Selling on etsy. New Feature: Listing expiration reminders - Discussions - Announcements - Teams Etsy. Better Shipping Tools to Save You Time - Etsy News Blog. We’re well into the month of October, and the holidays are creeping up on us. That means Etsy sellers are feeling the heat: more orders to make and process, more convos to answer, more trips to the post office, and less time to manage your shop and listings. One current pain point with shop management is the shipping settings for your listings.
We heard your feedback and are excited to announce a suite of shipping improvements in time for the holidays. To help you more easily reflect changes to your shipping cost, location and processing time, we’re launching “linked” Shipping Profiles and an improved Bulk Editor. We’ve also improved the Shipping Upgrades offered in our ongoing prototype team. So what’s new? First, we’re linking Shipping Profiles and listings so that when you change a Shipping Profile, those changes will automatically be reflected in related listings. Secondly, we’ve built a new Bulk Editor for shipping that will live in the Listings Manager.
What’s next? Holiday Merchandising Guide: Winter Trends and Tips. As things ramp up for the busy holiday season here at Etsy, we’re excited to share our 2013 Holiday Merchandising Guide. This comprehensive report is intended to provide informational and planning resources for the holidays; we recommend bookmarking the page for easy reference in the coming months. Throughout the guide, you’ll find information around key marketing campaigns, strategies for promotion and dates to remember, as well as our forecast for 2013 holiday trends. You’ll also see an overview of popular item categories and tips for merchandising your existing products to make them appealing to holiday shoppers. While reading, think about how you can use your own artistic voice to infuse these merchandising themes throughout your shop — in your item listings, photos, shop announcements, descriptions, tags, titles, promotions and more.
Connect Your Product to Potential Customers Tweak your existing listings to appeal to the needs of holiday shoppers. Check the Forecast: 2013 Trends. How Etsy’s New Guidelines Can Help Your Business. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”— Albert Schweitzer I’m constantly inspired by how far the Etsy community has come since 2005.
What started with a handful of creative artisans has blossomed into 1 million shops and more than 30 million members. I love watching Etsy sellers use the platform to steer their own paths to happiness and create dream jobs in the form of sustainable independent businesses. 1. We hear over and over from buyers that they love discovering the people who make all the awesome stuff on Etsy. How Transparency Helps Your Business: Transparency is a key element of an increasingly popular movement that centers around understanding where stuff comes from.
The Etsy Community and Seller Education Teams will be keeping our eyes peeled for stellar examples of transparency in shops’ About pages for coverage consideration in Seller Handbook blog posts and beyond. 2. 3. 4. How to Merchandise Your Shop for the Holidays. Seasons are often recognized by their distinctive trappings and trimmings — in the States, winter wouldn’t be a wonderland without the twinkle lights and powdered snow. Summer is known for backyard barbecues and sand between your toes, fall favors apple picking and leaves crunching underfoot. Seasonal experiences and images come to life through vivid memories and carefully constructed scenes. Visual merchandising is about tapping into the values and lifestyles of potential buyers, so that your product becomes a part of their warm and fuzzy feeling of reflection and anticipation. This process of Telling Your Shop’s Visual Story is a priority for shop owners year-round, but around the holidays it becomes more important than ever.
To get started, let’s walk through three key elements of holiday and seasonal merchandising for your Etsy shop. 1. Set the Stage by Establishing Your Target Market 2. Once you know who’ll be at the party, you can better prepare and dress to impress. 3. Getting to the Heart of Handmade Business. As an Etsy seller, former Team Captain and now the manager of Etsy’s Seller Education teams, I’ve learned a lot about Etsy sellers’ dreams and motivations.
Though every seller has a different story, one of the common threads we hear from the majority of our marketplace is that they start their businesses as a creative outlet. Because we’re fascinated, and constantly impressed by, sellers’ creative processes, I’m eager to share a glimpse into four sellers’ unique journeys. My favorite part about my creative process: How calming it is. I crave creativity when I go long periods without painting. My favorite part about my creative process: My willingness to fail. My favorite part about my creative process: The dialogue with nature. Photo by Stuart Isett My favorite part about my creative process: Because my work is inspired by Indian fabrics and embroidery, I enjoy the process of incorporating the look of the intricate fabrics and the flow in my forms.
