reviving my etsy shop

To be brutally honest, I never paid much attention to my Etsy shop.  It's there if people buy stuff, that's cool.  I might go through a phase once or twice a year where I take more photos and list stuff, but over the last 13 years, the number of hours I've put into improving my shop is pitiful.  Until this year, most of my sales have been wholesale, but with the uncertainty ahead and being stuck at home on the farm, I finally had the time and the need to increase my Etsy sales.

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​Before this year, with a handful of visitors a day and even fewer items, my conversion rate was pretty high at over 4% (Etsy average is about 1%).  The interesting thing is that most of my visitors have no idea what Etsy is (I know this because they sometimes phone me up for instructions on how to buy stuff online and we just end up with them sending me a cheque).  Made even worse, is I fell afoul of the Etsy search algorithm by not offering free shipping and not doing all the magic to wind the undyeing love of their search engine, Etsy de-listed my shop for about a year.  De-listed means that the shop was still active, but Etsy would not show my products in the search.  But that was fine because I had other things to do and people were still finding my shop.

But now, income is unstable and I really don't like living without a savings buffer.  It is time to take this Etsy thing seriously.

When I decided to focus again on my Etsy shop, I noticed that Etsy was bringing in about 20% of the views with their search.  The Etsy search is a really powerful ally, and if I'm going to turn this into my main income, it's time to make friends with the Etsy Search Engine.

I don't know if any of this is going to work, but here are some of the things I'm trying

• Choose one aspect to improve each week and only spend a week on it (for fear of running into the law of diminishing returns)
  • for the first week, I re-shoot the images for my items to create a unified theme.
  • the next week, I began focusing on the cleaning ebook because I read in the news that people were poising themselves with cleaning products - no, not drinking them - using the toxic chemical to clean and spending more time in the house. I'm rather proud of my little book and I imagine writing an extended edition one day and having it printed... but I'm also feeling what's the point? It's not selling well. Either no one wants it or I'm doing a bad job of marketing it, so why bother making a bigger version? I hope that fine-tuning it to the Etsy customer base might make a difference.
  • soon will be learning what long tail keywords are and how to use them.
  • and so on, working my way through the Seller Handbook.
• Make more products. I'm washing wool like crazy and experimenting with new and exciting products.  They say that a shop won't take off until there are at least 50 products for sale.  Since I have a lot of raw materials on the farm, there are lots of exciting things I can make!
• Being patient. Like wool drying in the sun, a shop takes time to grow. But even knowing this, it is hard to wait and wonder if my work is paying off or making things worse.

Any suggestions or thoughts on how I can win back the Etsy search engine love for my shop, please put them in the comments below.

I'm also investigating kits.  Learning to card, learning to dye, learning to spin... if any of this catches your fancy, please tell me below.