This is Linda from Sparkling Vinyl. I have noticed a common thread of reasons why some stores have low sales so I thought I would just write about mostly what I see based on all the mistakes I made when I was new to Etsy, and believe me, I made them all!
#1. Not knowing your audience. In other words, not knowing who it is you are selling to and why they would purchase your product over another store. Also, not researching if buyers are even searching for your item. I see many stores put up a combination of items that have no common theme or relevance to each other. Which brings me to ……
#2. Buyers land on your page and they don’t know what your store is about. For example, you love to make stuff, so you post a baby product, and then a fancy bracelet, a painting of some sort, you get what I mean. All these customers are looking for different things and the person typing in the search bar looking for a baby product is expecting to find lots of baby items to choose from and instead sees an array of items that don’t relate to each other. Sometimes the banner is also confusing. If you are selling baby products, then your banner shouldn’t have a scary dragon on it. Well I’m just using examples, but you get what I’m saying.
#3. Bad SEO!!!! This is the worst one of all. I see sellers naming their bracelets in the description area something like “purple twilight heavenly dream”. Well people don’t search for bracelets that way. If they want a purple bracelet they will type in “purple bracelet”. Save the cute names for your description area or your shop updates. Also, bad tags, I see one-word tags with broad highly competitive terms that a new store cannot rank for. Such as gift, bracelet, t shirt, soap – these types of words are too broad, and you need to narrow your terms down to your niche. You need to use a keyword tool that shows what Etsy buyers are looking for and what best describes your item. You should be using an “anchor keyword” on your items that are similar. And you need to be using all 13 tags!
The first part of your description should match the first part of your tags. I use Youtube coaches to learn Etsy SEO. I use the keyword tools Marmalead and Erank. There are lots of Youtube videos to learn how to use these tools. If you look at Etsy’s handbook for SEO, they tell you there what their best practices are.
#4. Bad pictures – Dark backgrounds, dark pictures, blurry pictures! Pictures are everything on Etsy. The buyers can’t touch your product and a bad picture will cause no one to click on it which in turn will drop it in the rankings. Etsy likes light backgrounds because they have done the research and those pictures have a better click through rate which means better sales.
#5. Not enough items. Yes there are stores that don’t have a lot of items that have a lot of sales but if your competitors that have tons of sales have 200 items on their store and you have 15, who do you think is coming up in search, just based on math alone?
Okay, there are more things, but these are the most common ones I see that can take down your shop before you even start. I hope this was helpful.