Seller Handbook Best-of Archives. Quit Your Day Job: Yokoo. There’s no doubt about it: Yokoo is hardcore. This iconic Etsy seller had knit 1,582 hats and scarves with her own two hands when we shot our Handmade Portrait of her in 2010. Three years and over 2,000 more hats and scarves later, she’s still going strong with her solo operation, fueled by superhero knitting and crochet talents. Before Yokoo captured our hearts with her knitwear, she worked a nine-to-five job at a copy center. Her decision to leave the steady comforts of a full-time job didn’t come easily. However, she says, “I slowly began to realize that my time has unlimited value. If I spent an hour editing a photograph, it wasn’t just an hour, but a total of every hour I ever spent on any photograph — each idea building upon the previous one. This is truly the untold moral of finally becoming self-employed.” As her business has built off each subsequent idea, the Atlanta artist has developed a style of knitwear and product photography that’s instantly recognizable.
How about you? How to Promote Your Etsy Shop With Pinterest. Millions of people use Pinterest every day to explore their interests, find products to buy, and connect with people who share similar interests. Many pinners are already interested in the things you make and sell, so the more people pin, discover, and repin your products, the more likely new customers will be to discover your Etsy shop. Here’s a handful of straightforward tips to help you promote your Etsy Shop on Pinterest. Make Your Boards as Cool as Your Shop Create a range of boards that showcase your shop’s personality and taste, and make sure each board has enough pins to make it feel substantial so pinners will feel like it’s worth following.Give your boards clear names so people can instantly understand what’s on them, but don’t be afraid to get creative — just keep names to 20 characters or less so they don’t get truncated.
Moorea Seal uses clear, concise, and interesting board names to organize her pins. Pin Like a Pro Don’t Be Shy What kinds of things should you repin and like? Quit Your Day Job: Yuki Designs. Each and every bead in yukidesigns’ Craft Supplies shop tells a story as rich as its color palette. Shop owner Karine lives in Quebec, Canada, and takes annual trips to Indonesia in pursuit of unique items. Her passion for travel, artist’s eye, and jeweler background come through in every detail. Once told by a teacher that she would never make it as an artist, Karine left art school and worked a series of jobs for 16 years before working on her Etsy shop full time. “Finding Etsy came as a great surprise and blessing to me after a series of heartbreaking failures and disappointment,” she says.
Here’s her story in a nutshell: In 2006 Karine quit her day job and invested all her savings into living in Indonesia for a year to paint and start a new jewelry line. “Unfortunately, the project turned sour and, long story short, I lost almost all of it. I returned home full of debt and despair,” she says. Your shop has a cohesive look. What inspires you? The photos serve two purposes. New and Improved Tools for Custom Requests on Etsy - Etsy News Blog. On March 15, 2013, Tara Powell and her fiancé, Serge Podrez, decided to quit their day jobs. Five days later they opened DendroCo, an Etsy shop for handmade reclaimed-wood furniture. After only three months, business is booming — but it’s not their established product line that is moving the needle.
Instead, Tara and Serge are proud to say that custom requests make up a majority of their business. Tara and Serge are not alone. Nearly one in five handmade shops on Etsy offer custom items. To help us improve the custom orders experience for all our members, more than 5,000 sellers on Etsy have been actively testing enhancements in our prototype team. What’s new? Sellers can now opt in to prominently display that they accept custom orders on their shop and listing pages, and to receive helpful tools specific to managing custom buyer requests.
A custom order conversation. What are the benefits? If you are a seller who has yet to offer custom goods, consider adding them to your line of work! Wholesale 101: Vendors and Sellers Share Insider Tips. In June, a variety of Etsy sellers met in the Brooklyn Etsy Labs to connect with other sellers and get the lowdown on wholesale from several pros, including West Elm Senior Buyer Peter Fowler, full-time Etsy seller Sara Selepouchin of Girls Can Tell, and wholesale vendors Elena Vasilevsky of ElenaV and Bethany Mallett and Jenna Mallett of Ortolan Organic. The following three videos cover pitching to buyers, along with trade shows, line sheets, consignment, industry best practices, differentiating a line, and invoicing. Each of these speakers provide a wealth of experience, and their insights help demystify the wholesale process. Sara Selepouchin has been an Etsy seller since 2006. Her line, Girls Can Tell, features hand-drawn and screenprinted diagrams on fabric and paper housewares.
Sara is also the owner of the Philadelphia boutique Occasionette. In this video, she shares her story of growing her Etsy shop into a brick-and-mortar store. Peter Fowler is a Senior Buyer at West Elm. Top Tips for Managing Custom Orders. Did you know that there are signals buried in your customer interactions that can translate into big opportunities for your business? Where do you look for these signals and how do they apply to your shop? Enter custom orders. Offering custom items can be a great way to connect with your buyers, expand your inventory, or refine items that are already in your shop. For some sellers, custom orders seem intimidating (What if I have to say no?) And time-consuming (OMG: Bridezilla just changed her mind for the 400th time!). These six tips will help you manage your custom orders and grow your business without losing your mind. 1. Every custom order begins as a conversation. When shoppers click on the “Request custom order” link within your shop, a special custom order conversation will begin with this customizable form.
