10 Questions about selling on Etsy platform Answered by 6 figure Etsy Seller.
Today we'll be answering some of the most frequently asked questions by my students regarding selling on Etsy platform. For those who don't know me yet, I'm Kato and My company - "Qisabags" was established on Etsy and we produce and sell Premium quality, Handcrafted Leather bags on various e-commerce platforms including Etsy, Shopify and Amazon. My business took of on Etsy and I'll be always and forever grateful to this platform.
1. How much time do I need to Spend on Etsy in order to succeed ?
As I mentioned earlier, Etsy is a platform that loves active shops and Etsy algorithm will prioritize active shops accordingly. Being active on this platform is especially important for new shops, which just started establishing their online presence. When I first started on Etsy, I spent on average 2-3 hours a day creating new listings and optimizing my shop. I used to post 3-4 listings a week, which mostly depends on how many products you have ready to sell. This is why I always advise my students to have some products ready, before even opening an Etsy shop, which includes product pictures, keywords and copywriting. This way when you open your Etsy shop, you are ready to boost your Etsy SEO and show the algorithm that your shop is ready to go.
2. How much income can I as a seller generate with Etsy ?
This is very subjective to the product you are selling, your production volume and the price point. Relatively expensive products have lower conversion rate, but the income from those sales will be substantial. If you are selling relatively cheap products, customers need much less time to take the purchasing decision and your conversion rate and the volume of sales can go through the roof over night. In terms of income, Etsy doesn’t really have any limits and if you work on your shop systematically your income should increase every year. In my case, I’m selling quite expensive products, most of my items are over 150 USD and I have a six figure yearly income and 10 employees at our factory. So you can see from my experience, Etsy can definitely become your main source of income.
3. Why Etsy and not Shopify ?
As I mentioned earlier, this two platforms are completely different and in my opinion at some point you should start selling on both of them simultaneously. Etsy is a marketplace with Huge volume of traffic and Shopify is your own, standalone website, which can never be taken away from you. Etsy is easiest and the fastest way to start selling your products online and Shopify will give your company more of an established brand look and Brand Identity features.
4. Are Etsy Ads worth it?
Unfortunately we have very limited options nowadays when it comes to Etsy advertising and Offsite Etsy Ads fees are quite high - If you made less than $10,000 USD, you’ll be charged a 15% fee for an order attributed to an Offsite Ad on the amount you made from your sale before the advertising fee was applied. If you made at least $10,000 USD, you’ll get a discounted fee of 12%. We don’t have a way of controlling cost per click or how our listings are advertised, but from my experience it’s definitely worth if for some shops. Etsy ads itself are also not cheap, and because I’m advertising high margin products I have included the Etsy ads cost in the price of my listings. I spend roughly anywhere between 1500-2000 USD in Etsy ads every month and I have 3 times that amount revenue from the ads, so in my case Etsy ads are working quite well for my shop. I have a daily budget set at 60 USD a day and on some days Etsy doesn’t even spend that much and if it does, I’m sure it gets spend right. You have to be quite careful with Etsy ads and when you are first starting to advertise your listings Make sure to monitor how much your listings spend and generate throughout a week. Quick Tip: Before enabling Etsy ads, make sure your organic SEO and keywords are in order.
5. Can I ask someone to build an Etsy shop for me?
There are some organizations that work on building and managing Etsy shops, but I would definitely advise you to be careful with this services. Couple of years ago a lot of shops managed from one IP server were automatically blocked by Etsy for security reasons, so make sure that whoever you decide to give your shop to, the device that they login with, won’t be used for any other Etsy Shop. the other shop gets blocked for some reason, all the shops that were ever accessed by that device IP will be automatically shut down as well. Also in terms of managing an Etsy shop, I would definitely recommend always doing it by yourself, because at the on of the day, no one else can do it better than you – an authentic creator and an artist.
6. How much time does Etsy algorithm need to show a listing in SERP? (Search Engine Result Page)
This is again, very subjective. Sometimes Etsy algorithm prioritizes new listings and bumps them up in search results to see how customers interact with it and assigns its place in Etsy search accordingly. So for a short period of time your listing might even turn up to be at the top in some high demand keywords and this is a great thing, because if your product is good, you will be assigned a place in the first 5 pages of Etsy search results. We also might encounter another scenario, which happens more often my students. Usually Etsy algorithm needs more time to show your listing anywhere at all. I’ve had some listings which only showed up in the search results after a month of listing them. So in my experience it can go both ways and you should be prepared to give the algorithm some time.
7. How soon can I expect my first Sale ?
Your first sale on Etsy is once in a lifetime event and there is nothing more exciting than the first Cha Cha Ching! The first sale depends on how much listings you have, the keyword, the quality, the price and also little bit of luck. It can take anywhere between 1-5 month and you should always remember to be patient with the algorithm. It might start working when you least expect it, so you should always continue listing your products, working on your shop, even despite having sales for a long period of time. Etsy Sales have nothing to do with your product or shop, it has to do with time and is directly connected to the time you spend on this platform.
8. How many listings Should I have?
The more listings you have, the more chance there is that some of those listings gets on the first pages of Etsy search. Each listing is the opportunity to get seen and gain some traffic. I’ve noticed a turning point in my shop after 35-40 listings, I started gaining a good amount of traffic and customers could see that I have a lot of products and I’m a serious about my shop. Currently I have more than 300 active listings, I’m closely monitoring their performance and deleting some listings that are not performing as well as they should. The key is to have quality listings with good conversion rates in your shop and not to overload it with low quality products.
9. Who is responsible when the item gets lost ?
Selling high volume of products I’ve encountered every possible case scenario with my customers and I’ve had cases when the products I shipped got lost or stolen upon arrival. Which is quite an unfortunate situation for both parties – The seller, who is not in any way at fault or responsible and the buyer who turned out to end up without a product and a money loss. The first thing you do, is contact your postal provider and file an official reclamation form for lost/stolen package. This does take around 3 weeks to get process, before you receive a letter from the post office. Unfortunately the post doesn’t often cover the full cost of the package and what I usually do is I send the replacement product right away and agree to suffer the lost in value on behalf of my client. In opinion this is the most Nobel thing a seller can do to ensure our customers wellbeing and providing an excellent customer service.
10. Is it hard managing an Online Etsy business?
This is definitely the question I get asked very often by my students. I just want let you know that this didn’t happen to me over night. I literally used to sell my work on festivals and street markets just 5 years ago. If someone would have told me 5 years ago that I would have a fully functioning online business by the age of 26, I would have never believed them. Building an Etsy shop is like building a house, brick by brick. You have to be ready to invest your time and effort in your future and be able to imagine yourself running a business 5 years from now. I was able to achieve that with no funds, based in the third world, developing country, working from home. My niche market is located in the US and my customers wait for 3 weeks to receive their packages. I’ve learnt all this by myself, because there was never enough information on the internet, so I encourage you to start believing in yourself. Imagine what you can achieve in 5 years and what your business will look like, if you start building your Etsy shop today.
That’s all for today’s lesson and I hope you guys will consider all this before
opening a shop, I gathered this information from my personal Five year experience on this platform and I also researched a lot of Etsy sellers who improved their presence on this platform drastically because of this simple steps.
For more Etsy tips visit my ecommerce blog.
For more video tutorials on Etsy SEO visit my skillshare teaching account.
Good luck and see you in the next blog!
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