As a company, Etsy has been around since 2005. They’ve established themselves as the leading e-commerce platform for handmade crafts, such as jewelry, home decor, furniture, and bags.

In 2020, the platform started displaying items dedicated to teachers and classroom decor. While they don’t add thousands of materials every day, they do have new items added regularly. Today, the website has around 7,700 products you can buy and use as a teacher.

In this Etsy review, we’ll show you what you can find on the platform, and we’ll compare them with Teach Simple, an alternative source of teaching materials.

Why You Should Use Etsy

When you visit Etsy’s website, you can see that teaching resources are not the company’s focus. They don’t have any search filters dedicated to different types of teaching materials, and you can only choose a price range you want to see. You can also order products by:

  1. Relevance
  2. Customer reviews
  3. Price (ascending and descending)
  4. Date added

Etsy doesn’t offer everything a teacher needs. Instead, they focus on:

If you’re a fan of great designs, you’ll enjoy Etsy’s products. Every item posted on the platform is colorful, well-organized, and visually engaging. Regardless of whether you’re looking for a worksheet or a classroom poster, you’ll always find something that’s aesthetically pleasing.

For instance, if you’re looking for an alphabet mat, you won’t find a sheet of paper with letters drawn on it. Etsy’s mats will have wooden parts, felt, decorative laces, and carefully-chosen colors.

Etsy Pricing

While Etsy doesn’t have a dedicated pricing page, we found that the company charges sellers $0.20 per item they post on the website, as well as a transaction fee that amounts to 6.5% of the price listed. While these fees are lower than the fees that are applied on some other platforms (looking at you, Amazon), they still encourage sellers to place a higher price than teachers expect for such products.

Prices on Etsy for teaching materials go from $0.25 to $179.15, with the majority of items being under $20.

Etsy’s pay-per-item model makes sense for buying jewelry and bags. The problem with purchasing teaching products this way lies in the fact that teachers invest in class resources on the regular and risk whenever they make a purchase based only on a small preview. On Etsy, you have to pay the full price before you can get a real look at what the material contains. As a result, you can end up spending hundreds of dollars on items that aren’t good enough or don’t exactly fit what you need.

What Makes Teach Simple a Better Alternative to Etsy

Teach Simple is a source of teaching materials that offers all types of materials that teachers need. You can use Teach Simple to download:

While the platform offers free materials, its biggest value lies in its premium, high-quality materials. The advantage to using Teach Simple over Etsy is the former’s subscription-based model. You can sign up for Teach Simple and make unlimited downloads without worrying about paying over the budget for the products you may end up not using.

How Teach Simple Works

When you visit Teach Simple, you can use our navigation system that’s specially tailored to fine-tune your research and show you the products you need with ease. You can combine several filters to get only the most relevant results. Use our navigation to search products by:

  • Subject
  • Grade
  • Material type
  • File type
  • Date added

While anyone can sign up for Etsy and post their products, Teach Simple’s contributors are experienced teachers only. If you download materials from the Teach Simple platform, you’ll know it’s been made and reviewed by someone who knows what it takes to teach students and keep them interested and motivated to learn.

Teach Simple offers you the chance to try out its products for 30 days for free without any hidden charges. Subscribe for free and make unlimited downloads during the 30-day trial without any payment obligations.

Etsy Vs. Teach Simple

Here’s a brief overview of what Etsy and Teach Simple have to offer:

What the Source OffersEtsyTeach Simple
Free materials✗✓
Charge per product✓✗
Subscription-based✗✓
Free trial✗✓
10+ different types of materials✗✓
Materials for all K-12 grades✗✓
Materials made by experienced teachers✗✓
Thousands of new materials added every month✗✓
Easy-to-use navigation✗✓

Overall Impression

Etsy offers beautifully-crafted teaching materials that are more on the creative side. You can use Etsy to find well-designed worksheets, planners, and templates. Still, if you’re looking for materials for teaching, such as lesson plans, books, and assessments, you’ll have no luck on this platform.

Etsy charges per item, which can easily put your total fee to $100+, and you don’t really know what you’re getting until you pay the full price. If you’re looking for a single platform that offers 10+ different types of teaching materials and doesn’t charge you per download, you can find everything you need at Teach Simple.

Other Etsy Alternatives

Not sure Etsy is the right choice for you? We’ve reviewed many other similar platforms that teachers can use to find inspiration for their classes—here are our favorites:

  1. EasyTeacherWorksheets.com
  2. WeAreTeachers
  3. DadsWorksheets.com
  4. Super Teacher Worksheets
  5. Education.com
  6. Tes
  7. Math Worksheets 4 Kids
  8. 123 Homeschool 4 Me
  9. Teachers Pay Teachers
  10. K5 Learning
  11. Scholastic Teachables
  12. Twinkl
  13. Really Good Stuff
  14. Kindergarten Worksheets and Games
  15. All Kids Network
  16. Learning Resources
  17. Amazon Ignite
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