The 10 Biggest Etsy Mistakes I See...

I've been on Essie for about two years now and I've recently hit a pretty big milestone at least for me of hitting 5 000 sales and reaching over 75 000 in revenue on the platform I learned a lot along the way and I've made a lot of mistakes and some of you guys have been sharing your shop with me looking for feedback and I see that you guys are making some of the same mistakes that I did too these mistakes could be causing you to lose it on sales they could be losing you money they could be losing you time and they could be holding you back from reaching the success that you dreamed about when you first started your shop in the first place so let's not waste any time and get right into it and talk about the 10 biggest largest hugest Etsy mistakes that I see mistake number one is not taking enough photos most people are visual Shoppers back in the 50s when there was a radio in the center of the living room instead of a TV you could get away with just describing your product with words but these days people really want to see what your product looks like in as many photos and videos as possible when I was on call with an Etsy Shop Optimizer last year she told me that the more product images a listing has the better off it does and that's just according to the stats I understand that if your shop uses a print-on-demand model like mine does it's hard to get a lot of photos because you don't want to be creating so many products for all these different designs if you're not sure they're going to sell but another thing that you can do with this photo section is just convey important information that you want your customer to know things like specifications or sizing of your products or even just how to order or what's customizable if you look at some of the biggest shops on the platform you see that a lot of them do this they use this section to display important information because you know that a lot of customers don't read the item descriptions mistake number two is changing a best-selling item or an item that's doing well if you've been on Etsy for a while you know that the search algorithm can be a Fickle thing it can change on a moment's notice and you really don't want to be encouraging it to change for items that are doing well for you when you make changes to an item it can take Etsy a while to index these changes in the search and during this time it may or may not be available for customers to find people have shared stories with me saying that they went through all their listings in a day and made a bunch of changes all at once and their business just dropped off like to zero for like one to two days I personally don't know if this is a huge deal anymore because Etsy is always making changes but it is best practice to stagger out your updates if you can because you don't want to be stuck in a scenario where your shop isn't searchable to customers if you do want to make changes like you want to test out new photos or titles or descriptions the best thing to do is something called a b testing instead of making changes directly to an existing listing you want to create a duplicate one with all the changes that you want after that that you can sit back and just observe which listing is doing better and drop the underperforming one if you want mistake number three is copyright or trademark infringement I know a lot of people do it and I know a lot of people don't get caught and I know some shops make some decent money before getting shut down but to me it's just not worth it if you know me you know that I'm always talking about how important it is to build a business that has the potential to last long term but if you're doing something illegal like copyright infringement you just can't do that because there's always a risk that any day your shop could get shut down I know it can be hard because if you just spend two seconds browsing on Etsy you'll see that there's a ton of stores that have Disney stuff Marvel stuff or Pokemon stuff and it almost seems like it's okay to sell these items I make a lot of etsy related content here on YouTube so I guess people think I actually work for Etsy or something but I'm always getting messages from people who've had their shops shut down randomly and asking me to help them open and back up firstly I don't work for Etsy guys I'm sorry but I can't do anything to open up your shop again and secondly it's almost never random 90 nine percent of these jobs are infringing and copyright in some way and that's the reason they got shut down even if you're creating these products from scratch by yourself or you're personally drawing art pieces using these characters if you're using IP that doesn't belong to you there's always that risk there's the risk that you're going to get shut down mistake number four is unprofessional responses to reviews you'll see this a lot if you spend any time browsing Etsy forums or Reddit but a lot of people are not really professional when it comes to their customer service I totally get it as small business owners we put our Heart and souls into the products that we make and when somebody criticizes our products or our shop it can feel like it's a personal attack on ourselves there's going to be people who give you unfair reviews there's going to be people who try to scam you for free product and there's going to be people who just simply don't like your product and that's okay not everybody has to like your product some of the biggest companies in the world who are making the most Innovative products they have haters too like not everyone is going to like your products but one of the most important things that you can do for the long-term health of your business is just to treat these people right anyways if somebody gives you a bad review on Etsy one of the worst things you can do is respond to them in an unprofessional way I'm calling the benefit I'm calling the ungrateful hotline it can be a huge turn off to any potential customers that might see it it's really in your best interest to be the bigger person and to reply in a courteous and understanding way even if you don't really mean it my go-to response when dealing with negative reviews is just to be sorry that they weren't happy with their order and just to let them know that if they need anything else I'm always available via email or Etsy messages and I leave it at that you don't have to go into detail about what the customer did wrong or how they didn't read the description or how they're like super crazy or something like that most people will get that vibe from Reading their original review anyways so you really don't need to point these things out mistake number five is under pricing your products I like to browse Etsy from time to time just to discover new shops and just to see what everybody is doing and whenever I do I always stumble upon these shops that I feel must be losing money or just making less than minimum wage I know there's a lot more competition on Etsy these days and you can feel pressured to need to lower your price to compete but in my experience you really don't want to compete on price that's the last thing you want to compete on because it's a race to the bottom where everybody loses pricing can be a very difficult thing to figure out so I get it but I've talked about this before and I think it might not be possible to charge too high for a product the real thing you have to consider is does the price match your ability to sell it also a lot of people think that if