What I Have Learned After 100 Orders on Etsy
I have been on Etsy for over a year and I have sold over 100 orders! Today I want to share some things I’ve learned in this last year and my journey to 100 orders! I am not an expert and everyone’s journey is different, but I hope I can provide something to help you in your own buisness! As small buisness owners, we can learn from each other, and even though I am still a newer owner, I hope I can help you, and you can help me!
First off, I want to share with you what my shop is about! My shop us called AnnMarie’s Art Shop and I mostly sell decor and stationary. I identify as a variety artist, meaning that I create things with different mediums and styles, and often! For example, one day I’m painting a cute wooden birdhouse, and the next I’m digitally drawing flowers. And this can be a norm for me. I like to switch it up and I am drawn to anything creative. I don’t limit myself to specific types of projects, simply, if I want to create, I create whether it’s with the same materials as the day before or not! This is a huge part of my identity as an artist and I want my online presence, including my shop to showcase that!
A number 1 tip that many give when giving advice to a new Etsy shop owner, is to narrow down your products to a niche. And this is a tip that I wouldn’t ignore! But if you look at my shop and my social media, you can see I don’t strictly follow this advice. I follow it to an extent, as I have found it useful, but I have decided that a common ground between everything I do is rooted in decor and stationary. But this is still broad, and I wouldn’t recommend just going with that. Something I have begun doing is launching different product collections. I am still new to this technique so we’ll have to see how it goes, but I think it will allow me better to niche my products, whether just the launches or the whole shop!
A tip I would give you based off my experience, is that you always need to think about shipping prices when pricing your products. We live in a world where “free shipping” is everywhere and seems like a norm, especially when you shop on places like Amazon. One thing I learned in this last year that I didn’t really recognize before, is that free shipping isn’t really free. When choosing to offer free shipping, you want to make sure you are actually adding that shipping cost to your price. If you want to value your product at $20, and shipping costs you typically $5 to send that item, then you should price your product at $25 instead of $20, so that you aren’t eating onto your costs of creation, and of course, your profit!
But if free shipping isn’t free to us and raises the price for the customer, then why offer free shipping at all? Well regardless of whether you add the shipping into the initial price or it comes when the customer checks out, you still have to pay for it. So you should worry more about whether offering free shipping is good for your product or not. I would not evaluate free shipping for your shop as a whole, but on a product to product basis. In my shop, I offer my Forge Lanterns without free shipping, while most everything else, like the stationary have free shipping. I made this decision based on how much it costs to ship my product and if that cost fluctuates at all. For the lanterns in my shop, depending on location it is going to, the pricing for them changes a lot. So I found it unfair for my customers to be charged a medium rate when often that would be much higher than needed for customers who live closer to me, and would be eating into my costs for shipping to customers who lived further than that medium rate. So for that, shipping is calculated at checkout for those items in my shop. With things like the Army Congrats Cards in my shop, the average rate to ship doesn’t really change to much depending on location, and with it being a cheaper item for me to create, it made more sense to offer free shipping for that type of item.
Offering free shipping can have advantages in marketing, which we see executed very well with sites like Amazon, and Etsy itself has proved that buyers tend to look for that option. Etsy has a filter in the shopping menu that allows you to toggle listings that offer free shipping which Etsy has shared with us sellers, that many use that feature! I think when you can, you should offer free shipping, but like I mentioned before, it won’t always be best for you and sometimes your customers to do that. So if you do have listings that probably shouldn’t be shipping free for customers, then I say don’t worry about it. Honestly, I stayed away from free shipping for a while worried about it eating into my revenue. And my best seller to this day, does not offer free shipping. Instead I used other things like looking into taking good pictures and learning about SEO strategies to help make sure those types of listings are also seen. At the end of the day, customers come to Etsy looking for unique, handmade, and valuable items. We know Etsy is not Amazon, and most customers know that too.
