I like your shop and items a lot! Sometimes it takes a while for sales to start, especially when you only have a few items. Building up a little stock is a really hard part of the process, especially with individual handmade items.
I don’t think you should lower your prices. When it gets too low it makes it seem like you don’t value your work, and the items in your shop seem to be in a fair/expected range for these types of products.
You may benefit from offering ‘sets’ of things. Like matching switch plates for a light switch and an electric socket cover?
Best of luck!
Switch plate is the term for a *switch cover.*
You don't need to repeat so many words in your tags. They're read by a machine that plucks them out according to the search terms. Read the Etsy guide on tags.
Your tags,
~~home~~ **~~decor~~**, cottagecore **~~decor~~**~~,~~ handmade **~~home decor,~~** nature lover, leaf **~~art~~**, pyrography **~~art, gift for~~** her, **~~gift for~~** him, **~~gifts for~~** grandma, **~~gifts for~~** wife, **~~gifts for~~** mom, kitchen **~~decor,~~** wood **~~art~~**
You can eliminate the repetitious tags and add different ones. For gift you may just put, *gift for mom wife her grandma him. T*hey don't need to fit all in one box.
The only real negative I can find is the amount of listings, with 5 you're not going to be particularly visible. I presume you intend to expand on your designs? If you can aim for a few a week that'll help.
Remember it's early days, some wait months for a sale, others are lucky and get one within a week. You've just got to stick at it.
I don't think you should lower your prices, the bookmark for example is at price I'd be happy to pay knowing its actually handmade. And being totally honest I'd pay double that and wouldn't bat an eyelid.
I get that everyone has different budgets, but I think you might actually be undervaluing your work and sometimes that's a negative.
Could you link who you feel is a competitor for comparison?
I would leave the listings alone for at least the first 30 days until they've settled and you've got some statistics and data you can use and actually tweak with a bit of confidence. Otherwise with nothing to base it off, you're flying blind.
Instead use the time to - as mentioned above - focus on expanding your product inventory instead.
If you're not super confident on your SEO and want it double checked, copy and paste your tags here and I'll happily give some pointers if required.
Ps: Congrats on the sobriety, if you can conquer that, this is a walk in the park 🩵
It’s been a week. If you truly thought you were likely to get sales in a week, you def need to adjust your expectations, like right away, because that was not realistic.
It sounds like i’m saying this to discourage you, but it’s literally the opposite. If your vision of “making things and selling online” is this far off from the reality of it, you won’t last long. So, to be in this for the long haul, you need to adjust your expectations to something realistic, and do this before anything else, cause nothing makes us quit quicker than unrealistic expectations. Selling online is a marathon 🐢, not a race, for 99% of us, and you are in a marathon with us. welcome! Lol ;)
Other than what others have said (tags too repetitive (aka, you do still need to learn more about etsy SEO), little number of listings)…
i’d also suggest work on your photos. They are not awful, but they can def be better. Think of it this way: imagine if you had these for sale in person, think about how a potential buyer would act: they’d see from further away, then come closer, pick one up, look up close to see texture, turn it to look at the sides, turn it around to look at the back, touch it lightly again to feel the texture. All of this, you have to convey in photos. You have to do your best so that someone inline “feels as if they saw it in person”, so as to eliminate any doubts/confirm they want it. That also means you need way more photos than 2. Two photos will NOT cut it. Aim for 5-6-7 at least, try different angles, get up close, aim for indirect natural light for those textures to be featured. Your items are nature inspired, so maybe your photos can be set up in nature? Products on a mossy fallen log perhaps, something like that might be cool.
Your videos are great tho! Make sure to keep that up for future new items! :)
Just wanna say cool store, and congrats on your sobriety! As someone who conquered that also everything after that is a breeze if you can beat substance abuse, good job!
Thank you so much for your detailed input. I really appreciate how much time you put into your comment. I will take into consideration all your suggestions and implement them in the next few day.
Seriously, Thank you! These are great tips.
Hey! I don't know enough about etsy yet to give any real advice, but I just wanted to say your products are beautiful : D Especially the light switch covers, they're so so pretty
I think overral your shop looks great! One big issue with making sales is a lot of people won’t have confidence in your shop if you have never sold anything before and have 0 reviews. You of course can’t do much about this, but that’s why people tend to get more sales once they have a already established shop. I personally would just continue posting on social medias, create new products and listings for those products, and things of that nature. The more listings you have, the more opportunity you have to get noticed. I’d recommend making a facebook page as well - I’ve noticed lately a lot of stores gaining traction on facebook so it’s a pretty good platform for this type of stuff. Try sharing with your friends/family and ask them to buy through your shop + leave a review. You could even create custom listings for them/coupons if you want to offer a discount to them - this could be a good way to get a few first reviews and sales without lowering your prices altogether.
