Etsy is serious about bringing holiday shopping forward and will try to entice shoppers with a focus on “deals.” Etsy is promoting a 5-week Cyber Sale that kicks off on October 23rd and runs past Thanksgiving and Black Friday-Cyber Monday and invited sellers to participate.
“The biggest shopping event of the year is almost here,” Etsy told sellers in an announcement on Thursday, “and we’ll be driving deal-seeking shoppers to Etsy to help them find amazing discounts on great gifts for the holidays.”
In order to offer shoppers deals, it’s up to Etsy to convince sellers to run sales. It encouraged sellers to schedule a sale of 25% off or more between October 23 and November 29 for the chance to have their items featured. “Why 25% off? We know from research that sales with discounts 25% or more could result in more orders,” it said.
In a separate announcement on Thursday, September 28, 2023, Etsy announced a sweepstakes for a chance for 50 sellers to win $40 in listing credits (approximately 200 listing credits per winner) for participating in the sale and in Etsy’s Share & Save program. Etsy reminded sellers that for those signed up for the Share & Save program, “When you share unique trackable links to your shop or listings and make a sale, we’ll take 4% of the order total off your Etsy bill.”
It appears sellers must put their entire shop on sale (minimum 25% discount) to be eligible for the sweepstakes – read the fine print.
Etsy told sellers it would be investing in marketing “to make sure buyers everywhere know all about the Cyber sales event,” and it is creating a new “Deals” tab in the Etsy shopping app featuring items that are on sale.
Etsy advised sellers to review their pricing strategy so they could offer “enticing discounts” for shoppers, and it referred them to what it called its “Ultimate Guide to Pricing” (Tools for Growing Your Business—and How to Fit Them Into Your Pricing Strategy).
Sellers reacted to the advice in the pricing guide in a thread on the Etsy boards, with some displaying some resentment that Etsy expects them to lower their prices. A seller kicked off the discussion with the comment: “Gee, Etsy, you could just buy all my inventory, and then you can do with it as you please. Set the prices you want, ship it the way you want, and refund any time you feel like it – just give me the money and we can be done.”
So 25% Discount and 25%+ seller fees leave very little if anything for me. Amazon has a sale for a day or two – Etsy has theirs’s for five weeks. I do not see many “seasoned” Etsy sellers jumping into this.