Selling on Etsy in 2026... Is it Even Worth It?

And the moment that you go home, the sales completely stop. That is something that I just don't know if I would be willing to risk, but the competition is brutal. You might take home a couple hundred dollars up to a thousand dollars or so, which if you get up to a thousand dollars, that is amazing. Let's have a chit-chat real quick, because y'all, if I had a dollar for every single time someone come to me and said, Etsy is way too oversaturated for me to sell. Then I would have enough money to fully fund an Etsy shop and then some. I hear it constantly in my DMs, in comments, people in person, family and friends who really do want to start selling, but they talk themselves out of it because they think that Etsy is way too saturated. And if you want me to be honest, I get it. It does feel like it can be oversaturated because when you search Etsy and you see thousands and thousands of results for something that you are trying to sell, it feels like the door just gets shut right in our face. But here's the thing that nobody is actually doing. They're not asking the right questions. The question isn't about is Etsy too oversaturated or is it too crowded? The question then becomes compared to what? Because today we're gonna look at lots of different options out there for you to sell your products. We're gonna look at the possibility of selling at craft fairs, your own website, social selling, whether that is on Instagram, TikTok, whatever, or even on Amazon. And I really think that by the end of this video, your mind may change. So before we really dive in, I want to be completely upfront with you guys. I'm not here to be an Etsy cheerleader. I want to be completely honest with you and give you the pros and the cons of every platform, including Etsy. Because here's the thing, if there is something out there that genuinely beats it, I feel like I want you all to know about it. You deserve that. But here's the thing, we have spent years and years of helping people learn how to build real income by selling their handmade and digital products online. And the data that I have seen over and over tells a completely different story. So let's go ahead and dive right into it. If you are new here, my name is Lauren, and I am a craft producer here at Maker's Gonna Learn, but also one of our resident Etsy experts for our other program, Passive Earner Society, where we teach people how to really sell on Etsy in 2026, because there's a lot to it. But enough about that, because I'm not here to necessarily sell you on that or Etsy. I want to show you a real comparison of all of these different avenues that you can take if you have a creative business. So I want to start with craft fairs, which is the one that most of us hold near and dear to our heart. It is the most old school way of selling our creative things and that is at our local craft fairs and markets. And look, I'm gonna be the first to tell you, I adore a good craft fair. There's something really special about seeing the people who create the beautiful things that we purchase face-to-face and seeing someone fall in love with our creations and something that we have made. But I want to be really honest about what it takes to be successful at these craft fairs. To start out with, you are paying for a booth. And honestly, in today's economy, you're gonna have to pay, I would say if you could get by with $50 for a booth, you would be doing great. But generally speaking, they're $100 plus for a booth. And if it's a big event, it can be into the multiple hundred dollars just to be able to have a space or a booth set up at the event. Not only do you have to pay or rent your space, you are loading up your car. You have to come up with your actual setup, your tablescapes, your display pieces. You have to set it up and break it down yourself. More than likely, you're gonna be standing on your feet all day or out in the hot sun and then packing everything back up at night. And at the end of an amazing day of selling, I'm talking about a great day, you might take home anywhere between a couple hundred dollars up to a thousand dollars or so, which if you get up to a thousand dollars, that is amazing. That means that they have done something right with marketing that craft fair. And like I said, the range could be very wide on this. You could come out with next to nothing or you could come out with a good little chunk of change. But here's the thing. You can only be at one place at a time. You can only do so many weekends a year. And the moment that you go home, the sales completely stop if you do not have a way to drive traffic to an online shop. There is no passive income. There are no 2 a.m. sales that you got while you were sleeping. And there is no customer in another state that is finding your stuff. Craft fairs are an amazing way to test products. I fully believe that. It's a great way to meet your customers and to learn your ideal customer avatar and make some extra money while you're at it. But as a primary selling strategy, I just don't feel like the math maths on this one. Also, you have to think about who is putting this craft fair together and how well they market it to the community. If the person, you are at the mercy of the person that is putting this craft fair on. And if they do not know marketing and they can't get people to the craft fair, that is going to determine how much money you do or do not make. And honestly, I'm a control freak and I like to have control of how traffic is driven to my shop and to my business. So I don't know. So let's talk about pros and cons. Pros of a craft fair. You get to meet your customer. You get to know them really well. People can actually see and physically touch your stuff and that's amazing. And you get to meet other makers in the process. Now, the cons of an actual craft fair is going to be long days. You can only be in one spot at one time and you are at the mercy of someone else marketing for you. So I'm gonna let you weigh the pros and cons and kind