Hi everyone, I've been doing a little research trying to find out why my sales have dropped. I used to make close to $30,000 a year before Etsy allowed wholesales to compete with the handmade items. I've learned to live with it by selling on other venues occasionally. Now I'm on my way to retiring and trying to load up all my slabs on Etsy I still have. Here's my problem, I know that a lot of sales happen through a customer's phone and I've just found that 2 things are happening that would probably cause us to lose customers, one is the link to similar items that Etsy puts on my mobile pictures. Even before they get to read about my items they are sent to look at someone else's item. Does anyone know how I can circumvent the link (100 items are in the link) that allows this to happen? If you want to see this changed or removed we need to let Etsy Support know, Etsy support said the more that sellers call in the better chance we'll have on a feature being removed or changed.
Pictures are important but they really don't tell the complete story. My title and details tell the complete picture but Etsy's mobile app reduces the title down to 1 line with ... following it, most customers may not know what ... means, my wife and thousands of persons probably didn't. A title doesn't take up a whole lot of space and I think it is necessary so it should be shown. With the title being truncated and the chance of the details being overlooked on the way down the listing, the customer is presented with 32 pictures of items, a lot were not similar.
I know that Etsy thinks this is helping us sell our items and they say our items are also being shown, so we also benefit from the feature. I know if I had my choice I would elect to not show similar items. How many of you would like to see this feature a choice, if you do let Etsy Support know.
Just a suggestion to Etsy: A great deal of the similar items are not similar, this is just one thing that makes the customers angry, by being sent on a wild goose chase, this also happens in their search. If you make the customer happy they will BUY. They are really tired of scrolling endlessly through a search or link that doesn't relate to what they want. 1 link I looked a had over 100 items for the customer to look at, I would bet that 50+ were not similar. Has anyone seen a list that shows the changes that Etsy is going to make and when it will happen, I haven't.
