We have used MCF a few times to fill eBay orders and it was OK with the exception that it takes forever to get a tracking number. They don’t give it out until it ships which could be more than a day. our shipping on ebay is set to one day so it cuts very close to having a late ship even though it was shipped on time. That’s the only thing I hate about MCF. We would use it more often if that wasn’t the case and as @Dogtamer so eloquently stated, for Amazon these orders seem to be low priority. I will say that we have never had an issue with shipping or packaging for these orders and customers have not complained.
Yes Etsy is full of stuff imported from other countries.
Look, I feel terrible saying this, because I should want to be passionate about Handmade artisans, but that ship has long sailed away from Etsy. Just know at any given time they could ban you for not being handmade. I am handmade, 100 % all I sell is the light switch covers I make by hand. Etsy deactivated one of my best sellers for not being Handmade and had it deactivated for over a month. I went round and round with support and email and everything. Eventually they reactivated it and told me it was an accident. That listing has never recovered its stats and hasn’t sold since.
So go into it with the idea that its a temporary cash grab. At any given time they can hit your account with reserves and hold on to your money. At any given time they can just ban you. It’s just…depressing.
When I think of community on Etsy, I remember groups of sellers who would support each other with sales. And if you did not buy from other sellers in the group bounced you out. I cannot remember what they called these groups.
Are you thinking of the front page collections? Oh boy were those the days. I was in several of those groups - You’d have to create so many collections per day to submit for the FP, including at least 6 others in the group. It was more of a - If you include them, they’ll include you - and hoping the Etsy powers that be selected a FP collection you were in. Ahhh so much work, but so much fun. Really kick-started a lot of us back in the day.
When the “Amazon Gurus” first began to REALLY proliferate, in the first-½ of the first decade of this century, neither the MSM or its so-called ‘lesser lights’ had yet brought forth exposure of exactly howthat practice could run afoul of certain provisions in the U.S.C.
Once they did so - beginning in 2012, and crescendoing-increasingly over the next four years - Amazon (rather-begrudgingly, from my own point of view) deployed the 2Oct`16 Revision To Incentivized Review Policy Initiative (citational references are available upon request), with which Amazon’s TPTB seems to have considered that they’d put paid on the ability to do so (more to their chagrin, in light of subsequent development, methinks) and many another initiative in succeeding years has been targeted towards plugging this or that thumb-hole in this and that RELATED leak in the far-flung & multifarious storm-troubled dikes of its ramparts which bear upon that problem.
Yeah and lots of teams with promo games of fav’ing, buying from each other, stuff like that. Nonsense really.
Some of it was fun, but it was very high school. If you weren’t in the “cool” teams, you were never (almost never) going to get on the front page. The etsy mods pulled from the same curators over and over.
@HumbleWarrior “Do you know whether Etsy has a lot of Chinese sellers?”
Yes, Etsy has an abundance of Chinese and non-Chinese sellers reselling Alibaba and Aliexpress stuff as handmade. Chinese manufactured stuff sells well on Etsy which is why it does not get shutdown.
As others have mentioned, ebay has good traffic and flexible ad options.
Etsy has over 5 million sellers and getting visits to your shop requires paid Etsy advertising.
If you annoy Etsy (as I often do) by readjusting your ad budget or hours your advertising is turned on, Etsy will retaliate with a $1 daily spending limit on your ad budget (2-3 clicks).
I don’t know your product line so you would need to decide whether Etsy would work for you.
I know many Etsy sellers of crafts who use Etsy as a place to have their customers from real world galleries and shows contact them.
They list some of their older and poor selling works, and protect their newest designs for real world selling.
As well as the huge number of sellers, Etsy has one of the worst search engines on the internet, and sellers who spend their lives adding keywords to listings. Fortunately, not all Etsy sellers can afford to advertise or those who do not would stand no chance of selling.
Thank you for sharing. I used to sell on eBay 3-4 years ago using an automated software that forward eBay orders to Amazon FBA for fulfillment. It had worked great for almost a year before crashing down because I didn’t pay enough attention on the refund process. Since then my seller status on eBay is below standard
I love the way that eBay charges on advertising (the percentage as you explained). That’s better than PPC (for us). Maybe I should work on getting back on eBay before Etsy.
Hi Dog, thanks for your reply. When do you said low-priority, do you mean slower shipping speed? Yes, I noticed that orders that I place manually (normally for sending a replacement item to customers) through MCF takes 4-5 days, much slower than Prime.
Do you mean that if the ratio of FBA orders to MCF orders isn’t high enough (for example 100 FBA orders per 1 MCF orders is 100:1 which is better than 50:1 or 20:1), Amabot would punish me for overused MCF?
