Etsy shoppers could face being 'ripped off' by some sellers making false claims that their products are handmade - and end up paying several times more than they should.
Consumer experts at Which? warned customers that it had discovered some Etsy pages advertising items for sale and claiming that they were "handmade", when the products in question were actually available for a much cheaper price at other retailers. These product listings were found to be charging shoppers up to seven times the price of items from the likes of Amazon, B&M and Asda.
Which? analysed the first page of items in a selection of categories on Etsy in March, including furniture, toys and clothes, filtering the results to only show "handmade" items before using a Google image search to see if any of the products were on sale elsewhere. The research found that 23 handmade items out of the 192 looked at were also available on other online platforms or retailers, and all but two had a higher price on Etsy.
