How Not To Get Sales On Etsy

I opened my Etsy store in January (about 9 months ago), and have learned a lot about effectively marketing my store. For the first several months I was trying everything I could think of to increase my visitor count, and I did get a ton of people coming into my store, but the effort required on my part was substantial, and 3 months in I lost interest. That’s when things got interesting.

Initial Marketing Efforts When I opened my store, I used a variety of strategies to get visitors. I was active in the Etsy community forums, I participated in link exchange programs, and I discussed my work in communities outside Etsy (reddit, my blog, etc). I did Etsy’s paid advertising program, and I even advertised on a popular home decor blog. You can see below how effective this was for me, and you can also see the impact of me stopping my efforts, in March. The top (purple) line is visitors to any product in my store, and the bottom (blue) line is visitors to my shop’s homepage.

Why I Quit I do not have a background in marketing, so a lot of what I was doing was guesswork (mostly based on tips from other sellers). One notable bit of advice was that once you hit some threshold of catalog size, you start to take off. The numbers people gave were different (50/100/200 items in your shop), but the general idea seems to be that having a large catalog has a big impact. I did increase my offerings (I started with 3, and added a couple a week), but I was a long way off from the numbers people were talking about. All of this was a lot of work, and the 3 sales a month I averaged over the first three months was fun and exciting, but didn’t really justify the effort.

Performance After Quitting I stopped all marketing efforts in March, 3 months into my shop. I still managed the shop, but didn’t add many new products or try to drive in visitors. You can see in the graph above that I did maintain a decent level of visitors, though. My sales (see above) dipped for a few months, then in the summer they started slowly going up (I don’t know why). This resparked my interest, but the only tactic I’ve used since then has been adding products to the store (mostly in August). This month, I’ve hit the first threshold (50 items in my shop), and whether or not there is something special about the number, hopefully the general increase in products continues to improve my sales.

Favorites Don’t Indicate Sales On Etsy, visitors can “favorite” a product (or an entire shop). Take this metric with a big grain of salt, because people may have all sorts of reasons for favoriting (doesn’t necessary indicate they are more likely to buy), but it does mean you did something to catch their attention for a moment. You can see below that there is not much of a change in favorites in March, when I stopped driving in visitors. Furthermore, the shape of the favorites graph doesn’t really look anything like the orders graph, meaning there isn’t much of a correlation between favorites and sales. I could see an argument for a relationship between the shape of the favorites graph and the visitors graph, though it seems fairly weak.

“Low Quality” Visitors Lead To A Low Conversion Rate What I get from all this is that for the first three months I was driving in lots of low-quality visitors (meaning people unlikely to buy), and my resulting conversion rate (how often I turn a visitor into a purchaser) was therefore quite low. I read a book on online marketing a while back which talked about (among other things) improving your conversion rate by increasing the quality of your visitors. In my case, any visitor from outside Etsy is less likely to buy simply because there’s a high barrier to entry (creating an account, feeling comfortable buying from a stranger on Etsy, etc). My on-Etsy efforts during the early months tended to target other shop owners, which is better, but still a little off the mark. My latest efforts (adding more products, improving pictures & descriptions) are not going to drive in hordes of visitors, but the people that do find them (mostly through targeted searching) will be much higher quality for me.