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If you’re a photographer looking to sell your work online, you’ve definitely come across Etsy as a potential sales platform.

Etsy’s huge built-in audience of over 80 million buyers and reputation as a marketplace for handmade goods makes it sound like a pretty appealing place to set up shop.

So is opening an Etsy shop really worth it for photographers wanting to make print sales?

In this post, we’ll go deep on examining the pros and cons of using Etsy based on our own experiences. Mainly, we’ll compare opening an Etsy shop to having your own self-hosted website (since we did both!)

The TL:DR

We opened our Etsy shop more or less as an experiment. We wanted to see if all the “passive sales” that you hear about from Etsy are really true.

Spoiler alert: kind of. We did have a few sales through the year, but not enough to really justify the extra time we spent on Etsy.

Etsy does require maintenance, like adding new listings on a regular basis, improving your search engine optimization over time, and actively promoting your shop using social media or paid ads.

I think Etsy might be a great option for you if you hate the idea of setting up your own website.

You don’t have to be super tech friendly to start an Etsy shop and everything is already thought of for you, so you can hit the ground running pretty quickly. It can be a great place to start.

The Pros of Using Etsy

Etsy is an extremely popular platform, and you’ll find tons of YouTube videos and blog posts encouraging you to open an Etsy store. Here are some of the reasons that Etsy is touted as being such a great place to open a photography print store:

Tap Into Etsy’s Existing Traffic

Theoretically, with thousands of active buyers using Etsy on a daily basis and millions of users overall, you stand to gain from immediate exposure to their audience versus having to build your own audience from scratch.

We found this to be true – sort of. It took about 3 months to make our first sale. Through the year, we had a total of 39 sales purely from the Etsy app and search traffic.

With that said though, it really depends on how competitive the market is for your particular product. We ended up selling mainly our lower priced greeting cards and calendars through discovery alone.

For photography prints and wall art, the market is definitely super competitive, even on Etsy. So much so that only one person ended up buying a photography print that they found through Etsy search!

In other words – Etsy is pretty much the same as a website in that there’s no easy traffic. You’ll still have to learn how to optimize your keywords, keep adding new listings and improve your old listings over time.

You Don’t Need to Be Computer Savvy

Setting up your own website (especially with an online store) can be intimidating if you’re not much of a computer person.

In that respect, you can hit the ground running quite a lot faster using Etsy. You don’t need to fiddle around with any web hosting, themes or plugins.

It’s lower commitment too in a sense that you can just de-activate your store any time you like. You aren’t locked into a year long hosting plan.

They Take Care of The Checkout Process & Taxes

Etsy has its own cart, checkout page and payment processor. So you don’t need to test these processes or worry about taking payments and handling people’s credit card information.

Etsy calculates and submits the sales taxes for you, so you don’t have to worry about that either come tax time. (You do still have to do your own income taxes, of course!)

They Can Send Your Customers Coupons Automatically

You can set up coupons pretty easily with Etsy that can encourage customers to come back and complete their purchase in case they wander away before getting to the checkout!

Coupons can be sent when someone favorites one of your items or leaves it in their cart. In fact, at this point I think Etsy customers do expect that you’ll send them codes if they just keep items in their cart!

Coupons can be a pain to set up on your own website, and they aren’t as reliable since most of your visitors aren’t logged in like they would be on Etsy.

The Cons of Using Etsy

Reliance on Etsy’s Search Rankings and SEO

Just like with a website, you have to spend time optimizing the keywords in your listings so that they show up in searches. This is an ongoing process that can take quite a few months before you start seeing results.

It can be tough to find the right keywords that people are actually searching for and that describe your product well, but that other sellers haven’t already picked up on.

You just have to experiment – try some keywords, wait several months to see if people are finding your listings through those keywords, and if not, adjust.

We did find greeting cards to be less competitive on Etsy search than they are on Google (at least when we first started our website – generally, your pages show up higher in search as your website gets older and more established.)

You Don’t Really Own Your Storefront – Or Your E-mail List

There are ways of encouraging your customers to sign up from your e-mail list from Etsy. You can include a link to your sign-up form from your main shop, in the automatic thank you notes to customers, or even on the physical thank you note you send with the order.

But it’s important to note that you can’t just write down your customer’s emails from old order details and start e-mailing them promotions in the future. This is against Etsy’s terms of service as well as spam laws. Technically, the customer signed up with Etsy – not your store directly.

Etsy also has a bad habit of closing down shops, sometimes without reason. It happens, and sellers have lost the revenue streams they built up over time, overnight.

Added Fees (on Top of Payment Processing)

The added fees can really sneak up on you on Etsy, and it’s probably the biggest beef that most sellers have with this marketplace.

When you’re selling online or accepting credit cards in person, the payment processing fees are a given.

But Etsy also charges recurring listing fees to keep your listings active and to restock them when they sell, as well as transaction fees on top of the usual payment processing fees.

They also run their own paid ads and charge you extra fees if somebody discovers your listing that way. I believe you can opt out of the ads if you sell less than $10,000 in a year, but after that you can’t.

