Wednesday, January 15, 2014

How to Kill Your Etsy Traffic

How to kill your Etsy traffic, in one easy step. . . it turns out I'm now an expert!

It's kind of a long story -but it all starts here.   Remember how I streamlined my Etsy shop, because it had gotten out of control with multiple listings for the same pieces?  The problem was some of the pieces were ready to ship, and some were in the regular made to order section, and lots of them were identical.  It felt like some many-tentacled urchin creature that was slowly taking over my Etsy shop (and maybe also my life.)  So I (brilliantly!) decided to streamline everything, and pull down all of the listings except for what was ready to ship.  And truly, I do love the simplicity of having everything ready to go out the door after it's ordered, and also of having slightly fewer listings.

But. . . what I didn't really take into account was that some of those listings were really popular.  And if I wasn't going to keep fully stocked inventory of every single one of those pieces, I was going to lose a *lot* of traffic.  Because some of these pieces had a lot of favorites and Facebook likes.  Here's my favorite example:



Yes, the listing for this rose bangle was down for a while.  And if you look closely -


That bangle has been favorited 3561 times.  Which means when it's down, that's three THOUSAND fewer people who can click on their favorites and see it.  Holy shit.   Now combine that by 20 or 30 more listings - granted most don't have as many favorites, but it's the same basic idea.  Problem.

So it seems I had two choices - either put everything back up as made to order (which is problematic for gift shoppers, who usually need something rightthisminute), or I could just stock everything in inventory and make sure it's all ready to go out the door.  The second option definitely seems like the best - so that's what I'm in the process of doing now.  Building up the inventory so the listings go back up - and it's working.  Not too surprisingly, as more listings go back up, the traffic comes back.  Lighbulb moment, folks.  So. . . I suppose the moral of the story is, if it ain't broke don't fix it.  Although I'm hoping the Etsy shop ends up similar but BETTER than it was before - with everything ready to be shipped ASAP.  It turns out that it just takes a little time to end up with that new and improved version, since the holidays weren't conducive to immediately producing 200 ready to ship pieces.  But now I'm back into the swing of it and making progress.

And by the way, I do remember that I offered to answer a few "how to sell on Etsy" questions, and I do realize that this greatly reduces my credibility.  But just think, now this is one less mistake you'll have to make!

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