More and more people are choosing to sell on Etsy as it continues to grow its customer base. We think it’s a fantastic platform for budding side hustlers to sell their creations and begin to learn the ropes of eCommerce.
Why should you sell on Etsy?
There are many reasons you should consider Etsy as a place to sell your products. We personally love it and think it’s a great place for anyone to get started and see if their products have an audience.
- It’s super cheap to get started
- The marketing is fair and allows new users to compete
- You can get up and running within hours
- It has a large market of customers to tap into
- Payment and Postage systems are well integrated.
How did we do?
As seen above, we’ve made £799 (or $1000) from 60 orders and around 3000 visitors. This is a conversion rate of 2% which is pretty average for Etsy – where conversion rates are usually around 1-3% on average.
It took around 20 hours of effort spread across a few weeks to start selling in our store. From researching our product niche, creating the store, sourcing the products and actually having them available to buy. However, since the initial 20 hours of set-up, we’ve not spent more than a few hours on the store and we’ve really just left it ticking along in the background and fulfilling orders as they come.
Below we’ve laid out our approach to getting started out to sell on Etsy
Finding your niche
Before you get started, it’s worth doing solid market research into what products you’re going sell. You might already have a product which you make or sell, but it may not translate well onto Etsy. You need to check if you’re allowed to sell the product on Etsy’s Policy pages. Items like alcohol, weapons, etc. aren’t allowed for obvious reasons and they’d like handmade products to be sold (although you can get away with non-homemade items as many of the sellers sell items from China).
Research what is selling on Etsy
Etsy gives you a big clue as to what is selling well on the platform. They have a large dropdown menu bar just below the search option.
As you can see, they help buyers who looking for items such as:
- Seasonal items (Easter Finds)
- Jewellery & Accessories
- Clothing & Shoes
- Home & Living
- Wedding & Party
- Toys & Entertainment
- Art & Collectables
- Craft Supplies
- Gifts & Gift Cards
This is a great place to start thinking of ideas and finding which sellers are doing well to get inspiration.
Research other sellers who sell on Etsy
First of all, go onto Etsy and see what’s working well. You’ll be able to search for products and see how many sales each listing is getting and for what price. Ideally, you’re looking for High Demand and Low Supply, i.e. lots of people are searching for the product and there’s not much completion. This will give you a better chance of getting your first few sales.
Perhaps there are a few products which are all selling well across the top sellers or perhaps the top sellers all have a certain theme to their store. Start to get a picture of your competition and understand what your target market may be.
Find your product to sell on Etsy
This is a crucial stage and we recommend getting help from some of the great resources out there. There are many websites to find trending keywords and products, but for selling on Etsy, we had great success with eRank. eRank has a free or paid plan and they both give you enough information to learn more about a certain product.
If you pay for the eRank plan you’ll have more information about the number of searches each product is getting. You want High Search and Low Competiton.
Figure out how you will produce your product
Etsy wants to create a platform for sellers who create handmade items, so it’s best to create your products from scratch. We imported our materials from international suppliers and assembled them at home. However, you could use a local supplier, or international supplier like Alibaba, to buy a sample of test products for your store. If the products sell, then you can create a more custom, dedicated manufacturing process. We don’t want to spend too much time and money on a product if we don’t know if it will sell.
Creating Your Store
It’s super straightforward to set up your store, just go on Sell on Etsy and go through their steps to create your first product and storefront.
Create your Store Front
You could create a store brand logo using Photoshop or grab a free trial of Canva and use their excellent logo maker templates. Make use of free royalty-free image websites like Pexels to get images for your store homepage. Make sure to add a front banner image and opening announcement to let people know what you’re about.
Creating your Products
Try to take your own high-quality images of the products so you can stand out against the competition. Most phones will have a good enough camera these days, or you can rent a camera from websites such as Fat Llama. Make sure to use eRank to find the best keywords to attach to your product listings and use their product analyser to see if you need to add more images or change your listing to boost its ranking.
Pricing your Products
This is important when you’re starting out as you need to get your first few sales for Etsy to trust you. We priced our product to be the cheapest on the market so we were just breaking even after postage and product costs. Our plan was to build up some sales and 5-star reviews before increasing our prices to make a profit. This worked well, and we launched an initial 50% off store launch sale. This brought in 22 sales in our first month and gave Etsy the impression that we had a hot product to sell. This boosted us to the first page of many of our keyword searches and allowed us to make a great start.
Marketing your Products
As discussed previously, we had an initial high-discounted launch sale which we followed up with lots of smaller discounted mini-sales. Each month we tried a new sale, slowly reducing our discount to increase profit margins while being competitive in the market. Your goal is to be on the first page of the Highly Searched Keyword Searches.
Etsy will drive your traffic through their app and webpages, the search bar and through Etsy Marketing & SEO. You can also drive your own traffic through social media, your own websites and through paying for Etsy Ads. A breakdown of these for our store can be seen below.
We didn’t really get much from the paid Etsy Ads and we’ve read that they’re not what they used to be. However, it’s worth giving it a go to see how they perform for you.
Scaling your Store
You should leave your store running for a few weeks and keep track of your “Sales Funnel”. This is basically an overview of the steps your customer takes when making a purchase. If one part of your funnel is poor, it could stop your customer from purchasing. To do this, check the following:
- The number of people viewing your store/product
- The number of people who are viewing your store compared to those visiting.
- The number of people visiting compared to ordering.
If there are not many people viewing your store, you need to work to get your listing seen. This can be from advertising or using better keywords to rank higher. If not many people are visiting after viewing, then your listing offer is not appealing. Try new images, new price points or new titles to try to get more clicks. If people are visiting but not ordering, then you need to work on our product listing to try to convince them to buy. There may be a mistake in your listing or something to make you seem untrustworthy.
Make sure you make one change at a time to see if any improvements are made. If you make multiple changes, you won’t know what worked for you and you’ll struggle to make continuous improvements.
Conclusion
Opening an Etsy Store is easy and can be done in a day, the hard part is finding the product people will buy and convincing them to buy it over your competitors. We still think it’s a fantastic way to test products cheaply on a marketplace where people are looking to buy from small businesses. Once you’re ready and have your hot product, you can always cut the Etsy Fee costs by selling directly from your own website or social media.
Be aware that Etsy will charge a small listing fee and can a commission on each sale. These fees include a Listing Fee, Transaction Fee, Advertising Fee, Payment Processing Fee and then of course a Postage and Packaging Fee which you will pay separately.
For more side hustle ideas, check out our How To Make Money Online (and Offline) article.
Try our Etsy Fee and Profit Calculator here: Etsy Fees & Profit Calculator 2023
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