I have been running a small Etsy shop on the side for the past few years. With very little maintenance this shop has been able to generate a small profit.
Recently I decided that it was time to take my Etsy shop to the next level.
I am going to be updating the steps that I take along the way in this blog so that you too can learn from my successes and fails to improve the performance of your Etsy shop as well.
The first thing that I did was to quickly go on Google and do a simple search for "boosting Etsy sales." Needless to say, this resulted in an astronomical amount of search results. I perused the first few results and found that they are all pushing the same messages. You need to improve your SEO, tags, and images of your listing in order to generate more sales.
Coming from the world of Ad Tech (digital advertising technology) this makes perfect sense. Having the right images and the right messaging is what drives results in content marketing, so e-commerce should be no different.
The first thing that I did was to sign up for a free tool called "Etsy Rank". It's a very powerful tool with a ton of reports and insights around what is going on in the Etsy sphere. You connect your Etsy shop/s to the tool and they analyze all your listing to find where you can make improvements. Very quickly I realized that my listings were not getting good traction because the keywords that I had placed in the title and tags were very high in competition, meaning that it was very unlikely that someone who searched for these terms would find my listing and buy my item.
So the very first thing that I did was to go over all my listings and all the tags that were listed under each listing and remove the tags that had high competition. These tags were replaced by tags that had either low or medium competition so that the right people would be able to find my listings.
I started to monitor the performance of my shop very closely for the next few days and noticed a shocking change. Instead of traffic taking off after changing the tags I saw a drop off in traffic. I was quite alarmed to see this so I jumped on to Facebook where I'm a member of a few Etsy seller groups and found a post of someone asking why such a thing seems to have happened to their store as well. It turns out that there is what appears to be a learning period when you change anything about your listings. It isn't recommended that you change all your tags on all your listings all at once because this puts your entire shop back into this learning period which actually results in a lower visit count.
What you should do it spread the changes out over the course of a few days. For example on Sunday change the tags on 3 of your listings, then on Wednesday change another 3 and so on. This way you aren't going to be affected too badly by the relearning of the Etsy algorithm and your listings will continue to appear in the search results.
I have let the new tags rest for a few days and it looks like the traffic is starting to trickle in.
I hope that you have found this blog post to be helpful and that it will help you to improve your shop's sales as well. If you have any questions please feel free to leave me a comment below.
If you have been thinking about opening an Etsy shop there is no time quite like the present. If you follow this link: https://etsy.me/2OdXwvM you will receive 40 free listings towards your new Etsy shop. The best part is, I will also receive 40 free listings so its a win-win situation!