Ebay or Etsy for Vintage, Part II of A Review



Selling vintage online...where to list?  Etsy or Ebay?  This is my second installment of my review based on my experiences and opinions.

To sell...you have to be been seen!  When I started on Etsy, search results were based on the most freshly listed.  About a year ago, it changed to most relevant, and having spot-on titles and tags ruled.

However.

Etsy keeps messing with search in experiments that are only discovered via sellers paying obsessive attention to where their items rank in a search.

For instance, in my pet and people portraits shop, there are thousands of portrait samples.  A search for "pet portraits" show the same exact item out of tens of thousand similar ones in the prime top 3 spots.  And the first page shows mostly the same items week after week.  Since Etsy refuses to disclose their algorithm, the rest of us are just out of luck. 

Even more disturbing, Etsy is experimenting with eliminating categories from its front page.  Vintage was one of the first go, hidden as a subcategory.  A hue and cry by Vinties restored it for now, to one of the 7 "main" categories.  (BTW, as of this writing, ART is hidden under Home and Garden, while Halloween is a main category!

This is the latest experiment in search.  The constant experiments resulted in low views during experiments, which means lost sales.  An etsy seller is consistently subject to being a guinea pig.  The idea that buying is social has made it increasingly difficult to sell there for many vintage sellers.

I find the ebay search to be more straightforward.

And the traffic, have I mentioned that?  Everyone knows about Ebay.  Etsy is growing by leaps and bounds, but it seems like it is trying to herd away sellers who do not fit its unknown direction.

Ebay seems to want listings and sales, period.

My experience is more weighted on Etsy goings on, so I'd be interested in hearing what primarily Ebayers say.  All that said, both of them are working for me.  More important than anything, I think, is that I have to use them as tools, not online "homes".  What do you think? 

Ebay vs. Etsy for Vintage, a review, Part I

Vintage Red Kitchen Canisters

Etsy vs. Ebay, where is the best place to sell and buy vintage?  I buy and sell on both, here's my review of the two sites.  This will be in more than one part, to do it justice!

Some of you know I sell vintage online as well as portraits and art.  I find it a nice social balance, I get "out and about" at auctions and estate sales.  Working all day, every day in the studio is confining for me, I'm very outgoing.

I've sold art on ebay, but when I started with the vintage, all I heard were horror stories about crazy listing fees, buyer feedback abuse, cheapie Chinese imitation junk, site-controlled checkouts, unfair search results, an impersonal environment and a non-responsive-to-sellers management.  So I tried Etsy.

So I tried Etsy.  Reasonable listing fees, a final value fee of less than half of ebay, and an online "community" full of hipsters just waiting to buy vintage.

Etsy has been very good to me.  I would prefer to sell there.  But in the past two years since I've sold there, there seems to be less and less of a difference between Ebay and Etsy.  So I have been listing and selling more and more on Ebay.   I only list auctions.  And at the price I would list it on Etsy plus 5% to cover the extra fees.

The biggest difference is that Ebay has huge traffic from every demographic and around the world.  And my vintage sells quickly there for the price I want.  I now wait a week before moving my newly-listed Ebay vintage to storage.  I rarely sell that quickly on Etsy, although it's happened.  It's even happened with items I had on ebay that never sold, listed on Etsy and SNAP, it's gone!  There's a bit of rhyme and reason to it, things that appeal to collectors of very specific things, like political memorabilia, military items, "name brand" figurines and collectibles do great on Ebay. Items like the canister set above, do better on Etsy, where buyers are more apt to browse for "something" for their kitchen, rather than a razor-sharp search.

Crazy listing fees on Ebay are gone. I can take a chance on an expensive item and not worry that I'll have huge listing fees if it doesn't sell! It's now cheaper for me to list on Ebay at 50 free listings a month than Etsy for 20 cents. That in itself is worth a second look at Ebay.  

Buyer feedback abuse? Both drastically favor the buyer.  Not when I started, you could see the feedback from the seller as well as the buyer and so could see the "other side" of any negative feedback and make an intelligent decision on whether to buy or not.  But Etsy has since hidden feedback left on a bad buyer...or any buyer...thus, making it one-sided and scary. They both have mechanisms in place to settle disputes. But Ebay wins this one, too, sheerly by the embarrassingly cutesy name Etsy gives the process: "Kiss and Make Up".

I know that those who have been in this business a while feel that Ebay really hurt them in many ways, changed things that have hurt them, and that is a reality. I am not unaware of this, but I just have no personal knowledge. I'd love to hear from you if you do.  Next, I'm going to compare the flooding of the market and search issues.  Hey, thanks for stopping by!  Robin