they increase their prices they're going to lose a whole bunch of customers and they're going to make less money but that's not always the case but say you sell your items for ten dollars and you sell 100 of them a month you increase your price to twenty dollars and the worst thing happens you lose half of your customers and half of your sales are gone but is it really that bad because if you work out the math you're actually making the same amount of money while doing half the work so it's not always a bad thing I get comments sometimes from customers saying that my stickers are too expensive and I'm okay with the head I personally am not looking to make the cheapest stickers on Etsy if there are people out there looking for that like they can easily find it from other stores but I'm happy with the prices that I've set I'm happy with the quality of stickers that I'm making and I'm happy making money doing what I do mistake number six is focusing on the wrong Niche I think that the majority of new shops that are struggling to get sales are making this mistake they say that there are two modes of experimentation exploring and exploiting exploring is about testing why to find your points of Leverage or to find a niche that works for you but once you've found that Niche you should move into exploit mode where you're testing deep and narrow and doubling down on what really works for example say that one day you just decide that you want to make stickers maybe you saw this really cool guy on YouTube and you want to be just like him [Music] you're really ambitious so you make hundreds of listings with different sticker designs but you're not getting any sales what might happen to you is that the market just doesn't want this product from you at this time and you could have spent all this time and energy with not much effort in return a more efficient way to do it would be to take your time and try out a variety of different things to see what works first say you're interested in art you can try putting your art on stickers but also prints greeting cards pins magnets tote bags mugs or anything that comes to mind and maybe after doing all of those things you find that your greeting cards are selling really well this is where you want to change into exploit mode you've found that greeting cards have been selling well for you so Now's the Time to make hundreds of listings of greeting cards most people skip the exploration step altogether because it can take a lot of time but I argue that you could be wasting even more time by focusing on a niche that's not working for you at all mistake number seven is Etsy ads at the wrong time there's this misconception that Etsy ads are like a magic wand that you can just wave and it's going to magically bring you sales but that's not really the case at all what ads do is get you on the top page for particular Search terms which in some cases might lead to sales but in other cases might not do anything at all for example I sell daycare labels and back to school labels for kids which is a pretty seasonal business I get sales throughout the year but after running my shop for a while I've learned that I have a busy season near the end of summer and early fall and sales drop down in the springtime there's no amount of money that I could spend on Etsy ads that would get my spring sales to the volume that I do during the fall throwing money at Etsy ads is just going to be a waste because there's just simply less people looking for tags at that time and the thing is there are shops out there that are more seasonal than mine this is an extreme example but if you're selling Christmas ornaments or Christmas decorations there's no reason to spend money on Etsy ads in June it just doesn't make any any sense so before you go and you spend your hard-earned money on Etsy ads just make sure you've given some thought about the timing mistake number eight is copying the competition when you see a successful store in your Niche it's natural to want to imitate them you might be tempted to replicate the type of products that they make or even how they shoot their product photos but in my experience it's better to try to stand out like I said earlier people are visual Shoppers and when people are spending time to scroll through hundreds of different products the best thing that you can do is try to stand out and make a good first impression type in some of your tags into the search Barn Etsy and make notes on what all your competitors are doing is there a common theme Here is there something that you can do differently to stand out to use different colors or a different setting for your photos for example if you're searching for candles I feel that most of these products give off the same Vibe but this store really stands out while most candle shops are going for a pastel muted colored look this one uses bold and vibrant colors and instantly caught my eye looking at their sales they have over 2500 and they only started last year so it looks like it's working for them too the next mistake is setting it and forgetting it if you've been on Etsy for a while you know that it's not a platform where you can just set up a store have it run and just leave it up there to get sales forever the algorithm popular Search terms and general sales Trends are always changing and if you want your store to have continued success you have to evolve to one thing that you can do is to browse Etsy the same way a potential customer would I like to open up an incognito tab on my browser go to Etsy and enter in Search terms for my Niche then I'll look through the first one to three pages to see what shows up I'll click into the products that seem to be doing well and check out if they're using any tags that are new to me that I should switch to too this is a really great way to keep up with your tags and just your SEO in general it doesn't take much effort at all and it just keeps your SEO updated the next mistake that I see is the absolute worst and that's not starting it really hurts me there's like a physical pain in my chest when I get comments from people saying that it's their dream to start a business they have this great idea for it and they've been watching my content for months or sometimes some of them even years and they still haven't started it yet I know that people are juggling a lot of different things and life gets in the way sometimes but if you have an idea that you really want to do you have to find a way to make it happen it's easy to keep saying things like I'll do it once I'm done school or I'll do it when my job is less hectic or I'll do it when my kids are older there will always be something there will always be a reason not to do it we only get one life and people are out there living like we get another shot at this like we respawn at the end of it and we get to try again but we don't if you have a dream that you really want that you've been thinking about for years you owe it to yourself to at least try right if you're really inspired are now and you're ready to finally start your sexy shop check out this video here it's the fastest way to get 200 Sales and if you're telling me that you don't have any time check out this video here it's how to make more money when you have no time so there we go two videos no excuses I'll see you in the next one guys thanks for watching bye [Music]

Channel: Tim Koa

Views: 78,785

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Id: B6t5a2V5uFI

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022