How does it work?
Redbubble is a print-on-demand marketplace, which means that it takes care of your product fulfillment, packing, and shipping, allowing you to focus on the creative aspects of owning a business.
Here’s how it works: you register as an artist and upload your designs. Then you select the products you want to sell with your designs; Redbubble will give you a base price for the product that includes the manufacturing costs and service fees. You can adjust the end price of the product and set your profit margins.
Once a customer purchases a product from your store, Redbubble will print, pack, and ship it to them. Additionally, Redbubble will handle the customer support side of the business.
Source: Redbubble
What is Etsy?
It’s likely that anyone who’s browsed Instagram or Pinterest has come across a product sold on Etsy and knows a bit about the platform. But let’s have a quick refresher—what is Etsy, and how does it really work?
Background
Founded in 2005, Etsy is an online marketplace that focuses on craft supplies, handmade and vintage items, and print-on-demand products with original designs. Etsy is one of the most popular players in the ecommerce world, with over 7M sellers and 95Mn active buyers.
How does it work?
When you want to open an Etsy store, you have to create your free seller account and then open up a storefront. Once your storefront is set up, you can start uploading products. Since Etsy doesn’t take care of manufacturing and shipping, you need to set product prices and shipping methods yourself.
If you want a more detailed guide on opening an Etsy shop, read this blog article on how to start selling on Etsy.
RedBubble vs. Etsy: an in-depth comparison
OK, we’ve got the basics down—we know what these marketplaces are and how they work. But the big question remains: how do you choose the best marketplace for your business? Let’s dive into our analysis of Redbubble vs. Etsy to find out.
Sign-up process
First things first—how quick and easy is the sign-up process?
Creating your Redbubble account is easy. All you need is your basic info—name, email, and password—and you can start working on your store. You can immediately upload designs and set up your shop info and personal details, like name, physical address, phone number, and bank account information.
Source: Redbubble
Opening an Etsy shop is a bit more complex. After you’ve opened your shop—on Etsy, it’s called a storefront—and added in your personal and payment details, you’ll have to create your first listing or, in other words, add your first product.
Because you’ll be selling and shipping your own products, you’ll have to add more details on Etsy than Redbubble. For a first-time seller, this might seem a bit complicated and hard to understand.
Source: Etsy
When it comes to the signing-up process, Redbubble is more intuitive and easier to figure out for first-time sellers. It’s quick, and you can set your own pace, whereas, with Etsy, you might need to look for a tutorial on how to sign up.
Audience
Although Redbubble and Etsy have been around for approximately the same time, they vastly differ in the size of their audience.
When we dig into the statistics of the past three months, Redbubble boasts 23.7M monthly visits and 71.2M total visits. That means the competition on the site is steep, and you’ll have to put in extra effort to promote your work on social media to attract buyers.
Regarding demographics, Redbubble’s audience is evenly divided in terms of gender—both men and women shop and sell on the site. The dominant age group is people aged 25–34, followed closely by people aged 18–24. These two age groups make up around 57% of the site’s total audience. If your art is geared towards a younger demographic, Redbubble will be a good platform for you.
Etsy, on the other hand, is a juggernaut of the ecommerce industry, so its audience is much larger. With 503.3M monthly visits and a whopping 1.5B total visits over the last three months, you can probably imagine what the competition on Etsy is like.
But don’t let that dissuade you from selling your custom or handmade products on Etsy. With the right niche, you can build a customer base that’ll come back time and time again. Here’s an article that focuses on the top print-on-demand niches of 2024, so take a look and get inspired.
When it comes to demographics, Etsy is slightly more popular among women—they make up 58% of the site’s audience, and men make up around 41%. It’s also favored by a slightly older age group. Similar to Redbubble, people aged 25–34 make up the largest share of Etsy’s audience, followed by those aged 35–44. Together, these age groups make up around 48% of Etsy’s total audience.
