Etsy Tricks and Tips: How to Get Your Shop Moving

Etsy, the wildly popular website connecting sellers of handmade and vintage goods with an eager audience, is a great place to set up a shop. In less than one week from setting up my shop, I've made six sales. While I can't say that you'll find similar success, I can tell you what I did. First off, I researched the idea of starting a shop for several weeks before deciding it was for me. That's going to take you some footwork, though I will say the etsy forum on craftster.org was very helpful. Read some blogs, surf around and see what other people are doing and how it's going for them. It will guide you more if you look at sellers with items close to what you plan on offering, it can give you a price range for similar items as well as an idea of what kind of market there may be for your works. For example, I love to make doll clothes, so I checked out what was going on in the various doll related categories, I searched for dolls that I like to dress and checked out what some of the doll clothiers had sold. It turned out, from the dolls I enjoy that Blythe is by far the favorite amongst the other etsians, so I got out the things I'd made and vintage dresses I had for Blythe size dolls and began taking pictures.

Etsy itself makes it possible to see what people are buying through their site by using the 'pounce' feature. Even if you're just window-shopping, it's a fun little gadget, allowing one to peek at sold items or new shops. The site also has a very active forum area, which is a great way to get yourself known around the site. Chatting with the other members can show that you're an honest, decent person and let someone be more comfortable being your first sale. It can be a bit daunting to deal with an unknown seller, there's a certain amount of risk in any transaction, newbies are always suspect until proven otherwise. Letting the other nice people on the forum see that there's another sweet, honest person on the other side of the screen can make all the difference in getting that first sale. Go brew up a cup of tea and have a chat with some very fun people, it can't hurt to say hello and it might help make some sales.

Other places to start promoting are already bookmarked in your computer, just think of all the websites you've been to that allow for signatures or profiles. It's all about speaking up, you just need to be noticed, the sales will follow. You can even include your new shop's link with every email you send in your signature line. Start with a few little things and just keep rolling with it, there's a good amount of talk about twitter being where it's at for spur-of-the-moment sales, but doing any single thing could make you the next big star seller on etsy. More advanced users can easily get their shop's stock listed with google by following the guide at http://www.letsets.com/ which makes the process amazingly clear. Once you've started getting noticed, you can track all your traffic on the heartomatic from craftcult. I'm starting to see it's much like that enchanted mirror in the first Harry Potter book, I'm certain I could waste away staring at that thing.

Best of luck in your etsy adventures, it's been quite a fun place for me.