Why Depop and Etsy Have Gotten Harder for Genuine Handmade Sellers
An honest look at why genuine handmade and one-of-one sellers are struggling on Etsy and Depop.
Etsy and Depop have gotten harder for genuine handmade sellers because the same platforms now host a flood of dropshippers and resellers, rising fees, and pay-to-play visibility - which means a real maker is competing for attention against mass-produced goods, undercut on price, and asked to pay more to be seen. Whether Etsy is still worth it in 2026 depends on your craft and margins, but the frustration is real and it has specific, traceable causes.
This is not nostalgia. The early version of these platforms genuinely was easier for small makers. Understanding what changed is the first step to deciding what to do about it.
What changed: the dropshipper and reseller influx
The single biggest shift is who you are competing against. A marketplace that was once mostly makers is now also full of dropshippers - sellers who list mass-produced items, often from overseas wholesale catalogs, and ship them directly from a third party without ever touching the product.
For a genuine maker, this is corrosive in three ways. A dropshipper can list a hundred products in the time it takes you to make one. A dropshipper can undercut your price because there is no labor cost - just a markup. And a dropshipper dilutes the meaning of the word "handmade" for every buyer who gets burned, making shoppers warier of the real thing. If you want to see the tells, our guide to spotting a dropshipping store breaks them down.
Etsy’s 2024 relabeling - what it tells you
In 2024, Etsy rolled out a system of production labels asking sellers to disclose their role in an item: broadly, whether it was made, designed, sourced, or handpicked by the seller. On paper this is a transparency measure. Read another way, it is an admission.
If a marketplace needs a label to tell buyers a seller merely "handpicked" or "sourced" an item, it is conceding that not everything sold there is made by the person selling it. The labels do not remove resellers - they accommodate them, and then ask the buyer to do the sorting. For a genuine maker, that is a structural signal: the platform has decided to be a broad marketplace, and your handmade work is one option on the shelf among many. Our deeper look at Etsy’s production labels covers how the system works.
Rising fees and pay-to-play visibility
The second pressure is cost. Between listing fees, transaction fees, payment processing, and optional-but-increasingly-necessary advertising, the effective cost of selling on Etsy commonly lands around 10-11% of a sale once everything is counted. Depop has run on 0% selling commission plus payment processing - a different model, but one now facing change, since eBay agreed to acquire Depop in a deal announced February 2026.
The harder problem is visibility. As a marketplace fills up, organic reach falls, and the platform offers a fix: pay for ads. This is the pay-to-play trap. You can be a skilled maker with a beautiful storefront and still be invisible unless you spend - and the sellers most able to outspend you are often the high-volume resellers, not the makers. We compare the real numbers in marketplace selling fees 2026.
Caught between bots and undercutting
Genuine makers describe being squeezed from two sides at once.
- Undercut from below. Mass-produced and dropshipped listings set a price floor a real maker cannot match without working for free. Buyers comparing only on price never see the difference in labor.
- Drowned out at scale. Automated and bulk-listing operations flood search results, so a maker’s slow, deliberate catalog gets buried.
- Penalized for being small. Algorithms that reward volume, fast shipping, and constant new listings work against someone who makes one careful thing at a time.
None of this means a maker is doing something wrong. It means the environment now rewards behavior - speed, volume, spend - that handmade work cannot and should not imitate.
Why scale and curation pull in opposite directions
Underneath every specific complaint is one structural truth: a marketplace optimizing for scale and a marketplace optimizing for curation want opposite things. Scale wants more listings, more sellers, more transactions, fewer barriers to entry. Curation wants fewer, better, vetted sellers and a real gate at the door.
A large public or parent-owned marketplace has powerful reasons to chase scale - that is what grows revenue. So when a platform gets big, the slow, expensive work of curation tends to lose. This is not a villain story; it is incentives. But it explains why "Etsy used to feel handmade" is a real observation and not just rose-tinted memory.
A marketplace cannot maximize listings and protect makers at the same time. At some point it has to choose, and scale usually wins.
Is Etsy still worth it for handmade sellers in 2026?
For some makers, yes - Etsy still has enormous traffic, and if your margins absorb the fees and you have found a niche search term where you rank, it can still produce sales. The answer is genuinely "it depends."
But "it depends" is not the same as "it is fine." If you are spending more on ads to stand still, watching dropshippers undercut you, and feeling like the platform no longer distinguishes you from a reseller, those are real signals worth acting on - not a personal failing.
Where are genuine makers going next?
Makers are responding in a few sensible ways, and the smartest do several at once:
- Diversifying off a single platform so no one marketplace controls their whole income.
- Building direct relationships - email lists, social followings, repeat buyers - that survive any platform change. Our guide to marketing a handmade shop without ads covers this.
- Moving to curated marketplaces that gate out resellers, so they compete against other genuine makers instead of dropshippers.
- Investing in their own brand - story, voice, recognizable work - so buyers seek them out by name. See building a maker brand.
A curated marketplace is not magic, but it changes the competition. SCRAPD reviews every storefront by hand before it goes live, blocks dropshippers and resellers, and requires every item to be one-of-one. Founding-50 makers pay 5% commission - and because the marketplace is small and curated by design, you are seen against other real makers, not buried under bulk listings.
Is Etsy worth it for handmade sellers in 2026?
It depends on your craft and margins. Etsy still has large traffic and can produce sales, but rising fees, pay-to-play visibility, and competition from dropshippers make it harder for genuine makers than it once was.
Is Etsy full of dropshippers?
Etsy now hosts many resellers and dropshippers alongside genuine makers. Its 2024 production labels - made, designed, sourced, or handpicked by a seller - effectively acknowledge that not everything sold there is made by the seller.
Why is it harder to get sales on Etsy now?
As the marketplace fills up, organic reach drops and visibility increasingly requires paid advertising. Makers are also undercut on price by mass-produced listings, which sets a price floor handmade work cannot match.
What are Etsy’s production labels?
They are disclosures, introduced in 2024, that ask sellers to indicate their role in an item - broadly whether it was made, designed, sourced, or handpicked by the seller. They put the work of telling makers from resellers onto the buyer.
Where are handmade sellers going instead?
Many are diversifying across channels, building direct customer relationships, investing in their own brand, and moving to curated marketplaces that gate out resellers so they compete against other genuine makers.