Something I learned pretty quickly when opening my Etsy shop was that what might be a successful listing that becomes your bestseller on the platform may be very different than what you thought would lead to be your bestseller. I started my shop in August 2022 with digital color pages and I planned to slowly add more stationary and art items like stickers and prints of my best artworks. And those color pages, though didn’t sell, begun their Etsy algorithm journey, and saw some growth in people seeing it as the month went by. In August I also made a personal project that ended up going viral online. My brothers went into their basic training courses last summer for the U.S army. Towards the end of basic training, there is an event called the Forge, which during the last two weeks and is the last bit of the training before these recruits officially become soldiers! Many families get candles or lanterns that help light their soldier’s way to graduation and home. I made one for my mom since she was going to buy one and I thought, I can totally make that! So I did, and when I did she posted it online. So then family reached out to me to ask if they could have some made not only to support my brother but also other members of out family that were also in training. And of course I did! My family wouldn’t take them as gifts as they wanted to support my new venture into being a small craft buisness owner. And along with family reaching out, I had many others who I didn’t even know reach out too! And so naturally it became part of my Etsy shop and quickly became my best seller, and still is. Most of the orders I have filled so far have been for army families supporting their soldiers with these lanterns! I didn’t see this outcome when I started my shop and a month later it was kicking off with a product I hadn’t even know existed when I started!
Because of The Forge Lanterns, I found success very, very, very, early on in my buisness journey. I was very lucky to find not only a very niche good selling item, but that I enjoy making it just as much as people like buying them. But because of this success being so early on, I didn’t realize until a couple months in, was that this isn’t usually the way a buisness starts out on Etsy. It usually involves the slower grind and learning about what SEO is and how to best make a SEO strategy for my shop. Normally you have to work on a few products and keep creating working to be successful on Etsy or in buisness as a whole. I have since learned how to become better with that slower pace of success over the viral success. Going viral is a huge help to a buisness, and was a great way to start out, putting me in a lucky position, but learning to be able to see and be happy about the slower success has also been rewarding. That slower pace allows me to grow a great customer base who wants to buy from me again and again. Going viral, sometimes those many people only will buy from you once. Something that am seeing with both, is that you shouldn’t expect to go viral, but take advantage of it when you do!
Because of my success on Etsy, I have been able to earn Seller Badges almost every month on Etsy! Seller Badges are badges earned by shops that can show a customer that the shop they are buying from is trustworthy. The two badges I earn over and over the Smooth Shipping and Speedy Replies badges! In my opinion, these badges can be easy to receive because they mostly rely on you rather than an outside source. To receive the Smooth Shipping badge you need to make sure you are shipping your orders by the shipping deadline. With the way we can change shipping timelines, which is especially helpful when filling made to orders and/or when you have any things that may get in way of shipping orders. Things like your full or part time job, school, or a chronic illness, Etsy is great at having flexible shipping times that can help you set a standard for your shop so that customers buying your items know, it may take certain time to ship. You don’t need to explain it to them, they can decide if they can wait those times or not, though most are understanding that Etsy is not Amazon Prime.
The other badge I receive regularly, is the Speedy Replies badge which I think is the easiest to get. I highly recommend that if you don’t have the Etsy Seller app on your phone, you get it! It makes it so simple to reply to your customers! To get this badge you have to reply to your customer in the first 24 hours when they first interact with you. Every message after that, even on a new day don’t count towards the badge, but I highly recommend you always stay on top of messages! The Etsy Seller app at this point is just as good as using the Etsy seller dashboard on a computer or laptop. Etsy adds new features all the time and as an Etsy seller, allows me to check up on anything going on with my shop on the go!
The badge I have a harder time receiving is the Rave Reviews badge which relies more on your customers than you. This badge is earned when you have an average of a 4.8 shop rating. The best way I have found to get closer to this is to remind your customers to review their order. When I receive an order to my dashboard, I do my best to send a thank you message, to not only thank a customer but to let them know I got their order. In this message I also let them know that I’d love to hear any feedback when they get their order. I also include thank you notes in all my orders and so when they open their package, they not only have a thank you but also a reminder to review their order on my shop page! This seems to help me receive more reviews which help me towards that seller badge, but also helps you get feedback on your shop!
I hope that you were able to find something useful in today’s post! These are the major things I learned after filling over 100 orders on Etsy. I am still learning everyday and working to improve not only my Etsy shop but also my business as a whole! If you have any advice or questions, please reach out to me! I have a contact tab here on my website at the top of the page, or you can email me at: annmarie.barreiro.l@gmail.com
Thank you for reading about my shop journey! I am always adding new products to my shop and you can stay up to date with product launches with signing up for my shop newsletter! My newsletter friends always get first notified about new products, first to find out about sales, and get exclusive coupons! Sign up today to get your first coupon!
