Little Thing 273 : Passive Income

If you are curious about selling ebooks on Etsy as a passive income, let me share this with you. To be fair, they do all the charging and tax paying and fees and segala benda for you lah so you don't have to worry about the messy part. 

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Here goes:

I am selling the ebook for $6, that's around RM 30.39 last week.

• processing fees (4.5% + RM 2.00) = - RM 3.37
• VAT (remitted to tax authorities) = - RM 2.76 
• transaction fee (6.5% of item total) = - RM 1.84
• VAT transaction = - RM 0.11
• VAT processing fees = - RM 0.20
• deposit fee (to bank) = - RM 8.00
• VAT deposit fee = - RM 0.48
• auto listing fee = -RM 0.94
• VAT auto listing = -RM 0.06

So from the RM 30, I finally got RM 12.63.

I've been selling these ebooks since 2020, and I let it roll by itself because it never really makes that much money for me and I just wanted to make these zines available all over the world (that was my main intention). Since 2020, I got around 40 orders, accumulated to roughly less than 300$ USD - that's it. So, mende lah sgt kan, in case LHDN ingat kita buat beribu2 kan, yg berapa sen ni pun da setel bayar tax. The buyers are random from Etsy users so I don't even have to promote or do anything as long as the listing exists in the Etsy realm. 

But then, I guess people started traveling again and they are searching for travel zines to Japan - and so the sales came up lately. Hence, I stopped by at my Etsy and looked around. One thing that I changed is the deposit schedule from once every fortnight to once every month to reduce the transaction fees. Other than that, I can't do anything else. 

These are mediocre zines that as an artist, I don't want to see anymore because of how ugly they look in my eyes after several years. But still, useful for some people. 

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Sure, there are other options:

• like selling on our own website 
• also sites like Gumroad

But I'm too lazy to promote, do any selling, or become active on social media to let people know or urge people to buy these mediocre ezines, and to think about tax fees and everything. I just want them to exist, attract their own buyers, run their own course, and Etsy seemed to do the job. Lagipun org luar je yg beli ezines, org kita nak physical copy..

Etsy is a huge platform, it is reliable, but it is pricy and nowadays you need to pay extra to be seen by mass users. It's a love-hate relationship lah.

Again, I just do it for fun, dapat RM 10 per ebook pun ok lah. 

Boleh laa buat beli eskrim utk family.