It can be overwhelming to get your Etsy shop up and stocked. Perhaps though, waiting for sales is even harder! So what can you do while you wait? Research! Network! Yes!
Become a shopper on Etsy and pay attention to what YOU like and don’t like. What catches you eye, entices you to click heart or even add to cart and especially, was causes you to click away? Now apply what you have learned to YOUR shop!
Go hang out in the Etsy forums. Go to a craft show as both a vendor and a shopper. Chat with everyone you can! Take notes after each conversation and again, apply what you have learned to your shop!
Waiting can be difficult, but you can put that time to good use!
Your host Deborah Carney is joined on this series of podcasts by Esty seller Karen Helmrich, Unkamen Gifts. Follow along as Deborah gets started at Etsy setting up Cool Clay Jewelry, an Etsy shop to sell her own canvas, fabric, and prints on clay pendants and jewelry. This episode covers creating your product listing, which is where you sell your product to your customer.
Your host Deborah Carney is joined on this series of podcasts by Esty seller Karen Helmrich, Unkamen Gifts. Follow along as Deborah gets started at Etsy setting up Cool Clay Jewelry, an Etsy shop to sell her own canvas, fabric, and prints on clay pendants and jewelry. This edition covers the nuts and bolts of setting up your shop.
So, if you have been following these tips, you have a great product that YOU love and a listing with great pictures, relevant tags, title and description, with a good price and shipping rate. What is next? FEEDBACK! It is hard, no, it is TERRIBLE to sit with a “0″ feedback rating! Now, Etsy does have a special feature just for new, undiscovered shops called “Pounce”. New shops are featured here and the link is just 2 clicks from the Frontpage-so that’s pretty nice!
BUT, once you are “discovered” you need to figure out ways to increase your feedback to help establish your shop, your product and your credibility! How? Well, here is how we did it!
First, we looked at the Team list and selected a couple teams that we thought we could contribute to and that would fit our shop and products. We selected SHETEAM(Schooling at Home Etsyians) and TEAMETSYTX(Folks who call TX home, regardless of where they live). Next, we signed up for the teams Yahoo Groups so we could get to know our new team mates-and they could get to know us!
Teams are a great source for information, encouragement and sales! We are very grateful to both of the teams that we started with, as well as our new team, the Chainmaillerteam.
THEN, we started shopping! Team members are a great place to start, but we also looked outside our teams. We found some things we could use and some things that we liked and we sent a Conversations aka. “Convo” to the shop keeper letting them know that we admired the item and would like to purchase it, or better yet-TRADE! We found we were successful about 50% of the time with the trade offer and we still went ahead and purchased the items if the shopkeeper wasn’t interested in a trade. Usually other newbie shops are more receptive to trades than established shops. AND, there is a Trade Team on Etsy and some shops post “trade friendly” in their announcements or tags, so you can try a search!
Regardless, it was a Win-Win-Win situation!
1. We got Feedback from buying the item
2. We got a cool item
3. We got to see how other shops handled convos, sales, shipping and packaging, extra goodies~LOTS of good ideas came to us in these packages!
4.They got feedback from us
AND, if we traded, we got another Feedback from them, they got another from us and of course, we got our product some exposure AND we got to relist it( if it wasn’t OOAK) and that put us in the front of the viewing pages. YEA!
We estimate the we have participated in about 50 trades and while we don’t have it in our Shop Annoucements, we are Trade Friendly!
