THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED!! 39 comments are entered - if there are any more at a later time added, they will NOT count. ********** Today I'm christening my new(ish) blog with an Etsy giveaway! I'm offering one lucky winner a cabled beanie of their choice ( pick your favorite color !). This giveaway will run for a week - so you have until next Monday, January 23rd, to put your name in the hat. 6 ways to enter: Comment below about which color beanie is your favorite. Subscribe to my blog on Google Friend Connect . Blog about this giveaway on your own blog. " Like " my Facebook fan page . Follow me on Twitter . Tweet about this giveaway. Please leave a separate comment below for each entry. At the end of the contest, I'll use a random number generator to pick the winner!! Here's a look at some of the color options available. Browse other color options over at my Etsy shop ! ***** Thank you for enteri
Why is tip #1 helpful? Sometimes too many choices is just overwhelming. Maybe I'm strange but I generally don't look through more than two pages of any etsy shop. I'm really curious about why having 100+ items will make your shop more successful.
ReplyDeleteExcellent question!
DeleteIt's because it's next to impossible to get any Etsy search traffic unless you have a higher inventory. For most categories, 100 seems to be the magic number for some reason. (Jewelry actually seems to need more items in your shop for you to start being found consistently, since there is so much more competition in that area).
I really don't know why this phenomenon works, but it does seem to have some truth to it (at least according to the other shop owners on the Etsy forums). Personally,when I have 60 or 70 items, for example, I'll start getting more consistent views but no sales. Once I get 110... 120 items... sales start pouring in. It's quite strange really. I don't know if there's some mathematical reason (like perhaps the Etsy search algorithms pay more attention to larger shops), or if you're just finally able to stand out from the crowd (since some shops flood the searches with 500+ items).
In a nutshell, remember that your competition is everyone who sells similar items as you on Etsy. Some categories have more competition than others. If you have 5 items, and some other similar shop has 5000, when someone searches... that other shop is more likely to be seen... and purchased from.... since they likely can't even find the smaller shop.
Of course there are always exceptions to this rule. I've actually ran across successful shops with 5 items in them. But based on my research, the typical shop does much better with a much higher inventory, mainly just because they start generating decent Etsy search traffic.