Etsy Direct Checkout

Today's Silver Price: $32.40/t.oz.

There's a new feature coming to Etsy. It's called Direct Checkout. Customers can use their credit card on Etsy without having to go through PayPal. The third party has been eliminated... 2's a party, 3's a crowd...

I am very interested in this new feature. I think that customers will be much more likely to buy from an Etsy page if it is a simpler process. Now they do not have to have a PayPal account or enter their credit card info into PayPal, they can simply enter everything right on Etsy.

It seems that this new feature is in a pilot state. It is not available to all Etsy users at this time but apparently it will be eventually. I have requested participation in the trial and hopefully in a couple of months it will become available.

I don't think it will make much of a financial difference in terms of fees taken out of each sale. In order to use Direct Checkout Etsy will charge the seller 3% of the transaction plus $.25 for every purchase (this is in addition to the 3.5% of the sale that Etsy takes and the $0.20 listing fee).

PayPal takes 2.9% of the sale plus $0.30. So it's just about the same percentage taken out, but Etsy would charge $0.05 less than PayPal.

Hmmm now that I'm seeing all these fees I'm starting to wonder if this is all worth it. It costs me $0.20 for every item that I list on Etsy. Then when I sell an item, Etsy takes 3.5% of the sale. Now for the actual transaction, either Etsy or PayPal will take 3% of the transaction AND $0.25 or $0.30. So I'm paying at least $0.45 plus 6% for every sale. Bummer.

I guess for now it's not too bad. I've only had a handful of sales so far. Perhaps in the future though it will be beneficial to start my own website. If I start now, I can learn to build a website by...