Crafting Numbers: Is Etsy worth it?

In the spring, I wrote about the psychology of selling on Etsy. (In a nutshell: it's not as easy as it looks.) After I wrote that post, I sat back and started wondering, is Etsy worth it for me? You see, I usually have one sale on Etsy every few months. I had been, for a while, mindlessly renewing everything once it expired and waiting around for sales. (Not just waiting. I did carefully craft emails to bloggers - of blogs that I had read for months and even years on end - but nothing came of it.) However, each time you renew or list a new item, it costs 20 cents. If you have a lot of items in your shop, it adds up. And it adds up especially if you're not making a lot of sales on Etsy to cover these costs.

So I decided to run an experiment. I would track my sales and the costs of running an Etsy shop to determine if it was worth it to keep my shop open. If I wasn't making a profit, I would close the shop, I decided.

However, one strategy that I did change in implementing this experiment was my listing strategy. Rather than relisting everything as I did in the past, I only strategically listed items that I knew had sold or had potential to sell.

My results? Well, it's only the third quarter, but here are the figures:

Sales: $76.75 (after Paypal fees)

Costs: $22.77

So, I'm making an approximate profit of about $50 for the first 9 months of this year. Conclusion: I'm keeping the shop open. I will, however, continue my method of strategically selecting which cards to list in the shop, as it saves me money. (Side thought: Thank god Etsy is not my main source of income!)