1 Year Realistic Results Selling Digital Products on Etsy 💸 full breakdown & top tips for beginners

honestly I can't believe it has been exactly one whole year on Etsy and I'm so excited to make this video because I feel like I've been waiting to make this video for a really long time because it's super interesting what happened over the past year and I'm also going to share some tips that I have if you are also trying to start an Etsy shop selling digital products for this past year I been tracking everything and every single month I made a monthly update video I'll quickly go over what happened in October because technically it's the 12th month on Etsy but I want this video to be about the entire year on Etsy so last month October was actually really really good I had 30 orders and my conversion rate really improved so it went from 2.5% to 3.5% I didn't do any ads at all and I think definitely the 3.5% conversion rate is because I have been redoing all my listing photos to make them better and also because Etsy changed the dimensions thing to a square crop so I've been changing that but then also just like revamping all the listing photos I'm actually still not done but the majority of the listing photos are done October was quite good and I also think maybe like October like people are getting back into things and spending more money so maybe that's another reason why net profit was $290 Canadian the money I received in the bank was $334 and I paid $60 USD oh yeah I have not posted a listing for 3 months and and that's because I was mainly focusing on redoing all the listing photos but I do have things in the pipeline new things that I'm going to post so for looking at the onee results total number of listings 64 you know I thought I could get to at least 100 but honestly you know sometimes life happens or suddenly you realize you need to change all your listing photos so I have 64 listings visits was 10,000 visits my average conversion rate was 2.9 but also when I was experimenting with ads earlier this year it really made my conversion rate drop like my lowest was 1.8% so yeah with the ad strategy that I use like honestly I'm not really sure about ads still like I haven't really found a good strategy or I don't know maybe it's like my Niche oh yeah by the way my Niche is canva templates for a specific kind of business owner the total items I sold were 307 that's pretty cool my Revenue was 4,700 I spent 400 something on ads I made about 600 something my ad conversion rate was 3.43 this I just took the sum of all the conversion rates and I divided by the number of months that I did ads which was 9 months and then my net profit according to Etsy so basically I just added up all these numbers it was 3,434 the actual money I received in the bank was 3,400 something so just pretty similar and then I spent almost $5 $500 on Outsourcing my actual profit so what is the actual profit so what I did was I took the actual money I received in the bank minus the money I spent on Outsourcing so my actual profit was almost $3,000 which I don't know like one year of working on Etsy I made $3,000 I mean I think that's a good side hustle it's like good side hustle money but obviously not full-time income I think at the beginning I thought I could make more but also like there was a period of time when I was traveling in Asia where I just didn't have time to make new listings and so over this whole year I made about $3,000 with Etsy which you know I think it's not bad like and it doesn't mean I failed with my Etsy shop I think it was you know actually quite successful I have basically a five-star rating on my Etsy Shop my profit margin so I calculated this by taking the actual profit div divided by the total revenue and my profit margin is 63% considering everything I think that's okay um because I'm selling digital products which means people buy it then they just literally download it I don't have to ship anything if you just take into consideration Etsy fees I think the profit margin would be about 85% but because I spent some money on ads and then I also spent $500 on Outsourcing so that made my actual profit margin go down but like honestly like the Outsourcing it was so worth it because my biggest struggle is like I didn't have time so having my Cana assistant helped me with designing and also redoing listing photos that has saved me a lot of time and I really love having her because she brings fresh ideas like fresh new designs that I wouldn't have come up with by myself if you're wondering like Dena are you trying to make a full-time income on Etsy or not I have always said no like when I started Etsy 1 year ago I thought okay I'm just going to try it out if I make money that's that's great but YouTube has always been my passion like I love sharing my experiences and my journey with everybody and everything that I've learned so my full-time business is content creation if you're wondering if I'm going to continue with I'm going to answer that the end of the video but first I want to share some key learnings about starting an SCS shop okay the first one is it's best if you start a shop in a niche that you already have experience in I know I always talk about having a good Niche all the time but honestly I think the niche is probably the most important thing because it's going to determine a lot of other things like how much competition how much time you're spending researching on things when you have a good Niche and especially if you have already some experience in that Niche like maybe you've worked in that niche in your 9-to-5 job or you're just really interested in that Niche and you like read stuff on that Niche anyways you don't need to do as much research compared to if you didn't know anything about the niche another thing is is if you are the actual customer of the products that you are creating it is way easier to come up with the product designs because you're literally the one using it and the other thing is if you already know the niche you know that there are some products that you know the general public doesn't even know about but you know that these products are needed in the niche for example I was just brainstorming Etsy ideas with one of my friends he does photography and stuff and I didn't even know that what are they called posing like digital cards which is kind of cool posing digital cards yeah so like like some people will look up you know posing photographers will look like posing templates like some prompts they could use for their couples I'm not a photographer so I didn't even know that was a thing but he's a photographer so he knows that that is a thing that photographers actually use with their clients and so that's something that he could totally make and he could totally sell it's also something that he could potentially use himself if you want to know how competitive your Niche is there are a couple of market research tools that you can use and this year one of my favorites that I've been using is everb and they also have a Google Chrome ext