If this is your first time shopping on Five Volt Logic, welcome! If you know us from Etsy, welcome back! 👋 We are a mother-daughter team making unique jewelry out of unexpected materials. We love dice, functional items, and items that celebrate LGBT+ Pride. Learn more about our story on the "About Us" page!
You might be wondering why we are building our own site. After all, we have over 500 sales on Etsy and nearly 200 reviews...shouldn't we stay on Etsy and ride the wave? 🌊
We have several reasons to make the jump to our own shop site. Most involve issues with Etsy (especially Etsy fees), but some involve making the shopping experience smoother for you and other customers. Here are our top 3 reasons:
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Etsy's fees and lack of transparency hurt our business, and force us to jack up prices.
tl;dr: Etsy charges fees of up to 21.5% once your shop is successful, and they aren't transparent about their fees.
We loved starting out on Etsy, and it made it really easy to start our business. What we didn't realize when we started, though, was just how much money Etsy would take from us.
With Etsy's current fee structure, on EVERY purchase, we pay:
- 6.5% transaction fee
- 3% Etsy payments fee, + $0.25 (we didn't realize we were paying this fee until we had our shop open for a few months)
- A $0.20 listing fee
So, our starting fees are 9.5% + $0.45 (remember that for a $20 item, $0.45 is a little over 2%!).
To add to that, once you hit $10,000 in revenue, Etsy starts advertising your products on other sites, and then they charge you a 12% fee on any sales made from people who click on those ads. The kicker is that there's no way to opt out!
So, once you have a successful shop, you will be charged either 9.5% or 21.5% + $0.45, with no way to know how many orders will be in the 21.5% bracket. It's easy to see how this makes it hard to run a business: The fees are uncertain, so how do we need to price items?
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We want you to have an easier checkout experience -- especially for folks who see our products on Instagram or Facebook.
Have you ever seen our products on Instagram, clicked on them, then been sent to our Etsy shop where you need to click "add to cart", then go to checkout, then enter your payment info, then finally checkout?
It's a hassle and a half and we don't like it. Now you can check out directly in the Instagram or Facebook app by clicking on a tagged product. We hope this makes life a little easier.
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Provide you a better Five Volt Logic experience.
Let's face it: Etsy doesn't allow too much in the way of customization. We want you to enjoy our site and feel the wonderful weirdness of our shop with every click. Building our own website lets us use the colors, fonts, and formatting we want in order to build you a better experience!
We are truly thankful to all of our customers for the support and suggestions we have gotten since re-opening the shop. None of this would be possible without you.
We hope you love the website! If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to reach out at shop@fivevoltlogic.biz.
We plan on keeping the Etsy shop open for a few more months before transitioning fully to the site. Thanks for your patience!