Surely you have heard of Etsy by now. If not, welcome back from your cave dwelling. I hope you brought your sunglasses because adjusting to life out from under a rock can take a while. You must ease your eyes into the brightness that is outside of your rock and/or cave.

Now. Etsy is a great way to make an earnest living… The only thing is that you must be creating or finding tangible items to sell. Tangible – not websites, not articles, not other fluffy technology stuff. Etsy is a place for things like art on a canvas, knitted goods, home made jams, homemade soaps, jewelry and such. It is also a good place for vintage items that you might scope out at a garage sale.

If you haven’t guess by now, this website essentially gives you a pre-made, ready-to-go store front which you can start selling items on straight away. In order to prevent scam artists from getting their hands on an account, they have a mandatory requirement for you to give them a credit card number. The credit card will be charged a one-time verification fee of $1.01. It’s a small price to pay for keeping out a vast majority of the scammers!

Fees… All sites like these have fees. Of course! Take a gander at Etsy’s fee listing page here. On the date that this blog post was written, if you were to post and sell a $20.00 item, you would be paying ninety cents for listing it.

A word of warning; Etsy uses paypal as its payment processor of choice. This means that the $19.10 you’d profit from a $20.00 sale on Etsy would be subject to paypal’s fees as well. I hate paypal. With a passion. But I still use it. Boo.