How to Successfully Sell Woodworking Projects On Etsy
In the video below l discuss how to make money selling your woodworking projects on Etsy. I will tell you my experience with selling on Etsy and how i have been able to get consistent sales using these methods.
Etsy sales were nearly 5 billion dollars in 2019! There are over 40 million people shopping on Etsy and 40% of buyers are repeat customers. They keep coming back for handmade products!
Before selling on Etsy you have to research your product. Try to find your place. What makes your product special. Provide a unique product that will help you stand out from the crowd. There are 2.5 million sellers on Etsy, so competition can be high for certain products. You have to make yourself noticed by providing a unique product.
Getting started:.
Shop name. This may not seem very important, but your shop name sets the tone of what you’re selling. If your shop is JohnDoe123, nobody will have a clue what you’re selling. If it’s 731 Cutting Boards, that gives the shopper a good idea of what’s going to be in that store. Picking a name that fits your niche is a good start to setting up an Etsy Shop.
Pictures: I cannot stress enough the importance of good pictures. Pictures are what will draw the customer to your product. If you’re product blends in with the rest of the listings, the customer will scroll right past and never even look at your listing. Make sure you post 10 pictures of every single product. That’s the max Etsy allows you to post. Choose your best picture as your key photo. Take photos from several different angles, stage your item so that it looks like it is in use. Remember in this video how much I stressed that staging will sell your item! Take professional looking pictures. No matter how good your product is, If the pictures aren’t good, it won’t sell.
Titles: Good titles are a must! Etsy is a search engine. Title your items in a way they can be found by the customers who are looking for your products. Make your titles very specific. Think about how you would search for the item. Ask family and friends exactly what terms they would search to find that item. For instance, if you have a walnut and cherry cutting board with a drip groove and chamfered edges, you might title your product with all of those descriptors.
Description. If people click on your item and then click to read the description, they are interested. Write a good detailed description about your product and include your creative process. Customers on Etsy are looking for handmade items. Describe briefly your process for making your item. Tell the customer what materials you used. Tell a story about your product and how it was made.
About page. The about page of your shop is there for you to tell your story. What makes your products better/unique? What makes you, you? Remember what I said in the How To Sell Woodworking Projects video, people will do business with people they know (or feel like they know). The about page is where your customers get to know you.
Inventory: How on earth do you have inventory of a product that is made to orders. Well, in reality you can’t. But on Etsy, in the inventory box I keep them in stock! I try to keep no more than three inventory items per listing. When the item sells down to one, I put it back to three. This does a couple of things for your shop. It shows Etsy that there is activity on your account. Etsy likes active stores! It also can add a little urgency to your customer. When I customer adds a product to their cart they can see how many others have the same item in their cart. So if you only have three of those items in stock and five others have it in their cart, they are more likely to impulse buy for fear of missing out.
Add Products: Expand your inventory on your Etsy shop as often as possible. When you post a new item, Etsy gives your shop a small boost in search (they’ve said this in their postings). What I do when someone requests a custom color or shaped item, I take ten good pictures of that item before boxing it up and shipping. Create a new listing with that product. If creating new listings isn’t possible, look at your lowest selling items and revise them. Change the titles, descriptions, and tags. Don’t change things too often though. It takes a couple of weeks for the Etsy algorithm to log everything and to start showing up in the searches. Stay active in your shop.
Store theme. Make sure you’re not all over the place with your inventory. Etsy customers are shopping for specific handmade items. They aren’t going to WalMart for a one stop shop of all things. Make sure your shop has a focus. If your shop is selling woodworking products but also selling T-shirts, thermometers and painted rocks, it won’t be successful. Focus on a niche. If you have totally separate niche of items you want to sell, open a different Etsy shop for those items.
Marketing: Market your products on social media. Share your store/listings on your own personal social media accounts. People post pictures all the time of their favorite coffee or food or their tools, etc. Share your products with your friends. You never know who they will share to and you might can gain a customer through that sharing.
Messages: On Etsy you can send and receive messages from your shop. You will get messages as a shop owner from customers wanting custom orders or specific questions about your products. Be responsive to your customers messages. Respond to them as quickly as possible. Don’t let that customer wait all day or two days to hear back from you. Respond as quickly as possible. Etsy has a shop manager app for your phone. Get it. Use it. You can message, change listings, check financials, and more!