of decide. Now, the second way that you could sell your products is going to be your own website. And y'all, I need to get serious with you about this one because this is the one that I hear time and time and time again. And people say, well, if I'm just gonna be paying Etsy all of these fees, why would I not just create my own website? You can. You could create your own Shopify. You could create your own Squarespace or whatever else it may be. And this one can sound very, very appealing to you and everyone else. No platform fees. No, you get to completely be in charge of your brand and your rules. And eventually, yes, having your own website would be a great idea. I'm not gonna tell you not to do it. I do think that there are benefits of having your own website. But here's the part that I don't think, I don't feel like a lot of people talk about or at least we don't talk enough about it. And that is a website with no traffic is just an expensive business card. Let me say that one more time. A website with no traffic is just an expensive business card because you are the one that is in charge of sending your own traffic to your website. There's no one else out there doing that for you. And y'all, I don't know if you know this, but Etsy has over 90 million active buyers already on there searching on the platform, ready with their money out, ready to buy something. And your brand new Shopify store, unless you send the traffic there personally, you don't have any buyers waiting with money in hand, ready to purchase something. You have to get out and you have to be boots on the ground marketing every single day. You have to be the one that drives the traffic to your website for them to purchase. That means you have to be running ads and y'all paid media can be expensive. I don't know if you've realized how expensive paid media really can be. As someone who is, we run ads, I know how expensive they are. If you're not careful, ads can cost you in the thousands of dollars just to try to get traffic to your shop. And that is very important for you to think about and consider, especially if you are brand new. Not only that, but baking in rich SEO, the search engine optimization into your website is important. Even having really good SEO on your website, it takes an average of six to 18 months to show up on Google when someone is searching for a specific thing that you may carry. So that is something that I just don't know if I would be willing to risk if I was a brand new shop. Now, the sellers that I have seen be successful with their own website almost always built their audience on Etsy first. They use Etsy to prove their products, to build their brand, to find their customer and generate cashflow. And then they were able to take that business off of Etsy onto their own website as a second channel of income. And now their website can now stand alone on its own to support their Etsy business as well. If you want me to be honest, I feel like skipping straight to the website is like trying to run before you even know how to walk. A website to me, that's a long game play that we have. Etsy, in my opinion, is where we build a foundation, okay? Now, this next avenue of selling that is not Etsy is going to be either TikTok or social media. And y'all, this one also gets people extremely excited. And I mean, people have been successful with it. I'm not saying that they haven't. I know you've seen those videos of people selling on TikTok or Instagram where they go viral selling their handmade candles and they make $10,000 or however many thousand dollars in a weekend. And I'm going to be the first one to tell you that does happen a hundred percent. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like it doesn't. But let me ask you this. How many of those people do you see posting a follow-up viral video six months later that are still riding that wave? Going viral should never be a business strategy. It's a lottery ticket. And if you want my honest opinion, going viral is phenomenal, but that's not how you build a sustainable business. The fundamental problem with social media as your primary sales channel is the fact that people aren't on social media necessarily to shop. They're there to be entertained. So what you're doing, if that is your only source of income or your only source of traffic to sell your handmade items, you're constantly going to be interrupting their experience and just hoping that they stop long enough to buy something or hoping that the content that you put out is entertaining enough to get them to stop for you to show them your product. Now, I want you to compare that to someone who opens up Etsy, whether that's on their phone or on their computer and types in exactly what they are looking for. That is purchase intent. And that buyer is not there to scroll. They are there to look for something specific that you may have. Social media is absolutely incredible. It's a great way to show your process, to drive people to your shop, but I want you to start thinking of it as a traffic source, not a marketplace. The sellers that I see on there who use it correctly and the best way is they are using it to feed their Etsy shop, not to replace it. Now, the last way that you could sell your handmade products that people have brought up to me is through Amazon Handmade and honestly, most of you all probably haven't even considered this as well, but it is an option and we want to look at all of our options when it comes to deciding, is Etsy still worth it in 2026? And Amazon is a huge marketplace. Amazon has the traffic. Nobody's going to argue with that. They have people coming there with their cards out ready to buy, but here's the reality for small creative sellers. Amazon is built for volume and low, low price. What you're going to be doing is you are going to be competing directly with mass manufacturing who can undercut you on price every single time. And honestly, the handmade designation on Amazon Handmade, it does help, but it doesn't protect you from the race to the bottom. The