If you've been feeling like your Etsy sales have been slow lately, don't worry – you're not alone. Many Etsy sellers experience a dip in sales at some point.
The good news is that there are plenty of things you can do to get your sales back on track. In this article, we'll share 7 easy steps you can take to boost your Etsy sales.
By following these tips, you can start seeing an increase in sales in no time.
What Causes A Shop To Stop Selling?
Before we dive into how to fix or reboot, an Etsy store that has stopped selling is important to understand the two main reasons why an Etsy shop may see a slowdown or complete halt in sales.
#1 Chasing Trends
Across all the shop audits on it's that I've done, the number. One reason that I see shops that were previously successful not hitting their current goals is that they were chasing trends.
Definitionally, trends will come to an end.
If the products you're building and launching inside of your Etsy shop are only designed to capitalize on an existing trend, You are setting yourself up for long-term failure.
The goal for any successful shop should be to build a foundation around products that sell consistently.
The easiest way to make sure you're doing this is to build your shop around a niche focus rather than a product focus.
#2 Not Focusing On One Niche
Similarly to the shops that I see focusing only on-trend products, I often see shops struggling with this issue Trying to be everything to everyone.
As I mentioned above, the shops with the most consistent revenue are to focus on one single niche.
Even if you're not making the mistake of trying to serve every niche under the sun, spreading your focus among multiple niches, especially unrelated niches, is a quick way to start to see burnout from your customers and a drop in sales.
Again, the goal should be to provide as many evergreen products as we can to a single type of customer.
If you want to sell products to the fishing niche and the underwater basket weaving niche, put them in separate stores.
Step #1 Look At What Has Already Sold
Now that you have an idea of What may have caused your drop in sales to begin with, it's time to start diving into how to fix it.
If you're reading this article, chances are that you have a sales history.
After all, why else would you be reading an article about how to reboot your Etsy store if there was nothing to reboot?
All joking aside, since we have a sales history, we have a ton of valuable data to work with.
This will be the key to figuring out our foundation to build our evergreen sales for the future.
Our goal here is to find a niche based on the products that we have sold previously.
This method should work regardless of which of the two main mistakes( or if you committed another mistake not mentioned above) cause your sales to drop, to begin with.
All you need to do in this stage. Just take a look at the products you've sold previously and figure out which niche was most served by them.
For example, if you were selling a wide variety of mugs to different markets, and noticed that a large portion of your sales came from people buying fishing-related mugs, that's a great potential niche for you to dive into.
The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!Step #2 Product and Niche Research
Once you've identified a few potential inches, you'll want to go through the niche validation process and then decide if you'd like to run a store in that niche for the long term.
As you're going through this process, you should have two main goals.
The first thing you should be doing is verifying that the niche is big enough to support your income goals.
If it is, then move directly into the product research phase.
If it's not, then you want to do a little bit of research on related niches, to see if there are any closer related images that your customers would consider to be the same thing.
After you finalized your niche, you'll want to identify a minimum of three to five existing products that are selling regularly ( we shoot for at least one sale per day) and are fairly easy for you to create and launch.
Step #3 Product Design and Launch
Now that you've spent the time to choose your niche and found a few evergreen products, step 3 is to take the design to design and launch all of the products you identified in step two.
There are two main reasons we want to try and launch these products before we do anything else.
The first and most obvious reason is that we want to try to get ranked in Etsy search and have the ability to bring in sales as we work our way through the rest of the revival process.
These products will serve as our foundation moving forward and we want to have them launched before going through the rest of this process.
Step #4 Re-Brand
Next, you want to take the time to rebrand your store.
This means you'll be creating a new banner, logo, announcement, about section, and even recategorizing any of the remaining products that you have in a way that will appeal directly to your niche.
Additionally, if you have a generic store name like ” Leon's cool products” now is the time to consider changing your name to something more niche specific.
Step #5 Leverage Existing Designs To Scale Up Products
Once you've completed the rebranding process, it's time to start scaling up the number of products in your store.
Use the foundational products you created back in step three, as well as the existing designs and other popular products in your niche to add products consistently. Consistently.
The thing most Etsy sellers miss is that when we refer to launching new products, we don't just mean new designs.
For example, when you were looking back at your sales history and identifying products that were selling well previously, or you found a design or two that sold well on a specific product type, like a t-shirt.
In this stage of the reboot process, feel free to take any design that has sold well for you on one product type and repurpose that same design for other products.
One of the easiest ways to add products to your store, grab Etsy real estate, and increase sales, is by taking designs that sell well on one product type and adding them to another product type.
We've had a lot of success taking things that sold well on t-shirts or pillows, and moving that same design over to blankets and a variety of other things.
Step #6 “Grand Opening”
Now that you've gone through the rebrand and added a variety of new products to your store, it's time for your grand opening.
This should consist of two parts.
The first is to run a 5 to 7-day sale using the Etsy promotions feature inside of your marketing tab.
This will alert your previous customers, people who have favorited your products, and a variety of other people who may be interested in what you're selling and drive you a bunch of highly qualified traffic.
In addition to this, consider turning on the ads to drive traffic to your store.
This is one of the most overlooked features of the Etsy platform and you can change amazing results even by spending only a few dollars a day (we typically spend about $5).
The most important thing to remember here is that we can play the. “If you build it, they will come” game, but the real secret to getting traffic and sales on Etsy is to have existing traffic and sales.
Running an etsy promotion and enabling as he adds, allows us to massively shortcut this process and boost our sales quickly.
Step #7 Stay Active!
The last step I would take to reboot an Etsy shop is to stay active.
Although creating products that sell on an evergreen basis is indeed a great way to build your foundation and ensure much more consistent income than you had previously, you still need to keep your store active.
Set aside a little bit of time each week for new product ideas and a few minutes each day to respond to any customer service issues that arise.
This not only will ensure that we continue to get Etsy love (check out what happened when we launched 30 products in 30 days), but it also helps to make sure that any customers we do have an amazing experience and are likely to come back again in the future.
A Quick Recap
As I discussed above, even if the reason your sales have slowed down doesn't fall into one of the two main categories we discussed, this simple seven-step plan is a great way to reboot your sales.
Spend the time to figure out what worked for you in the past, identify a niche that you wouldn't mind serving in the future, and build a solid foundation.
Once that's done, your job becomes much easier and is a matter of consistently creating new products, and driving traffic to your existing listings.
Chris Shaffer
Chris lives at the intersection of business strategy and growth tactics. Having consulted with dozens of different businesses (as well as building several of his own), he brings a unique perspective on what's working across the eCommerce world in businesses of all shapes and sizes.The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!