Top Tips For Etsy Sellers

Brand Strategy

Jun 22

Things you didn’t know about Etsy

If you’re an Etsy Seller STOP what you are doing and listen to this! In todays episode I share some the best kept Esty tips out there along with shouting out 2 amazing start-ups. Be sure to check them out and remember to show small businesses love. Listen to Season 1 Episode 11 of Her Messy Bun Podcast to learn some of Etsy’s best kept secrets or keep reading.

Best Kept Etsy Tips

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

I reached out to you guys asking you to share your businesses with me so that I can share some of them on my podcast and you guys did not fail me! One thing that I noticed was that majority of you guys just recently started your own businesses due to the quarantine and opened your shops on Etsy, which I think is awesome, but as I started checking out the new shops I started realizing a lot of my friends don’t fully understand how Etsy rewards you.

Being new to the scene can be overwhelming, what tags should we use, how much is shipping, should I offer free shipping, how many listings should I have, when should I add listings, should i pay for ads, what should my description box say about my product. There are so many questions about the unknown, so my goal today is to try and answer a few of these as well as give you so tips people don’t like to tell you.

The first thing is listings!

For those of you who didn’t see my post the other day, Etsy rewards sellers who have multiples listings and who consistently add listings every week. It’s important to have separate listings for each product because if you are selling 5 different items and I go to your site to buy all 5 items, etsy will say you made 5 sales (which you did) but if you have all 5 items under the same listing because you think they fall under the same category, and I buy all 5 items, etsy would only say you made 1 sale. You can take this a step further, let me use myself for an example. Before I was pregnant with Emmet I used to make and sell candles to order, so I could list a 4oz grapefruit candle and then include all the different scent options on that same listing. Then I could list a 4oz peaches candle and again include all of my different scent options on that listing. I was able to do this for 2 years and even though it hindered the visual amount of sales I had, behind the scenes I was able to make unlimited amounts of sales off of one listing. Now that I batch make my candles and products and have an inventory, its important that I have everything specifically listed separately in order to keep track of my inventory. This is something that you should keep in mind when you are creating listings, and really think about which will benefit you the most.

How to tag and title these listings:

So now that we have our listings lets talk about how to tag and title these listings. It’s important to not only have the specifics of what you are selling in your title, but it’s also important to save space in the end to add your business name. It’s also important to save a tag for your business name. Think about it this way, if I am are talking to my friends and family about my shop I’m most likely going to mention The Savage Boutique sells this or The Savage Boutique sells that. The thing that people will go to search isn’t the title of my listing, its going to be the title of my Shop. So now when my friends and family go to search me, I’m boom FRONT AND CENTER and whether they can find my shop or not they definitely will be able to find a listing of mine.

While we are talking about tagging our listings I want to share something not many people like to share. When it comes to tagging your items there are three things to think about:

What are other people tagging their items as
What are people actually going to search in order to find my item
It’s ok if I don’t know how to tag my listings because I can always edit it as needed.

The last things that I want to talk about is Ads and shipping.

Personally everyone is going to have different beliefs on this but what I’ve learned is the Ads on etsy don’t work in your benefit unless you are making consistent sales and/or you have a few hundred sales in a short period of time. When you purchase ads on etsy too soon or when you’re not able showing any form of consistency Etsy doesn’t showcase you on the front page of someones search and then on top of that, from a visual marketing standpoint, as a buyer we don’t tend to buy from ads, especially when it looks like no one else has either. So don’t waste your money on buying ads, instead share to Pinterest and TikTok what you are selling and be sure to think about the post from an advertisement perspective.

You would never see a company put a commercial out begging for sales, instead you would see why you should buy from them, how to buy from them, and how many to buy from them.

Pinterest and etsy are like best friends, I never go on pinterest without seeing at least 10 things from etsy. Be sure to utilize this platform. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with all the different social media platforms there are. Try to focus on three. I personally love TikTok, Pinterest and then I’ll share to my listings to Facebook and when i’m posting photos, I’ll share them to my instagram and because its linked to my facebook it does the job for me. You can also look in to apps that you can batch schedule your posts so you don’t have to worry about social media every day.

As for questions about free shipping.. Whether you decide you want to do it or not that’s up to you, the only advice I can give you is to figure out how much shipping is going to be first, and then either build it into your cost of item in order to offer free shipping or keep your item at a lower cost and have people pay for shipping. What ever you do, do not offer free shipping if there’s no room in your profit margin to pay for it.

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