Shipping: Shipping through etsy can save you money. I save money using USPS Priority Mail when I print through Etsy. I buy boxes from Walmart and packing supplies from Amazon. Check the video description for links to the shipping supplies I use.
Tags: Etsy allows you to use up to 13 tags per listing. Tags are another way for customers to find your product through search. If you are building cutting boards for Etsy, in the tags of the listing you will describe that cutting board in every way possible. Make sure you use the same terms in your title, tags and description. For instance, that walnut and cherry cutting board you listed, in the tags use “walnut and cherry cutting board” “cherry cutting board” “walnut Cutting board” and so on. Tags should be in phrases. Use tags similar to your keywords. Target long tail keywords (or search phrases). Etsy relies heavily on tags to determine your products relevance to buyers searches. The use of good tags, combined with your title and other attributes will help you rank in their search. If you can get your products to rank high in the Etsy search, you’ll see more customers.
Putting it all together. Your titles, description and tags should all tie into each other. This lets Etsy’s algorithm know what the product is about! Everything will work together to help your product rank higher in the Etsy search. Double and triple check these three attributes to make sure they are working together.
Seller Handbook: Etsy has a seller handbook.. Read through the seller handbook. It gives a lot of good information on the best practices to use to sell your items.
Ads: You don’t have to buy ads on Etsy to make sells. However, when you buy ads, you are essentially buying a spot on the front page of the Etsy search for your product. I spent about $1,500 in ads over a 12 month period. That sounds like a lot of money, but I only spent between $1 and $5 per day. Typically I leave my ads at $3 per day and make consistent sales. I tried it at $5 and couldn’t keep up with the orders and work a full time job. So Etsy ads certainly work for my products.
Off Site Etsy Ads: Etsy implemented off site Ads recently. You don’t have to do anything to be eligible for Etsy’s Offsite Ads. Etsy works with sites like Google and Facebook to promote your listings on their pages. Etsy sends them all listing inventory information on Etsy, including the listings’ descriptions, photos, titles, and more. If a buyer clicks through an Offsite Ad promoting one of your listings and then purchases from your shop within 30 days, that order(s) will be attributed to the ad. You’re only charged when a shopper clicks on an ad for one of your listings and purchases from your shop. If a shopper clicks on an ad for your item but doesn’t make a purchase, you don’t pay a fee.
Avoid these common Etsy mistakes
Don’t jump in without researching your products. Look at other sellers shops in your niche (ones with a lot of reviews are making sales). See how they are listing, describing, and titling their items. Don’t’ copy them, but look to them for inspiration on how to set up your listings. Look at their listings. What draws your attention good/bad. Read their customers reviews and see what they liked/didn’t like. Plan accordingly.
Don’t write basic, impersonal descriptions. Create a detailed description that makes a personal connection with your customer. Etsy buyers are searching for hand made items. Give a short description of the creative process on how your items is made.
Don’t make generic products to sell. There are over 90,000 listings of cutting boards on etsy. Find something that either makes you stand out in that crowd or look for other woodworking products with less competition
Don’t leave a product on your store that is not selling. If it’s been up for a couple of months and traffic is slim to none and you don’t have sales on it. Either take different pictures and change the title/description/tags and relist or remove the item from your store. Don’t change your info in your listings too often. It takes time for the algorithm to get everything logged. So if you change something, give it a couple of weeks and see if it made a difference. But Etsy likes active shop owners.
ERANK and Marmalead are good websites to use to help you optimize your listings. I’ve used the free versions of both of these. Both have a paid version that opens up more features. I’ve never paid for either of them.
Power TIP. Pinterest. Pinterest drives more traffic to my Etsy shop and website than any other social media platform out there. Pinterest is photo driven. You can go to your etsy store and “Pin” your pictures from your Etsy listings into Pinterest (see video). I highly recommend using Pinterest to drive interest to your Etsy shop. It has worked very well for me!
Be sure to check out Etsy.com for their policies you have to follow to sell on their platform.