Etsy :: Sigh.

So etsytools has been up and down. When it's been up, I've been able to wrest from it that of over 5,000 daily sales on Etsy, fewer than 80 were tagged "photography".

The name of the game on Etsy is "promotion". What that means in Etsy parlance is pour time and money into pushing your items to the top of the pile of listings to even have a chance of being seen. I can't find a good number for how many listings there are, total - one Etsy post indicated that there were around 375,000 new ones in one month - and a listing lasts 3 months. So assuming every listing went to its full 3-month lifespan, that'd be somewhere around... 1,125,000 up at a time, which sounds kinda low actually.

So, you have to sink enough time and money into "promotion" to give your items a chance to even see the light, to make it into those 5,000 daily sales, out of 1.1M listings. And for photography, that's only 80 items. Of 1.1M total listings.

It doesn't make much business sense. I'm starting to see that Etsy is a great place to list your excess craft output, to make some friends, and a place to have an instant-on retail outlet. But it's not a place to seriously sell most things. I am going to continue through the winter, running the normal promo schemes, but then focus on real-world venues - and on improving my work.