How We Scaled Our Etsy Shop & Became Top 1% Sellers

Etsy shop sellers often fall into two categories. Those who have too many sales and they’re overwhelmed by the number of orders they have, feeling like they can never keep up, and those who have very few sales and they wish they had the former problem. At different times, our Etsy shop has experienced both of these issues.

Last year, we implemented several key strategies that allowed us to scale our etsy shop, take in HUGE numbers of orders, and become one of the best-selling shops on Etsy.

Before we jump into that story, I want to say that this is not an I-Dream-of-Jeannie kind of thing. We didn’t just cross our arms and snap our fingers and the Etsy magic happened.

Instead, we worked so hard — harder than we’ve ever worked on our small business before— to get into that top 1%.

There’s not one tiny secret that, if you know it, you can be a best seller on Etsy. It’s a lot of little things that you need to dial in so that everything’s working together perfectly.

So, 2020 is where this starts. What a year. Everything was looking great and then BAM! A global pandemic. It was a crazy year. On a whim, I started making some face masks for my friends and myself in late March and everyone I knew was asking for them.

On March 31, I turned to my mom and sister and I said, “I think we ought to start an Etsy shop.” And they were like, “Sure.” I thought maybe we’d sell a few handmade items and then maybe we’d make a few hundred dollars.

On the first night, we got 11 orders. We were so shocked! We also thought, this will last a couple of weeks, right? Can’t be longer than that.

The next day was, April 1, our first real day on Etsy.

At 7:30 that morning, two orders came in and then nothing for a while. At noon, we got four more orders. Throughout that afternoon, orders kept coming in! We were excited. All evening, we all spoke on the phone about how many masks we would have to sew the next day. Etsy notifications just kept coming in on my phone. I couldn’t believe it. I abandoned all of my regular evening activities and just sat and watched the Etsy shop all night long. When I woke up in the morning, my jaw dropped. We had grossed more in one day than I was making in 2 weeks as a teacher.

We dove in, sewing for hours and hours, saying to ourselves, “This won’t last more than a few days, so let’s just make the most of it while we can.”

So, just like everyone else in the quarantine, we thought we’d be catching up on projects, learning a new skill, or baking bread.

Instead, we were working an Etsy shop that was blowing up.

Within just a few months, we added different products like mask chains and DIY kits, and then we made a pivot towards our sticker shop and created products we were actually excited about making.

4 months later, I quit my day job as a teacher and we’ve created and scaled an incredible brand of hand-designed stickers with an Instagram community that we love.

Having a product with high demand was a huge learning curve. The time before and during our early days of being in the top 1% of shops on Etsy was overwhelming. We were totally stressed out, we considered quitting, and we were just tired. Our studio was a disorganized mess. Every day we would reset the workspace and by the end of the day, it looked like a bomb went off.

We knew there had to be a better way.

We quickly realized we had to scale. This is how we got to the top 1% of all sellers on Etsy.

If you want to be successful on Etsy, you need to streamline everything. Don’t make one handmade item from beginning to end. Instead, you should make 10 or 100 of one kind of product at a time that can be quickly and easily replicated.

You should adjust shipping settings & production times in real time, based on your current workload.

Analyze how fast you can ship out not one product but 50 or 100 at a time. If you want to scale, you need to adjust your shipping policies to reflect this. How long will it take you to process and ship out 50 orders that all came in on one day? Customers love nothing more than fast production times and fast shipping so if you have the ability to ship very fast, this will stand out as a selling point among your competition on the e-commerce platform.

You will also need pause or stop or adjust other parts of your work/business to make more and more of your product during busy seasons.

This is really important if you want to scale and rapidly grow your business when the sales start coming in. You need to be willing to adjust other things in your life to accommodate the rush of popular shopping times.

Once we successfully scaled and we had built a system of producing and shipping, we fine-tuned our SEO and started to offer more listings. Most successful shops on Etsy have a large number of listings and while there’s some back and forth about how many listings you should have, at least 100 listings should be your goal.

Here are the strategies we’ve implemented to rise to the top of Etsy’s seller rankings:

• Learn SEO specifically for Etsy
• Taking gorgeous, bright and clean photos of your product that make it easy for your customer to understand what you sell.
• Optimize your listings to convert with descriptive content and clear measurements and shop policies.
• Have an organized system makes everything faster. We have time to put out huge numbers of orders because our system is efficient.
• Working every day in Etsy Shop Manager is 100% necessary. Etsy‘s algorithm favors what it considers “active” shops, so you need to be doing something every day.

All of these small things add up in your Etsy shop. These are the regular and consistent things that we do as a top 1% Etsy seller.

There are 2+ million sellers on Etsy and what most sellers struggle with is consistency. One reason many sellers aren’t financially successful on Etsy is because they start a shop, they get really excited about a few products they list, and then they simply don’t touch it again. If this is you, and you’re wondering why you don’t have more sales when you feel like you did everything right, remember that you can’t set it and forget it.

The best-selling Etsy shops have consistent sales because they’re active in their shops day after day and they treat it like a true business.

Originally published at https://www.shopstudiosisters.com on January 12, 2021.