face could understand that lassie wanted him to go to the well, you can figure out that a dog in a vest proclaiming it a service dog wants you to follow him
I know of one person who has a card attached to the vest the dog can reach around and grab. He then takes the card that says follow me, they need help etc. to someone so they know the situation.
Maybe something like that could be possible?
Or even a patch that says If I’m alone, follow me. Something like that.
Sadly not everyone knows or understands how service dogs work, so maybe something to help the general public get it would be helpful
I at least would be curious and more likely concerned if I saw any working dog without a person. If one were bothering me I would definitely stop and think, most likely I would think “you must still be in training, where’s your handler” but I would certainly not ignore or shoo the dog and it baffles but tbh doesn’t surprise me that there are people who would.
Anyway psa, til service dogs may be trained to get bystander attention if necessary!
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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