Starting an Etsy Business For Dummies Cheat Sheet

You can personalize your Etsy shop in any number of ways. This personalization is critical to ensuring that your Etsy business stands out from the crowd and helps promote your brand. And anyway, it’s fun!

• Add a cover photo. A cover photo is a graphic that runs across the top of your shop’s main page. You can create a cover photo from scratch by using any number of graphics programs.
• Include a shop title and shop announcement. Think of your shop title as a tag line of sorts. It briefly sums up what your shop is about. In contrast, your shop announcement trumpets what you sell, the types of materials or ingredients you use, or your artistic philosophy. Your shop announcement could also broadcast when your next sale will be.
• Populate your shop’s About section. Sharing your shop’s story in the About section helps garner additional interest in you and your shop among buyers.
• Use sections to organize your goods. If you sell different types of items — say, magnets, notebooks, and picture frames — you can use sections to organize your shop by item. Even if you don’t sell different types of items — maybe you’re all about knit caps — you can use sections to organize your goods by, say, yarn type, size, or price.
• Choose a strong shop icon. Your shop icon is the image that represents your store across Etsy. Be sure to select a shop icon that reflects well on you and your shop.

Running a profitable Etsy business means being comfortable with doing a little math — especially when pricing your pieces. Putting a price on your Etsy creations may seem challenging, but don’t freak out! You’re not dealing with calculus here, or even trigonometry. To price pieces for your Etsy business, all you need are two simple formulas:

Wholesale Price = (Materials + Labor + Overhead) × 2

Retail Price = Wholesale Price × 2

When you calculate the costs of your materials, you need to consider only the price of what you used to produce one piece, not everything you actually bought. Labor costs are your hourly rate multiplied by the time spent to make one piece. Overhead costs consist of what you need to run your business, such as tools, office supplies, and the like (but not shipping costs).

Note that, in the second formula, you multiply the wholesale price by 2 to determine the retail price. Some sellers may choose a higher number, multiplying the wholesale price by 2.5 or even 3 to determine the retail price (assuming that the market will bear that). The multiplier you choose is really up to you.

Great product photos can boost sales for your Etsy business, but you don’t need to hire a professional photographer (although you can). Composing your own photos for Etsy is a breeze. As you shoot your pieces, keep these compositional points in mind:

• Angle the camera. Angling, or tilting, the camera puts the subject slightly off-center and creates movement and flow. The result is a more dynamic, intriguing image.

• Shoot tight. Filling the frame with your subject not only adds visual impact but also enables potential buyers to see how well made your piece is.

• Blur the background. By using a shallow depth of field (read: a low f-stop setting on your camera), you can blur the background, dramatically highlighting your piece. When the background is blurred, you can shoot in almost any setting; just make sure that the background colors don’t clash with your subject.

• Less is more. Don’t crowd the scene with extraneous objects. Otherwise, potential buyers may not understand exactly which item in your photo is for sale.

• Frame your subject. One way to draw the viewer’s eye to your piece is to frame it — that is, place some darker element in the perimeter. This technique helps keep the viewer’s eye from straying from your item.

• Group pieces together. Especially if you make itsy-bitsy goodies, you can try grouping them to catch a buyer’s eye. Not only does this make for a more eye-catching photograph, but it also shows potential buyers how pieces in your collection work together.

• Use the rule of thirds. Divide the scene you’re photographing into nine equal parts by using two horizontal lines and two vertical lines (like a tic-tac-toe grid); place key elements at one of the four points where the vertical and horizontal lines intersect. In addition to conveying a sense of tension and energy, this helps pique the viewer’s interest.

Your listing title in Etsy acts like a good headline. It’s designed to grab a buyer’s attention. It also factors into Etsy’s search system. That means your listing title must do double duty: piquing a buyer’s interest and being optimized for search. When composing listing titles, keep these three points in mind:

• Keep it short. Your item title must be brief — no more than 140 characters (including spaces).
• Clearly describe your item at the beginning of the item title. This helps improve the chances that others will find your item when searching on Etsy.
• Use a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters. Too many all-uppercase words, and it seems like you’re shouting. Too many lowercase words, and it seems like you’re trying to be e. e. Cummings.

Etsy recognizes the importance of marketing your business — which is why it offers several built-in promotional tools. Marketing on Etsy is easy when you use these tools:

• Promote your listings on Etsy. With Etsy Promoted Listings, you can improve the ranking of your listings within Etsy search results when prospective buyers enter specific keywords.

• Promote your listings on Google. Google Shopping enables you to reach buyers outside Etsy. It works by propelling your listing to the top of the page (or closer to it) when people enter certain search criteria into Google’s search engine.

• Create coupon codes for your shop. Coupons increase sales, increase branding and awareness, reward current customers, and entice former customers to return.

• Post shop updates. Use shop updates to offer a sneak peek at a new item, announce an upcoming sale, or just share a cute picture of your dog in your studio. All of this helps to embed your shop firmly in the “shoppocampus” portion of your buyer’s brain.

• Promote your shop on social media. Sharing your Etsy listings with friends, family, and fans on social media is a great way to keep them buying from you.