So you’ve been thinking about opening a little Etsy shop? Etsy is a great creative community, that allows you to open a shop and sell your handmade, digital or vintage items or craft supplies to customers all over the world. For each item you list Etsy charges $0.20 and then takes a 3.5% commission for each sale, BUT Etsy handles most of the admin, making it such a simple process.
Here’s a basic guide to help you along, starting with how to open a shop and list your first items. Be sure to subscribe for updates or follow on Bloglovin’ or Facebook to catch the rest of the series which will include getting Etsy payments in South Africa.
Your first step is to go to www.etsy.com and select Sell on Etsy and then Open at Etsy Shop.
Fill in all your details and click Register. Etsy will then guide you through the steps to set up your shop details. You will need a credit card to register, however you don’t ever have to use it if you set up PayPal (more on that in the next post). These details can be changed at a later stage, once you have opened your shop.
Listing your first items is the next big step. Go to Your shop > Listings > Add a listing (or Your shop > Add Listings if your shop is not yet open).
Add a few good quality photos, 800-1000px wide, that show the details of your products and fill in all the other details. If you need some ideas of how to describe your products have a look at a few similar ones for some ideas, but remember to make yours original! Try to use a descriptive title tags to make your products easy for your customers to find. Think about what words your shoppers would use to search for an item like yours and try use those words frequently. Click Preview, then Publish and your items are now ready to sell!
If your next products are very similar go to Your shop > Listings > Listing Manager. Click the settings cog at the right of your listing and select copy. You can now just make the small changes to your next product and publish it, saving time on the repetitive parts.
You can find Part 2 of this series here and Part 3 here, where you’ll learn how to set up PayPal and withdraw your money into a South African bank account.
Leave a link to your new shop in the comments, I’d love to have a look!
You can visit my Etsy shop here:
Daphney says
Hi Deborah i am in south africa and i would like to open online store with etsy,Selling homeware.I dont know if is possible to do that
Deborah says
Hey! It definitely is, but you w ill need to sort out courier. If it’s delivery within SA that’s pretty simple, but overseas is more tricky.
LungyM says
Hello I want to setup a shop on Etsy SA can I also do droppshiping?
Deborah says
Hi Lungy. As far as I know Etsy does not allow dropshipping.
Az says
Hi. If I’d like to sell through Etsy, am I required to have a business license?
Az says
Hi. I’d just like to know if I’m required to pay taxes for what I earn from Etsy.
Deborah says
Hi. Tax requirements are the same for any other money that you would earn. You are expected to bring the money into SA (via FNB) within 1 month and then claim it on tax returns as you would for any other income. If you’re below the threshold you wouldn’t need to pay tax.
Elaine says
Hi
Thank you for the informative post! I am from South Africa and would like to open an etsy shop selling digital prints of my art. Do I need to have a registered business to do so?
Kind regards
Elaine
Deborah says
Hi. No you don’t need a registered business 🙂
Amith Sookraj says
Hi, Im from South Africa, unfortunately I get past the address page. It does not have access to the South African street address etc. Is there a solution to this problem .
Deborah says
Hey, I’ve sent you an email to try and sort it out!
Jeremy says
Hi there.
How do you get around having to put in a US bank account and US address?
Struggling to get past this step when opening an etsy store.
Thank you so much!
Deborah says
Hi Jeremy
Is there a setting to say what country you’re in? The design has changed since I set up my shop, but I definitely never said that I live in the US. I checked my settings now and it’s all set to South Africa, with my current address as my address. I have a South African credit card listed on my account, but all payments go through my PayPal account. PayPal is the best solution for receiving payments. You can see the rest of the series of these blog posts to see how to use PayPal with an FNB account for South African withdrawals. If you can’t figure it out, feel free to send me a screenshot of the page you’re struggling with and I’ll see if I can help further.
Des says
Hi what about taxes and calculating postal or shipping costs. Pls assist.
Deborah says
Hi Des. Since my products are all digital I don’t have to worry about shipping costs
carysjones28 says
This is such a useful post! Thank you very much! 🙂
Carys
xxxx
Freckles&Frocks
Deborah says
Thanks Carys. Look out for the next post in the series later today. Xx