Etsy: Expert Guides and Resources

When pricing your items on Etsy, the trick is to strike a balance. You want to price your pieces high enough to cover your costs and turn a healthy profit. But you need to price them low enough that you can sell a reasonable volume of goods. Finding that sweet spot is the focus of this article. ©Aksonat / Adobe StockNot all creative types share a general distaste for math, but lots of us do.

Editing an Etsy listing is pretty simple. Maybe you made a mistake when creating your Etsy listing and need to change it. Or maybe a potential buyer asked a question about the item you have for sale, and you want to update the item's listing to reflect your answer. Or you may want to add or change a listing photo.

With a little planning and forethought, you can post your Etsy listing so that it reaches the maximum number of potential customers. Once it is posted, you can go into your account at any time to see when your listing expires. When you post your Etsy listing, it will appear within a few seconds on the main Etsy page under Recently Listed Items.

When you begin selling items in your Etsy shop, you may wonder how to determine how much your customers should pay for them. If you hope to run a profitable Etsy shop, you need to get comfortable with doing a little math, especially when it comes to pricing your pieces. But don't freak out! All you have to learn are two very simple formulas: (Materials + Labor + Overhead) x 2 = Wholesale price Wholesale price x 2 = Retail price Offering products at different price points (using the preceding formulas) is a great way to increase your customer base.

Ever wonder how many people have visited your Etsy shop? Or what keywords they used to find an item in your store? Thanks to Etsy Web Analytics, you can find out. With Etsy Web Analytics, a free service powered by Google Analytics, you can track such metrics as page views, site visits, popular content, and page referrals — helpful for, say, determining whether that ad you placed on that blog is actually directing readers to your Etsy shop like it's supposed to.

Placing a banner on your Etsy site helps you establish your brand. You can create a banner yourself or have a professional do it. Once you have your Etsy banner made, uploading it to your site is a pretty basic process. While logged in to your Etsy account, click the Your Account link along the top of any Etsy page.

Odds are, you need to collect sales tax for the items you sell in your Etsy shop at least some of the time, (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and New Jersey are the big exceptions that don't require sales tax.) You also may not need to collect sales tax if you use your Etsy shop to sell prescription drugs (not recommended); agricultural products, such as animal feed or seed; groceries; or products for resale.