The Main Thing Selling on Etsy Taught Me — It is Harder Than You Think

Miroslav Novohradsky
Design Nexus
Published in
4 min readMar 2, 2024

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Why Etsy has become incredibly hard.

Photo by stefan moertl on Unsplash

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You’ve probably noticed that I’m writing a ton of content about Etsy.

All the articles are about how to find winning designs, sell more, and how easy it is to start.

But as any seller knows, this marketplace has become crazy competitive.

Listings that used to easily rank on the first page now have no sales.

Shops that were successful just a year ago seem to be fading.

So what happened?

In short — the Etsy gold rush ended.

Selling on Etsy used to be like staking a claim during a gold rush — throw up a listing and sales would start flooding in.

But as more and more prospectors rush in, the claims dry up.

Now, over 9 million sellers are packed onto Etsy’s platform battling over a still-growing but small pool of buyers.

Let’s talk about the numbers:

In 2022, Etsy had 7.4 million active sellers. Just a year later, that number skyrocketed to 9 million — a 21% increase!

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Miroslav Novohradsky
Design Nexus

Writing about graphic design, digital products, and how to sell them. Psst: Get our free Digital Product Starter Kit - https://bit.ly/4eyCDbo