Last night, I hit 500 sales in the dodeline design Etsy shop. I can hardly believe it!
Like anything in business, my shop and I have had our ups and downs. I only now just realized that I joined Etsy just shy of exactly two years ago (August 24th, 2009), and as silly as it is, I literally remember that day like it was yesterday. It was rainy and I was bored, frantically trying to make productive use of my time at home while I was broke and not at my part-time job. In between resume sending, Craigslist job-post searching, and trying to stay positive, I landed on a little thing called Etsy.
I had been toying with the idea that summer of making cards but my problem was that I simply just didn’t know where to start. Do you just call some stores up and say, “hey, got some cards, wanna see?!?” I had been working on artwork for some even though I didn’t know how or where I was going to sell the things, or really even how I would make them seeing as how I was barely making ends meet.
Enter Etsy. It renewed my spirit, it excited me to no end to realize that this was where I could start. It answered the question for me. But, as a side note, you will be surprised to know the first thing I ever listed: TABLES. At the time I was buying and selling furniture on Craigslist and refinishing and stuff as a way to make some money. I didn’t have as much luck with that (obviously) lol. Here’s that first table…
I wandered away from Etsy because I didn’t know what Paypal was and I didn’t pick it up again until an October afternoon when I was feeling crafty. I started listing things and bidding on Alchemy, and lo and behold, I won one! And $100 for a design job appeared in my email inbox. I can’t tell you how proud, thrilled, and excited I was to have found an alternative means of making ends meet despite the massive recessionary odds stacked against me.
I made it through that Christmas and I think I had 30ish sales or so by the end of it. I started doing more website work and then I decided I needed to leave Etsy and make my own website to sell stuff. So for much of the first half of 2010 I didn’t use Etsy as much and let the shop go.
Well, I can tell you that making my own website was a lot more trouble than it was worth at the time. Etsy gets traffi because it’s Etsy so you have an immediate advantage. It’s a lot harder to get people to your own little corner of the internet. So in June after the Artist Market – which was also pretty integral – I wandered back to Etsy and got my shop in shape.
I retook pictures, edited descriptions, and I also tried one of those Etsy myths – that you need 120 items listed to get consistent sales. I will tell you that in my experience that is true! As soon as I increased my shop listings to around that #, I did much better.
I hit 100 sales on September 1st, 2010.
Then I started working on another Etsy myth, which is that being an active treasury maker will help you hit the front page and have more sales. Also true! I joined a treasury team and I made the front page that holiday season at least a dozen times. In the spring I had to drop the team due to lack-of-time and I can tell you – I have been on the front page once since.
People always say the thing about the # of listings and also that once you have 100 sales it goes much more quickly. I’m not sure why that is but I can say it’s true – it took me a year to get those first 100 sales, and less than a year to get the next 400. Funny the way that works.
{read more at my blog: blog.dodelinedesign.com}
