My father is an artist and ETSY is pretty useless for him. If you want any kind of visibility you have to pay pay pay for promotions on ETSY and even those don't work so well - maybe if you ran them week after week after week...
If ETSY actually handled the payments themselves that would be a value add but they don't. You still have to set up PayPal etc and jump through all those hoops so instead of maintaining the ETSY store - that only gets traffic if you advertise a bunch and that you have to keep paying to list you inventory on and that won't allow you to link to anywhere else where your art is available - it made more sense to set up a site on weebly (75 bucks for two years hosting with 10 domains) and just email that to real galleries. And if we could get any real traction online we would dump weebly and use Shopify because they actually let you track inventory in a semi-meaningful way.
edit: I see the OP is an engineer at ETSY. Consider this constructive criticism... I'm basically an artists IT guy by night.
If ETSY actually handled the payments themselves that would be a value add but they don't. You still have to set up PayPal etc and jump through all those hoops so instead of maintaining the ETSY store - that only gets traffic if you advertise a bunch and that you have to keep paying to list you inventory on and that won't allow you to link to anywhere else where your art is available - it made more sense to set up a site on weebly (75 bucks for two years hosting with 10 domains) and just email that to real galleries. And if we could get any real traction online we would dump weebly and use Shopify because they actually let you track inventory in a semi-meaningful way.
edit: I see the OP is an engineer at ETSY. Consider this constructive criticism... I'm basically an artists IT guy by night.