Not sure that you know who you’re working with? How will this item be used? Knowing these answers will help you guide your buyer through the ordering process. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 3 Clever Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Business. Marketing plans can be tedious, costly, and overwhelming for any small business owner — and, let’s face it, incredibly boring. When was the last time you woke up and said, “I can’t wait to start my day by writing a 10-page marketing plan!”? Never! But as business owners — whether we are new or seasoned professionals — we do wake up and ask ourselves questions like: How can I get more customers? How can I make more money next year? What do my customers really want? All of these questions are good starting points for marketing strategies, but with so much on our plates, it’s hard to determine what we should and shouldn’t spend our time on.
Step 1: Be a Unicorn Magic is defined as unforeseen generosity that feels delightful (Tweet that!) Etsy inherently symbolizes uniqueness, discovery, connection, and expression of one’s personal style and taste. Play around with bold, custom work. Are you thinking about creating custom items? Develop a unique personality for your shop. Do the exact opposite. 10 Ways to Trust Your Gut to Grow Your Etsy Business. I’ve always (halfway) joked that starting Garden & Gun came via divine intervention. Let me explain. I launched Garden & Gun in spring 2007, after moving back south to Charleston, South Carolina, following a successful career in publishing in New York City, which included an action-packed start at GQ followed by stints as the first female publisher of The New Yorker, the publisher of Mirabella, as well as the marketing director of Fortune.
A few years before that, my husband had a calling and we left the Big Apple and moved to Princeton, New Jersey, for seminary. After his completion, he decided that Second Presbyterian in Charleston would be the perfect home for him as pastor. I had left behind my magazine career in New York, and frankly, had no plans of launching a publication. However, the entrepreneurial spirit that’s driven my entire career had a funny way of not letting me go. 1. If you see a void in the marketplace and feel that it needs to be filled, go for it. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 5 Ways to Define and Achieve Success on Your Terms.
It’s easy to get caught up in what we think we should be doing in order to invite success into our lives. We read blogs, we subscribe to newsletters, we talk with family members and friends, we peruse Pinterest, we follow people on Facebook — there’s information and advice galore out there. We live in a remarkable time with remarkable tools for learning and for social interaction. While there are obvious advantages to having access to so much information, it’s also a bit of a slippery slope. It’s easy to begin believing that other people outside of yourself have all the answers. If you just do what so-and-so-blogger says to do, then you’ll be successful. It’s easy to compare yourself to other people who create similar types of things and to wish you had their success.
The thing is, so-and-so doesn’t know you. I’m here to give you permission to take your power back and define success on your own terms. 1. Close your eyes and dream up what your ideal life might look like. Think about: 2. Quit Your Day Job: Julie Ann Art. Julie Ann wants to make people “laugh their asses off,” and she’s doing a dynamite job of it in her Etsy shop, JulieAnnArt. She approaches her designs and business plan honestly and realistically. “A lot of my design ideas come from conversations in my daily life,” she says. “Oftentimes I’ll be laughing with someone and a lightbulb will go off in my head like, ‘Hey, that’s a card!’” Though she has nearly 16,000 sales, success didn’t happen overnight for Julie — she’s been growing her Etsy shop for five years.
When she decided to switch from painting as her main medium to her current greeting card business, she noticed quite a jump in sales. “After years of consistent yet unsustainable growth, something changed,” says the Los Angeles–based artist. “This drastic growth made me start to seriously think about pursuing my business full time.” What was your biggest challenge as an Etsy seller when you started, and how did you overcome it? Yes! This is my business and my main source of income. 7 Signs Your Business Is Ready to Grow. 10 Tips for Making More Time to Make.
Kiva - A people–powered economy. And Kiva: Empowerment Through Entrepreneurship - Etsy News Blog. How to Make Your Photos Publicity-Ready. How to Write a Creative Business Plan In Under an Hour. Quit Your Day Job: karoArt. 4 Sure Signs Your Business is Ready for Wholesale. Monitor Your Account With Sign In Notifications - Etsy News Blog. Hello Etsy Video: Rasnath Dasa - Etsy News Blog.
Best Etsy Tools for New Sellers. Developing Craft Entrepreneurship: An Update - Etsy News Blog.