Products
The real differences start when we look at how you can sell products on Redbubble and Etsy. When you want to start selling artwork online with Redbubble, you upload designs and add them to products.
Source: Redbubble
Once you’ve uploaded your work in a PNG or JPG format, you can choose what products you want to sell with this specific artwork.
The advantages of Redbubble are that it’s very easy and quick to add new products to your store. You can edit several photos at once, and you don’t need to worry about any product details apart from basic info about the design and adjusting the Redbubble base price.
However, there are several disadvantages to this process. The editing options on Redbubble are very limited, as is the product range. You can choose from around 80 products in categories like apparel, home and living items, or stationery and office products. When you compare Redbubble with a print-on-demand company like Printful, which offers more than 300 customizable products, 80 is a very small number. Plus, you can’t add your own product visuals on Redbubble, so it’ll be quite challenging to make your products stand out from the crowd.
Etsy, on the other hand, allows for way more customization options. You’ll be running your own shop, so you get to call the shots on things like product visuals, pricing, shipping, and returns. You also have a much broader product range—you can sell any handmade and vintage items, plus any custom products you create with print-on-demand partners like Printful.
Source: Etsy
The advantage here is that you’ll have much more control over your business and your products. You’ll be able to infuse your brand and your personality in every aspect of the shop, which will allow you to connect with potential customers and build their loyalty.
Of course, the biggest disadvantage with Etsy is that you’ll have to put in a lot more time and effort than Redbubble. You’ll have to think about how to create product visuals, how to ensure fast shipping, how to price your products, and more.
Store customization and branding
Both Redbubble and Etsy are online marketplaces, which differentiates them from ecommerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce. On ecommerce platforms, you can build your own website from scratch; on a marketplace, you only open up a storefront that the marketplace’s shoppers can browse.
If you’re using Etsy or a print-on-demand marketplace like Redbubble, keep in mind that your store customization options will be more limited than if you were using an ecommerce platform.
On Redbubble, there’s very little you can customize on your page. You can add your artist profile picture, a banner, a short description, and your social media info. Redbubble is very product-oriented, so there’s not much you can do to brand yourself apart from your designs.
Source: OMEGAFAUNA on Redbubble
Etsy’s customization options are similar but with a few additional features. Generally, what makes Etsy different from Redbubble is that you have more opportunities to tell your brand story. Aside from things like a shop icon and banner, you can add an “About us” section to tell your customers who you are.
Etsy sellers also have more branding options when it comes to packaging. Since Redbubble handles shipping for you, it doesn’t allow any custom branding on its packaging. But as an Etsy seller who’s selling handmade goods, you control everything—what your packaging will look like, how it’s branded, or how durable it is.
If you want to sell print-on-demand products with branded packaging, don’t worry—it’s still possible with the right supplier. Take a look at Printful’s custom packaging options.
Seller fees
Another big difference between Redbubble and Etsy is the fees both marketplaces charge. When you’re selling online with Redbubble, the marketplace gives you a base price that covers the production and shipping costs. You can then enter your desired margin percentage to get the selling price.
Once a customer buys the product and pays the retail price, you receive the profit margin, and Redbubble deducts the base price. You don’t have to pay any other subscription or transaction fees.
With Etsy, however, you pay fees for every sale you make. You’ll have to pay a listing fee of $0.20 for every item you add to your store, as well as payment processing and transaction fees for every item you sell.
There are additional costs as well, like shipping fees, advertising and subscription fees, and more. You can learn about the fees Etsy charges here. It’s also worth mentioning that Etsy offers a wider range of payment options than Redbubble, available through its payment system, Etsy Payments.
For example, if you’re selling a t-shirt for $20 on Redbubble, you’ll get to keep around $6. On Etsy, after paying the listing fee, transaction fee, and payment processing fees, you’ll get to keep, let’s say, $15. But you’ll also have to deal with the production and shipping costs that come with running your business.
