Etsy is awash with illicit products and mass produced goods (2021)
In my experience if you want to make a sustainable living from selling arts or crafts online, you want to go up market. Charge $1,000 or more per work.<p>Use a relationship based sales process starting with one focused social media presence, typically Instagram.<p>Not everyone will be afford your work, but if your marketing and customer service is solid, a plenty large market will exist.<p>Once you start collecting social proof from happy customers, flow that back into your marketing and getting your next client becomes easier and easier. You can then often charge $3,000 to $5,000 for the same exact work because of the social proof and the brand you are building with it.<p>Making an art business work is similar to making a bootstrapped software business work, in the sense that software bootstrappers again and again go through the personal realization that writing software is typically only 20% to 30% of what they need to focus on in order to be successful.<p>They realize they need to bite the bullet and learn sales and marketing too and only if they do so can they overtime shift more and more of their time to just the areas of their software business they want to spend the most time in.