Based on our research since the start of the year Etsy has had half a million new sellers join the marketplace. 494,123 to be exact.

This amounts to over 70,000 new shops every month, making 2017 the fastest growing year so far. By comparison last year roughly 60,000 new shops opened every month.

Etsy marketplace is of course much smaller than that of eBay or Amazon, but we are seeing very active interest from new sellers. For context, every month 100,000 new sellers join Amazon marketplaces which is not that much higher than that of Etsy.

United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Australia, Germany, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, and Spain are the top 10 countries new sellers join from. US sellers accounted for roughly half of all new sellers, not surprising given that only 32 percent of total sales are international.

Out of all those sellers, 305,000 currently have products listed. So 61 percent of new sellers remain active.

154,000 had at least a sale since joining, 31 percent of new sellers. Although only 5,500 had more than 100 sales.

Out of those which had at least a sale, 35 percent - or exactly 53,000 - had a sale in the last 30 days.

It is impressive to see how many of the new sellers are able to have at least one sale, which suggests that discoverability on the platform is still possible. Although Etsy has received criticism that the search algorithm is scored to favor new sellers.

The only number Etsy reports is the Number of Active Sellers, which was 1.8 million last quarter. They define it as the number of sellers who sold at least one product in a year. For the last year it has been growing by 12 percent every quarter, and will likely continue to do so driven by the influx of new sellers.

Based on $2,841 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) last year, and 1.75 million active sellers at the end of the year, this equals to $1,623 in sales per seller. This figure has risen from $1,531 in 2015, $1,431 in 2014, $1,261 in 2013, and $1,078 in 2012. It is a good sign to see the marketplace grow its sales beyond the number of sellers, which means as long as sellers can remain active the opportunity pool increases. Even given the growing number of total sellers.

However in Etsy Is Backing Itself into a Corner we wrote about Etsy’s issues continuing sales growth, which have also meant staff layoffs, and strategy readjustment.

Khadeeja Safdar wrote in The Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article titled “Etsy’s Painful Lesson: It’s a Retailer, Not a Tech Startup”:

“The online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods, which calls itself a “sophisticated technology platform” and says it treats “code as craft,” is now under pressure to stop spending like a tech startup and start acting like a retailer.”