Never Do These 4 Things On Etsy! | 4 Mistakes To Avoid When Selling On Etsy

if you want to find out what mistakes to avoid at all costs when selling on etsy then just keep watching [Music] [Applause] welcome back to my channel friends if you're new here i'm kate i'm a wife mom etsy seller and business coach and my goal on this channel is to share with you guys what i've learned in my past six years of selling on etsy and the strategies that i've used to bring my shop to six figures so in addition to sharing tips on what you should be doing on etsy it's important that i let you in on the things that you shouldn't be doing so in today's video i'm gonna be sharing the top four mistakes that i see so many etsy sellers making and how you can avoid them but first let's take a quick moment for our etsy shop shout out congratulations to angered accents co thanks for being a part of our channel family make sure to comment down below for a chance for your etsy shop to be featured on our next video all right let's go ahead and dive into the first of the four things that you should never do on etsy number one is never put your shop in vacation mode if you've never heard of it vacation mode on etsy is something that you can turn on for your etsy shop when you're either on vacation or you have an emergency come up and you need a little break from the sales coming in so what turning on vacation mode actually means for your shop is that you will no longer appear in the search at all someone can find your shop if they search for it specifically by its name but if they're just searching for a certain item it won't appear in the search it won't rank at all people will not be able to add items to their cart even if they find their way to your shop because the add to cart section will be grayed out therefore meaning that people will no longer be able to purchase anything from your shop as long as it's on vacation mode sometimes etsy sellers will turn on vacation mode if they're feeling really overwhelmed and they just need a break or they want to stall their orders for a little bit to catch up it sounds like a good option right but in reality the problem comes in when you return and you take your shop off of vacation mode you'll realize that your listings have been knocked way down in search you may no longer be ranking on the first or second page if you were before and actually i've heard many stories of sellers whose shops pretty much died they were brought to a point where they were unrecoverable so i would recommend that you think long and hard before putting your shop on vacation mode the reason for this is because etsy works off of momentum we've talked about this a little bit in our previous videos but the momentum of making continuous and steady sales is what boosts your listing's quality score and helps you to rank higher in search being more easily found when people are searching for your niche or your product category and every time you make another sale it just boosts it again and again so you want to have that ongoing momentum and when you put your shop in vacation mode it completely halts that completely stalls it so that when you come back your momentum is gone and it's like starting all over so this is the reason that we've actually never put either of our shops on vacation mode and hope to never have to and i would really recommend that you only use the vacation mode as a very last resort like emergency situation some things that you can do if you're getting overwhelmed and you do feel like you need a break is to extend your processing time so that you have a longer period of time to space out filling your orders or to even raise your prices a little bit that will slow down your sales naturally and you'll be making more profit for sale okay the second thing that you should never do on etsy is never focus on quantity over quality and what i'm talking about here are listings now i want to address some strategies that others have put out that are very outdated and they're not true but i hear people say them all the time there's a strategy that says you need to be listing new items every single day you need to be getting up into the hundreds of listings for your shop you need to be renewing every single item every single day and the people who are teaching these strategies are claiming that by doing all of this extra manual labor every day that it will boost your listings which just isn't true and etsy has even said not to focus on that now i'm not saying that having a lot of listings is bad i'm just saying that you should never sacrifice the quality of your listings for just trying to rush and create all these listings just for the sake of having quantity now here is a more in-depth strategy that i really want you to lean into and get right now so listen to the logic of this etsy lets you have drop down menus for options when you have a listing so what i suggest is if you have similar listings with different options a lot of people would say well let's say you have seven create seven different listings so that you can have more listings out there more chance to be seen etc but i would argue you should create one listing and have all of those different seven variations in the drop down menu on the one listing and the reason for this is that you'll end up getting more sales on that one listing therefore boosting that listing's conversion score and boosting it in the search that it's found more easy it's on the first second third page and the more sales you make on it the higher it ranks if you had put each variation up as a separate listing and you had seven different listings then in essence you're splitting the total sales that item could make between seven different listings and each one has a lower total of sales not optimizing the opportunity of having all the sales focused on one listing to really boost that one listing so to give you an example of this if i offered a bracelet in red white black and blue i wouldn't need to do a separate listing like one for the red bracelet one for the black bracelet one for the blue bracelet etc i would just do one listing for that bracelet and have all of those color options listed in the drop down menu therefore all the sales no matter who's buying a red one who's buying a black one who's buying a blue one they would all purchase through that listing now don't get me wrong you do need a healthy amount to start but i would suggest to start off your shop shoot for 12 to 15 listings and then grow as you go making sure that every listing you put up is a quality listing and has good photography you take the time to research seo and what it should be titled that's what makes it really good quality and then as you go you can build up to 40 or 50 listings you don't need hundreds upon hundreds of listings in your shop okay friends we're about to dive into mistakes number three and four but first if you haven't subscribed to our channel yet we would love for you to do so just click the little subscribe button and 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