It’s easy to get your status back up on eBay, just ship some orders on time without any issues, and it doesn’t really matter anyway because buyers don’t see your below standard status. As long as you have decent feedback you should be fine. We have also been able to call and get bogus feedback removed in the past.
Thanks for sharing the story. How did you prove that your product is really handmade? I’m sure that Etsy doesn’t have an inspector to come to your production site to observe.
Thanks for warning. I already have enough anxiety on Amazon shutting down account up until sometime this year that they have a program to warn sellers before the account get suspended.
Thanks for the info. Man, I’m trying to avoid them because they love to compete by cutting prices. That’s the worst way to compete IMO. It’s just spiral down to the bottom pit.
The sagging performance of the AFN (“Amazon Fulfillment Network,” aka FBA) in recent years - which IS an empirically-demonstrable paradigm, and was beginning to show signs of being so long before the COVID-19 Crisis scare threw monkey wrenches into so many established workflows - is probably, to my way of thinking, among the primary impetuses behind various & sundry changes of policy - such as the aforementioned unwelcome MCF variance from the historical norm in recent months, the 8Aug2023 News Headline “New Seller Enrollment for Seller Fulfilled Prime Will Reopen on October 1, 2023” (link, Seller Central, “ref.”-version URL), etc. - with which our Seller Community must needs struggle to deal with.
Partially, but not entirely so.
The underpinning gist of what I’m trying to impart is that Amazon can NEVER be relied upon to provide YOUR buyers a sufficient degree of Customer Satisfaction if one leaves matters entirely in its hands.
Despite certain provisions of the ASBSA (“Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement” [link, Seller Central]), and long-, deep-, and broad-consensus to the contrary, there do exist relatively-simple methodologies for ensuring that one does not bleed their own coffers’ recompense into Amazon’s at the merest drop of this or that Amabot’s hat.
Wow, this made me feel like I have the privilege to be part of Amazon FBA Not sure why they can’t take more FBA sellers but that’s good news to me. We have too many FBA Chinese sellers on the platform already.
I sell on Etsy, I opened my first store there in Oct 2014. I like eranlk for my keyword research.
Before that, I sold in Fb sales groups. I did about $400-$600/mo. I did best on Amazon Handmade until the pandemic, easily $1K+/mo. I’ve never recovered. FBA was great, but it’s become too expensive and time-consuming. My best-selling venue changes on a monthly basis.
FB/IG was starting to do well until FB killed my store by “demonetizing” it. Meaning I couldn’t take payments thru FB/IG. I’m back selling in FB sales group, I just rejoined a group where I first starting selling.
I’ve been rewriting descriptions, changing or adding new photos. I start on my website, then spend 2 more days pushing them out to my other venues, then check each listing for errors. iI can easily take 2 weeks or more to list a new product. Product updates are easier. I still try to mix new product listings with product updates.
I joined Etsy in 2008, and did reasonably OK. Since I sold at craft fairs 40 weekends a year, Etsy was supplemental income so I never had high expectations.
I loved the teams and the collections. It was the only time I actually enjoyed social marketing. And then 5 or 6 years ago, sales started their downward slide — and they kept sliding. Prior to the slide, my online sales were 90% Amazon, 9% Etsy and 1% other.
I’m in a very saturated category (jewelry) and there’s no way in f I can compete with Alibaba etc. pricing. Like craft shows, once you let in commercial non-handmade garbage, that’s the audience you’ll draw. As the customer base includes more bargain hunters, artists and crafters go elsewhere because their (and my) target market has abandoned ship.
In ballet, it’s called the downward death spiral. Once the ballerina starts spiraling down, death is imminent.
Which brings us back to Etsy.
Every 4 months, listings expire and you pay another fee to renew them. I spent umpteen hours reading Etsy’s trend reports to decide which ~120 items I wanted to include for each 4-month period. For all the bazillion hours I spent on Etsy, I netted $53 in 2022. F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F
which is why I didn’t renew a single item in 2023, and have no plans to.
Thanks for the info. Sorry that you had to quit Etsy due to the flood of Alibaba items You should try eBay. Like Amazon, they don’t charge to list, you only pay them percentage of the sales.
I didn’t know this term came from ballet. The decline also happens in Amazon market (at least for me). Covid19 year was the best year because everyone stayed at home and had to purchase online. Since then, the sales have dropped every year. The PPC also gets more expensive with uglier results. However I still have hope that things (e-commerce) will get better. I’ve seen news of brick and mortar stores closing rapidly in big cities on both coasts due to rampant shoplifting. The police no longer care because they cannot prosecute them (blame on bad new laws). Less brick and mortar stores = More online purchase.
sounds like a high school behavior 
Not sure why they can’t take more FBA sellers but that’s good news to me. We have too many FBA Chinese sellers on the platform already.