How to boost Etsy sales for your business

Etsy is one of the most lucrative shopping platforms, meaning you can create a highly successful business there if you use it effectively. If you’re struggling to get your Etsy shop off the ground or your sales have started dropping, you likely need to take a look at how you promote your products. 

This guide will show you how to boost your Etsy sales using these five methods:

• Connect your shop to your social media
• Recreate old listings
• Check your recent sales
• Update your Etsy SEO
• Offer free shipping if possible

If you want to learn more about actually starting an Etsy shop, you can do so here.

If your products don’t sell as well as you’d like, one of the first things to consider is that it’s time to update your SEO strategy and choose new keywords for your listings. Keywords are words or phrases that people use to find what they’re looking for. 

The simplest way to update your SEO keywords is to do a simple search on Etsy and see what competing items come up. Make a note of the terms that these listings use and copy them to your ads (if they apply, of course). Also, go through your own product ads with a critical eye and ask yourself: “do people really use these terms when searching for products like this one?” If not, update your keywords to something more relevant. 

When figuring out how to boost your Etsy sales using SEO, you need to think about who is likely to buy your products and how they’re likely to use them. Also, consider when customers will use your products, why they need them, and how they will improve their lives. This is part of defining your target audience, which you can learn about here.

With 3.78 billion social media users across the globe, it’s one of the most effective methods you can use to generate more sales. You can give your Etsy sales a boost by linking your shop to your social media accounts, both private and business ones. Simply adding your shop handles to your profile bio to help people find it easily can help you bring more visitors to your shop.

You also want to use social media to promote your shop to your target audience. Share valuable tips with your followers, join groups, start conversations, and engage with other users to build your reputation as an expert in your field. At the same time, you’ll drive more traffic to your site and make your shop more visible on Etsy.

Etsy determines how interesting an item is to buyers by looking at how well the listing converts, in other words, how many people make a purchase after viewing it. More conversions mean a higher quality score, which boosts that item’s placement in search results.

In practice, this means that you’ll have the highest chance of selling products similar to ones already popular. Take a look at your recent sales and check which items have performed better. You can access your sales stats by logging into your account and clicking on ‘Shop Manager’, then ‘Stats’.  

Once you identify which products are most popular with your customers, draw inspiration from them to create similar products.

One way you can use popular items to boost your sales on Etsy is to create the same items in different colours, sizes, or materials. Selling the same items with different looks gives consumers more options, which can help you close more sales.

When looking at how to boost your Etsy sales, you can also go through your old, less popular listings and see if you can spice them up a bit to make them more relevant and appealing. For example, you take new photographs of old ads and update the description to give them a new, fresh look. Recreating old listings can help you get a higher quality score so more people see your products when browsing Etsy. 

Another example is to adjust your ads according to seasons or events. For example, if Mother’s Day is coming up, add something like “Mother’s Day Gift” to the title. You can do the same for Christmas, Easter, Bonfire Night and so on. 

Did you know that 61% of shoppers leave a webshop because the delivery charge is too high? In addition, almost 47% of consumers in the UK alone are more likely to buy from brands that offer free shipping.

This means that you can boost your Etsy sales by adding free shipping to your listings. If you can add the shipping cost to the item price without bringing it up too much, that’s excellent. That said, even if you need to increase your prices a little, customers are still more likely to buy the items when they see the shipping is free. 

You can take this tactic one step further by offering a discount for abandoned carts, which is when someone adds your products to their shopping carts without completing the purchase. Etsy has a feature where you can send a coupon code to a person who is about to abandon their shopping cart. Even though you’ll lose a small percentage of the price, a discounted sale is better than no sale. 

If you figure out how to boost your Etsy sales, you’ll soon get lots of new income that you need to manage and record. Financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed, so you need a system that helps make the process easier. Thousands of small business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is a two-in-one business current account and accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. Accept payments, capture receipts, receive cash flow insights, view profit and loss statements, and file your tax returns easily with this clever app. Using it will free up time that you can spend on doing what you do best instead.

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.