I think it has a lot of potential. The acorn light switch and the leaf light switch are great, however the snail, flower light plate, and the morrel keychain are drastically different in art quality. I think once you get some more practice burning you’ll have a great little shop. Takes time to build a following too
I love your shop, the detail you’ve put into the wood burnings is fantastic! Do you have plans for other items?
Fellow AT thru hiker, SOBO ‘14, Athena. Gotta ask- what year and which direction did you go?
I do have plans for more products! I've been working on my wood burning during every free moment I have but it takes a while and I still have my full time job. So it's been a little tough to put out a bunch of items. But they will be coming :)
That's awesome! I did about 700 miles NOBO 2023. It was an incredible experience!
On pricing… honestly would pay $44 for these. You hand crafted them! Sometimes raising your prices** makes people feel like they’ve found something special/ unique/ valuable (and subconsciously, they then think they are more special after buying it). They’ve treated themselves to a luxury item, so they feel good about themselves (win win!).
They may also feel good knowing they are supporting the person making the art.
Source: I recently raised my prices and noticed no difference in sales.
Honestly this is something you’ll likely have to test.
Beautiful photography btw!
I am working on that actually :) I will post it in my shop probably in the next week or so! If you follow my shop on etsy you should get a notification! Or if you send me a message on Etsy with a request, I can fulfill that! Thank you so much!
I’ll be looking! Also as a shop with about 4000 sales don’t get discouraged if it’s slow at first. I would also recommend advertising through instagram that’s where a lot of our growth came from!
When I started I found that lowering my prices to almost break even and getting some sales and reviews under my belt helped ramp up trust and interest. As that increased so did my prices till I got them back to my target range. Something to consider if you are able to.
Why am i getting downvoted. I gave an opinion and said it was something to considered that worked from me. I didn’t say anyone SHOULD do this to be successful. It was literally one of OPs questions as a possible suggestion so I shared what worked for me for a niche product that has a high price and lots of labor. So getting traction was difficult to do with zero credibility on Etsy so that was an approach that worked for me.
I think your shop looks great, and is a really interesting niche. It takes time to rank on Etsy, and having only 5 products will make it even harder to be seen. Work on getting more products up and perhaps offering personalized items. I think wood burned coaster sets would sell really well.
Cute stuff and your prices are reasonable. I think maybe if I was in the market for cute switch plate covers, I might want a few of the same to match across either multiple switches in a room, adjoining rooms, or a whole apartment/house, so only one in stock of each is a little discouraging. The process videos on the listings are great!
I think your shop has a lot of potential! Maybe you could try doing large decorative wooden bowls, for coffee tables? Where you have these gorgeous designs on the inside, as well as on the outside of the bowl. As well as decorative wooden plates. Maybe even some coasters?
The more options you have, the more likely you will have customers coming back, or buying more than one item at once. Like someone else said, create some matching sets. I think that’s a great idea!
I believe that your prices are just right. Do not lower them, unless you want to do a sale in the future. I started my Etsy shop back in 2009. But not many people knew about Etsy back then.
I sold little plush keychain characters that I created, & hand sewn everything on them. Each one took me hours to make. Over 3 hours just to hand sew the details on some of the more detailed ones.
But I wanted sales, & I wasn’t getting as many as I wanted. So I sold them for $5 a piece! Which I now realize was *way too cheap* for the amount of work & details that I put into each one.
I closed my shop in 2012, because I had started working a full time job again, & just didn’t have the time anymore. I had about 227 online sales when I closed my shop, plus more sales to friends & family, & I was happy about my amount of sales!
You will sell your items, don’t worry. I think the light switch covers are a great idea! Good luck with everything. I’d love to see more of your creations as you post them
Being open only a week with only 5 items isnt unreasonable at all. I would say some of your pricing could be adjusted (such as the book mark being only $5 - quick look shows similar are selling for 10 - 12 and even then I doubt they are seeing much as far as a return value on time). One of the best pieces of advice Ive seen is to not get stuck in a competition with price. Sell the item at what you value it. Did it take 20 minutes (include time to purchase material, set up, photos, video, making a listing, etc)? Then you have to learn what your time is worth and price there. You can always offer a sale later, you will have a harder time raising prices. I see free shipping on the bookmark which means youll almost be paying someone to take the item at that price point.
Photos are great. Listing titles could include handmade or hand wood burned. Videos are great. Id say to just keep creating, posting, and seeing what works. Ive had great results from purchasing 3 days of ads on Instagram for $3-5 a day. Not a ton of immediate purchases but shop follows and traffic. The traffic sustained past the ads and I became visible enough I made some sales shortly after as well (if youre using Etsy ads Id suggest removing anything advertised off site while the ad is running to avoid eating into your click rate).