The fees definitely add up and eat into your profit margins. Ours added up to 28% of the total sales.

When you compare Etsy’s fees to say, a commission charged by an in-person gallery or retail store, they’re not too bad. It also costs money each year to host your own website, especially as you start to get more traffic.

But they’re something to be aware of and to factor into your cost of doing business.

Free Shipping & Sales Are Greatly Encouraged on Etsy

Etsy really encourages you to offer free shipping if you want to show up higher in search results (of course you do!) That means you have to pay for shipping, and it can cut into your profit margins quite a lot.

We’ve also noticed that sellers who seem to do really well on Etsy have “limited time” sales running back-to-back all year long. It can be hard to compete when other shops around you are running 30-40% discounts at all times.

You could factor the sale price into the “regular” price of your prints, but having to run sales all the time may not look very professional for a photography business. It’s up to you whether you’d like to make that part of your business model.

Etsy Promotes Other People’s Listings Right Next to Yours

Etsy is a marketplace, so their main concern is helping shoppers discover as many listings as possible. Your listings feel like more of a commodity, and it’s super easy for your visitors to click out into somebody else’s shop while they’re looking at one of your products!

You Do Still Need To Do Your Own Marketing

Etsy will throw you a little bit of a bone, as you can see from our low-effort experiment! But if you really want your shop to thrive and potentially produce a decent income, you’ll need to market your shop and bring your own traffic to your Etsy store.

This might mean promoting your shop and listings through organic social media, or using paid ads. Personally, I don’t love the idea of doing all this marketing, just to bring people to a marketplace where other seller’s listings are advertised too!

I’d much rather send traffic to my own website, which is what we ultimately ended up doing.

It Doesn’t Look Super Professional

If you plan on doing markets, selling your images in retail stores or galleries, and otherwise doing photography as a career, it looks a lot more professional to be able to link people to your own website, rather than a marketplace.

You also have the benefit of being able to send e-mails from your own domain name when you have a self-hosted website.

And again, it’s annoying to refer potential customers to your store front, only to have other people’s products promoted alongside yours.

Our Experience with Print Sales on Etsy

As a disclaimer: we started our Etsy store as a sort of experiment to see if it would bring us in additional sales. When we opened it, we already had a website so any extra sales would be a nice bonus.

That means we did very little actual promotion to the Etsy store front. We did make a Facebook post about it when we first opened it, but that was about it.

We also didn’t do much to optimize our SEO. We set up the listings once in the beginning and then left them to see how well they’d do.

That is to say you’d probably have a LOT more luck with Etsy if you did actively promote your store and try to improve your visibility in their search over time.

With that said, these were our results:

We found success to be super limited for our higher-priced physical prints and wall art. To be exact, we sold a grand total of one (1) 8×12″ print on Etsy in the year+ we’ve had the shop open.

We had more traction with selling our lower-cost greeting cards and calendars. (Most likely because we had better luck showing up in Etsy’s search results for them.)

We opened our Etsy store right at the beginning of January 2023. Over the year, we made a grand total of $466.85 in fairly passive sales.

Now let’s talk about the fees! Altogether, Etsy charged us $130.94 during 2023. The postage fees and cost of goods sold was another $185, leaving our total profit from Etsy around $150 for the year.

So Has Etsy Been Worth it for us?

Long story short, not in our case. If you were hoping to make a meaningful income from Etsy by selling your photography prints you’ll probably be disappointed.

If you are willing to market and promote your Etsy shop using social media, in person markets, or paid advertising you’ll probably have better results.

It definitely does seem like Etsy rewards you for bringing them traffic and for continually uploading new listings. (Every time we upload a new listing, we see a boost in visitors.)

Personally, I just don’t love the idea of putting all that work in to promote a marketplace when I could promote my own website instead.

We still have our Etsy shop open because it is technically still profitable, and doesn’t take any extra effort on our part to maintain now that the listings are set up.

We ended up letting the photography prints expire though, as the greeting cards and calendars were the only things selling.

Does Etsy have a better conversion rate than a website?

When we did our little Etsy experiment, I was curious to see whether the conversion rate would be better on Etsy simply because it’s already a reputable website that people trust.

If you aren’t familiar with conversion rates, it’s basically the number of sales you make as a percentage of the number of visitors.

Surprisingly though, our conversion rate is pretty much the same on Etsy when compared to our website.

The Verdict

Etsy can be a useful way to make a side income. If you’re willing to spend the time setting up the listings, doing product photography or creating some mock-ups, and doing a little keyword research, you can make some sales here and there. No doubt, a few sales are better than none!

And some sellers are definitely making a killing on Etsy. If you’re willing to send your marketing efforts there I think you could definitely stand to get more momentum on Etsy and make a lot of sales.

If the thought of setting up your own website makes you shudder, you’ll definitely appreciate Etsy’s ease of use. It’s a great way to get started online and sort of test the waters of having an online shop.

Personally for us, it just made more sense to spend our time optimizing our own website rather than our Etsy listings.

Do you have experience running an Etsy shop? Let us know in the comments!