When I dived down the rabbit hole that is Etsy I had no idea how far down it went. Well to those of you who are thinking about diving down there with me I just thought I would give you a heads up.
1. Making quality handmade products will not get your items sold. No matter how awesome your stuff is no one is going to care unless you have equally awesome pictures, good reviews, high sales numbers and competitive pricing. I have found that if I price my items at what they are actually worth they get a ton of views, ( I am assuming bot views) but never ever sell. Even with awesome professional photo's many times items do not sell. There is a ton of competition out there and it is not as easy as putting a listing out and getting a sale the next day. This is not Ebay people.
2. I had no idea I would spend so much time obsessively checking my numbers. How many views do I have now? Okay how many views do I have now? What about now? Oh 30 people viewed that scarf maybe someone will buy it. NO. You are wasting your life. There seems to be no reasoning behind what will sell and when it will sell. You can have an item get shared on facebook 30 times and it still will not sell. You can have an item be viewed once that day and sell. Checking your stats while it is fun is in an of itself a waste of time. Its good to keep tabs and see that at lest someone somewhere is looking at your stuff but checking it more than once a day- waste of time.
3. I had no idea all the social websites that you can and should promote on. Not to mention all the time and effort that goes into getting follwers on said websites. I never had a twitter before I had this store, now I have a twitter, a facebook page, a wanelo account, a weheartit account, a fancy, a google+, craftjuice, craftori, stumbleupon, and probably a bunch I forgot because some of them are tricky and I never could figure how to navigate them so I kind of just gave up on them. Yeah. Thousands of followers on many of those sites and it's bringing in views, yet not many sales. I really truly don't know the formula for sales on this thing.
4. Etsy teams. Yeah. Tons of helpful nice awesome people who will talk to you all day. You will have no time to make your items because you get sucked into the promotional threads and making new virtual friends and you learn each others tricks and try and improve upon your respective brands. Very helpful people but not everyone there is there to help you. Beware of snakes in the grass.
Bottom line. I spend way too much time on the computer these days and I keep thinking that if I spend enough time it will translate into sales. It's not so much proving true. If you have tips and or tricks or any advice at all I would love to hear it please leave a comment and thanks ever so for stopping by :)
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