fees on Amazon are actually pretty comparable to Etsy fees, but the competition is brutal. And honestly, the people who find themselves on Amazon Shopping, that buyer is someone who is hunting for the best price, not necessarily the best quality product. Now, if you're selling a commodity product, then maybe Amazon would work. If you're selling a mass produced product, Amazon may work. But for most creative sellers, Amazon Handmade is just not the option. So now let's talk about Etsy, because here's where we land. When you look at every alternative, honestly, what Etsy offers you is pretty remarkable. And if you want my honest opinion, I think a lot of people take it for granted. Because like I said earlier, Etsy has over 90 million active buyers. And y'all, here's the thing. These buyers are on Etsy because they are looking for, specifically looking for handmade items, vintage style items, unique products. That's why they are on Etsy. And y'all, that is built in purchase intent that no other platform can compete with for creative sellers like us. Here's the thing. Your listings work for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You make sales while you sleep, while you're at your kid's soccer game or baseball game, while you're on vacation, while you're at the pool, while you're hanging out with friends and family. It doesn't matter where you're at. You can make sales wherever you are. And that right there is the power of a marketplace built for creative sellers like me and you. And here is another layer to that. The trust is already there and Etsy did that work for you. You don't have to build trust with your audience or your potential customers. Etsy has done that for you. You don't have to convince someone that your website is safe to put their credit card information in. Etsy has done that for you. And yes, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that it's not competitive because it can be competitive. Of course it is. But competitive is not the same as closed. And here is what I see. People who are not finding success on Etsy, they're not working Etsy like they should in 2026. They are either still using the old way of selling on Etsy, the 2020 or 2021 way of selling on Etsy, or they're just trying to figure it out themselves with no knowledge of SEO, no knowledge of their ideal customer avatar, no knowledge of how to read and date their data. They don't know how to do that. And that's why it's not working for them. That's why I truly feel like you hear so many people not having success versus having success. It's because they just don't have the right roadmap to get them where they want to go. The sellers who say that Etsy is oversaturated are often the sellers who set up a shop, list a few products with mediocre photos, not really good SEO or none at all. And they just didn't get sales in their first two week and they gave up. That, in my opinion, it's not an Etsy problem. It's a strategy and plan problem. So do you want my honest opinion? Is Etsy really worth it in 2026? Genuinely? Yes, especially for creative sellers, but only if you treat it like a real business and not just a hobby. The people who are struggling on Etsy right now aren't struggling because the platform is broken. They're struggling because nobody taught them how to do it the right way. Things like how to create listings that are actually ranking in Etsy search, how to truly price your products so that you're making real profit and not just breaking even. And how to pick products and niches that have demand without being impossible to compete in. That stuff is learnable. And once you learn it, Etsy is a completely different platform. And that is exactly what we do inside of Passive Earner Society. So if you are serious about building real income on Etsy and not just hoping for it, I've got a link down below that you need to click on to apply to work with us inside Passive Earner Society. Now, if you have made it this far, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what we do inside Passive Earner Society because this program is one that I think can change your life. Y'all, this is a coaching program where we give you a personalized roadmap to tell you what next steps you need to make in your Etsy shop so that you can truly build a sustainable business. We have a coach, a one-on-one coach for you to help you get over the blocks that we have seen so many sellers go through. Whether that is you're avoiding doing it because you just don't think you're gonna be successful or you have this irrational fear of being successful, our coaches are there to guide you, feed you the next steps, and help you learn how to do all of these things. That is our heart at Passive Earner Society. So, if you are ready to go all in on yourself and your business and truly become a creative entrepreneur, I need you to click that link down below, apply to talk to one of our success coordinators, and make sure that you grab a time slot as well. And y'all, that's very important that you go ahead and grab a time slot to talk to one of our success coordinators so that we can walk you through what our program is, what our program isn't, and see if you are a right fit for us and if we are a right fit for you. I promise it is completely free to apply, completely free to get on the phone with one of our success coordinators. Does not cost you a dime, just a little bit of time, so make sure you click that link down below and apply today. And y'all, if you have found this video helpful, make sure you hit that thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel, and also subscribe to our Passive Earners channel. That's where you can hear success stories of people inside our program. So check out our YouTube, our Passive Earners Society YouTube channel as well. And like I said, share this with someone who you feel like may be on the fence about Etsy because you never know, they may need to hear this too. So thank you guys so much for being here. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye guys.