Which is Better for Sellers- Teachers Pay Teachers or Educents?

*Educents has now closed down, but I’m leaving this post here, for the other information it contains.

Which is better for sellers: Teachers Pay Teachers or Educents?

That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer the last few months.  Is it better to sell my educational games on Teachers Pay Teachers or Educents?

When I discovered TPT, I thought, “Wow!”  Here’s a huge marketplace dedicated to helping teachers connect their educational products with other teachers who want to buy them.

I opened up a shop (read more about how my store got started here) and listed my products, but I was hesitant to pay the almost $60 fee for a Premium account.  Not having made any money yet, it was hard to spend that much.  So here I was getting only 60% commission, plus a 30 cents transaction fee per sale.

Then I discovered Educents and again my reaction was, “Wow!”  They let me open a store for free and I get to keep 85% right away.  And no transaction fee!

Now before I go on, let me compare the two briefly.

Teachers Pay Teachers Seller Accounts

Basic Seller

• Free
• 55% Commission
• 30 cents transaction fee per resource

Premium Seller Account

• $59.95 a year
• 80% Comission
• no transaction fee on products over $3
• 15 cents transaction fee for products under $3

Here’s a chart comparing the two plans on TPT.

Educents Seller Account

• FREE for all sellers
• 85% comission on all sales
• no transaction fee

So which is better for sellers- Teachers Pay Teachers or Educents?

Now at first glance it would seem that Educents is a better deal than TPT, and that’s what I thought.

I quickly opened up another shop on Educents and started promoting my Educent store.  I even did a launch on Facebook and ran some Facebook ads and made some sales.  But I couldn’t quite make my Facebook ads pay off (not yet) so I stopped running them.

And you know what?

Sales stopped.

But while I was focusing my efforts on Educents I noticed something.  Sales kept trickling in on TPT without me doing a thing.

Which got me thinking.  Maybe Educents is free, but TPT has something Educents doesn’t- a huge marketplace of educators looking for downloadable teaching helps.

When I look at my Traffic Data on TPT, 100% of my sales are coming from traffic originating within TPT.

I have traffic from my blog, other blogs (Where did that come from?) Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter (Again I’ve no idea where that came from; I’m not on Twitter), but my sales are all from searches on TPT itself.

So I evaluated my sales in the last two months and decided that at the rate I’m making sales on TPT, the Premium Membership will pay for itself in a years time, with no additional promotion from me.

Let me repeat that.  The Premium Membership on Teachers Pay Teachers will pay for itself without me doing a thing.

It took a while for that fact to sink in for me.  I kept thinking I’ll keep both stores but promote the Educents one, because after all, I’m getting 85% commission on sales there.

But once I realized that anything I promote on TPT is above the amount that TPT will automatically generate for me to pay off the Premium Sellers account, then I was free to promote whichever I wanted.*

And I think that it just makes sense to promote my TPT store, since I’d love to have all my reviews and followers in one place.

And if I see that I don’t make anything on Educents, I can always close that shop and not lose anything.

Plus TPT has the most incredible community of sellers willing to help out and share their experience.  If you’re logged into your account, just hit the drop down menu next to your name and the link to the forum is on the bottom left.

So are you convinced yet?  If you want to sign up for Teachers Pay Teachers, you can do so here.

And if you’ve found another sellers marketplace where you’ve had success, let me know in the comments below.  I’d love to hear about it.

CHECK OUT TPT

*When I first wrote this article TPT was offering 85% commission on a Premium Seller account and 60% on the basic plan.  They have since dropped to 80% so there is a slight advantage in promoting Educents.  I’m still mostly promoting TPT because most of my feedback and review are on there.  Also it’s been almost six months since I wrote the draft for this article and I’ve easily paid off my Premium Seller Fee on TPT, so I’m really glad I upgraded when I did.

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