Monetizing Etsy without selling anything on there

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Truffles

New member
Apr 20, 2009
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I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume that most of us here don't craft things worth selling on Etsy. If only there were another way to get involved like some sort of affiliate program. Unfortunately, Etsy does not have one.

So what is one to do? I have a site that attracts about 4k visits a month from artists and people who want to buy their art (typically one-off creations, nothing mass-produced). I'd love to post their Etsy shops and make money as an affiliate but I can't see an easy way of doing that. I've also investigated Etsy-like scripts but I can't find any good ones and I'm not sure how the backend of that might work in terms of the transactions.

All I've been able to come up with is:

Sell a Gallery Artist Subscription - Artists pay an annual or monthly fee to be able to post multiple items for display. There would be a free account but they would be limited to only one listing up at a time and they wouldn't necessarily be featured.

Anybody have any other ideas? I've looked around for multi vendor ecommerce solutions but I haven't found anything that looks good out of the box and that is relatively inexpensive/easy to install.
 


LotsOfZeros said:
Ubercart has a multi-vendor plugin.
Ubercart Marketplace | drupal.org
Click to expand...

Wow, that is free and looks pretty awesome. Unfortunately I know jack shit about Drupal and my code-fu is not yet to the point where I think I could get this up and running and customized to fit my needs on my own. I can customize Wordpress themes pretty comfortably but I've heard some real nightmares about Drupal.

You don't by any chance happen to know of a similar product for Wordpress do you?
 
I had actually looked at that Wordpress one and the forums had a bunch of people complaining about how broken certain elements of it were and bitching about the lack of support...but the multi-vendor is key.

I may have to cave and hire a Drupal developer to implement Ubercart...it just kills me because I know that if I ever need changes in the future I'll likely have to pay to get them done since I don't think I have enough skills to successfully customize it myself. Oh well, I guess there's a learning curve for everything right?

Have you used Ubercart at all in the past? If so what were your experiences with it?
 
Truffles said:
Have you used Ubercart at all in the past? If so what were your experiences with it?
Click to expand...

Yes I have, and yes there is a learning curve with Drupal but once you start to figure it out, it really becomes justifiable as you will have control over details at a more granular level. Just don't load too many other Drupal modules when you start to work with it or the learning becomes very convoluted.
 
I have been bitching at Etsy for 2 fucking years to get an affiliate program

they are so goddamn retarded for not doing this its ridiculous.

they promised me, in 2008, that it would be out in 2009
 
Unfortunately conv3rsion, that's a pretty disappointing article. They state they only bought them for their skillset to help Etsy with the internal search of their site and showcase. Of course, that's all they're saying at this point in time. I wouldn't be shocked if they were cooking up something similar to Chitika but that still wouldn't cut it for me.

LotsofZeros, do you know if Ubercart can handle a situation where payments are divied up to the vendors and it transfers the commission to me? Or would I have to collect payments and then payout manually upon fulfillment by the vendors? The Marketplace module wasn't very clear on how that is handled. It also mentioned affiliate capabilities so I'm wondering if I could just set myself up with that.
 
Truffles said:
LotsofZeros, do you know if Ubercart can handle a situation where payments are divied up to the vendors and it transfers the commission to me? Or would I have to collect payments and then payout manually upon fulfillment by the vendors? The Marketplace module wasn't very clear on how that is handled. It also mentioned affiliate capabilities so I'm wondering if I could just set myself up with that.
Click to expand...

As far as my past research takes me, I believe it all goes through you and then you disburse payments (ie: Paypal Mass Pay) to the various vendors. I could be wrong on that though. Best thing to do is use the search feature at the official Ubercart site. There's a wealth of good stuff on their forum:
Ubercart! A free open source e-commerce shopping cart

If you're looking for affiliate modules, check this out:
Ubercart Affiliate v2 | drupal.org
 
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