… 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.
I’ve purchased only one item from Etsy ever. An adorable fishbowl ring that I love to this day, but the cost was ridiculous for it. After that, I spoke with my wallet and stopped going through Etsy. They’re like the Macy’s of online shopping: double the price for things you can get elsewhere for half the cost. I’ll gladly support sellers that go through a more reasonable digital seller.
I mean, our products will most likely stay the same in cost if we go somewhere else, and go up a little bit if we stay on Etsy. It’s a tremendous amount of cost in time and money to switch 864 item listings to another platform.
There ARE a lot of cheaper ways to get things that are sold on Etsy, but a lot of them are people ripping off Etsy artists. I actually found knockoffs of a couple of my patches (literal special patches for a LARP run by friends of mine) on a Wish.com type site, with my images, and my watermark.
So do beware that what you buy elsewhere is quite possibly people ripping off those artists on Etsy who are ‘overpriced.’ Our stuff is priced pretty darn reasonably for handmade items. It’s just that a lot of people are used to the prices that come with Amazon and Wish flooding the market with cheap knockoffs.
(We thought about doing business with Amazon, btw, and decided not to contribute to Jeff Bezos taking over the world. Could we have another revenue stream? Maybe. But I’d rather miss out on some sales than contribute to the misery and penury of Amazon workers.)
I appreciate some of your sentiment but some of it hurts my soul as someone who works their ass off on handmade quality items, and where I have to outsource production, works very hard to make sure we ethically source our items. So please be kind and take that into consideration. One bad or overpriced item on Etsy doesn’t speak for the rest of us.
nose ornament with spiders
salinar culture (peru), c.100 BC – 200 AD, gold
the problem is that there’s no sense of scale in these pictures. i would love to see it on a mannequin head or something, just to see how big (or small!) it would be on a human’s nose
well, since u ask, u can look up the scale: this one in particular is about 4 3/8 inches wide and 2 inches in height, so it when worn this would at its longest point cover the length of approx the distance between the outer corners of each eye. the ornament would hang over the mouth but not all of the chin. these pre-columbian ornaments were stately and quite large compared to most our familiar contemporary septum nose rings.
i don’t know why, but any time i make a potion in oblivion i can only come up with Dr. Pepper-related names for them
I don’t recall my Mamaw forgetting that anyone was dead. (Though who knows by this point?)
One super awkward thing did happen when I was back in 2008, when my mother was really sick and they were still looking after my grandmother 24/7.
(And yeah, I still have some hard feelings about how long it took my uncle and his wife to step in and do anything but criticize. Until after his sister finally got the terminal cancer dx, when she’d been in awful shape for years already. Trying not to get off onto that just now.)
Anyway, after my mom finally did get the medical problems taken more seriously, however belatedly? My Mamaw couldn’t keep it in her mind that her daughter had terminal cancer. Or that she was sick at all, in spite of all the evidence of that in front of her.
It was awkward enough when she kept complimenting my mom’s weight loss.
What got me having to just leave the house and take to the woods for hours to calm down one day, though? She decided that she needed to call my uncle (the Golden Child), and rat my mother out.
“Cathy is so lazy! Why, she’s in there taking a nap again!”
Not remembering that her daughter was well on the way to dying. The lady’s automatic impulse was to try and stir up more trouble there.
I mean, I don’t have any trouble understanding where he learned some of his own behavior there, but yeah. That’s how it was.
Also another illustration of how dementia is unlikely to totally change who a person is. No matter how many people around them might want to blame all bad behavior on the dementia. IME, it’s like disinhibition from alcohol. If horrible shit starts coming out of someone when their inhibitions are reduced for whatever reason? It was there all along; they just had better control before over who they showed it to and how. Attempts at manipulative behavior may get much less slick (!), but they’re probably not a totally new thing. The reduced inhibitions and some other cognitive effects can make unpleasant behavior much harder to deal with, however.
“Oh yeah, every time that dad forgets mom is dead, we head to the cemetery so he can see her gravestone.”
WHAT. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some version of this awful story. Stop taking people with dementia to the cemetery. Seriously. I cringe every single time someone tells me about their “plan” to remind a loved one that their loved one is dead.
I also hear this a lot: “I keep reminding mom that her sister is dead, and sometimes she recalls it once I’ve said it.” That’s still not a good thing. Why are we trying to force people to remember that their loved ones have passed away?
If your loved one with dementia has lost track of their timeline, and forgotten that a loved one is dead, don’t remind them. What’s the point of reintroducing that kind of pain? Here’s the thing: they will forget again, and they will ask again. You’re never, ever, ever, going to “convince” them of something permanently.
Instead, do this:
“Dad, where do you think mom is?”
When he tells you the answer, repeat that answer to him and assert that it sounds correct. For example, if he says, “I think mom is at work,” say, “Yes, that sounds right, I think she must be at work.” If he says, “I think she passed away,” say, “Yes, she passed away.”
People like the answer that they gave you. Also, it takes you off the hook to “come up with something” that satisfies them. Then, twenty minutes later, when they ask where mom is, repeat what they originally told you.
I support this sentiment. Repeatedly reminding someone with faulty memory that a loved one has died isn’t a kindness, it’s a cruelty. They have to relieve the loss every time, even if they don’t remember the grief 15 minutes later.
In other words, don’t try to impose your timeline on them in order to make yourself feel better. Correcting an afflicted dementia patient will not cure them. They won’t magically return to your ‘real world’. No matter how much you might want them to.
It’s a kindness of old age, forgetting. Life can be very painful. Don’t be the one ripping off the bandage every single time.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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