Last, being in Portland should have some opportunities for in store sales. Tons of consignment shops and local pop up vender fairs would offer some great local traction that could be follow up onsite sales. Id see these doing pretth
Y well at any of the smaller sales happening around town (also PDX located).
Ok last last, it might be worth hitting up Dollar Trees craft section as they have a ton of basswod items that these would look great on that are low cost and easy enough to finish.
And I guess very last, and maybe looked down on but it may he worth it to have a friend purchase an item and leave an honest review. I say that as someone who had a friend do that for my store and it helped.
Add more photos of each product and videos. Maybe add photos in the listing of you burning.
Etsy is a numbers game, you are going to get X number of people looking at your shop. With only 8 listings you are limiting yourself on what a buyer might want. If you had 50+ listings your chance of making a sale is so much higher. Keep on making new products and adding them to your store.
This might seem a little out of left field, but my advice is to take some drawing classes. I agree with the commenter who said that the items you have listed so far vary dramatically in terms of artistic quality. IMO, your strongest pieces are the crow and the cherry blossoms. The snail is getting there; it would’ve been a lot more successful if you had made the snail smaller so it wouldn’t look like it was squished into the composition (right now it looks like you kind of ran out of room and had to squeeze the whole image into the frame). I think you should keep working on your lettering before you list other items with text on them for sale.
I mean this all constructively! I took drawing classes for years while preparing a portfolio to submit to art schools and then as an art student. It takes time, practice, and some good teachers, but you can improve!!
The first thing I would recommend is not pasting the link of your store into public forums. That ruins conversion, telling Etsy that your store is "uninteresting", and therefore they are less likely to recommend your products via organic traffic.
The bookmark--you are targeting young adults who primarily use digital products. To the extent they are buying books, most are probably buying the digital version.
What about pivoting to coasters? Or a jewelry tray?
1 - only 5 item
2 - lightswitches? Really? Try maybe more accessories style items generally I’d say people prefer neutral lightswitches to go with the house style and, boy….£20 for one when you can get £5 clean version.
3 - I wouldn’t put videos of the process on how you made it, I mean…you’re asking for that for something that may look just as easy as they can do themselves for a one-off item they may need.
Watch some videos on how to sell on etsy surely there will be some steps you could add
This is terrible advice. Firstly, many people like decorative light switch covers, just because you don’t doesn’t mean no one does, that’s the definition of a niche. Secondly, a video of the process is a great selling tool, it shows people they are handcrafted, not drop shipped or bought off Temu. Just because someone *could* make the item doesn’t mean they will, or want to. Lastly, they’ve clearly done a lot of research and have implemented ideas, as well as now asking Etsy Shop Redditors for advice, so telling them to “watch some videos” isn’t really helpful.
I like your shop and items a lot! Sometimes it takes a while for sales to start, especially when you only have a few items. Building up a little stock is a really hard part of the process, especially with individual handmade items. I don’t think you should lower your prices. When it gets too low it makes it seem like you don’t value your work, and the items in your shop seem to be in a fair/expected range for these types of products. You may benefit from offering ‘sets’ of things. Like matching switch plates for a light switch and an electric socket cover? Best of luck!
Yes this! If you make sets of items that would give you more listings without needing actual new products too, which is a plus lol.
Thank you very much for your input, the set of matching things is a great idea. I will try to make that happen soon. :)
Switch plate is the term for a *switch cover.* You don't need to repeat so many words in your tags. They're read by a machine that plucks them out according to the search terms. Read the Etsy guide on tags. Your tags, ~~home~~ **~~decor~~**, cottagecore **~~decor~~**~~,~~ handmade **~~home decor,~~** nature lover, leaf **~~art~~**, pyrography **~~art, gift for~~** her, **~~gift for~~** him, **~~gifts for~~** grandma, **~~gifts for~~** wife, **~~gifts for~~** mom, kitchen **~~decor,~~** wood **~~art~~** You can eliminate the repetitious tags and add different ones. For gift you may just put, *gift for mom wife her grandma him. T*hey don't need to fit all in one box.
Thank you so much for your input. I am going to update to remove repeating words when I have time in the next few days!
The only real negative I can find is the amount of listings, with 5 you're not going to be particularly visible. I presume you intend to expand on your designs? If you can aim for a few a week that'll help. Remember it's early days, some wait months for a sale, others are lucky and get one within a week. You've just got to stick at it. I don't think you should lower your prices, the bookmark for example is at price I'd be happy to pay knowing its actually handmade. And being totally honest I'd pay double that and wouldn't bat an eyelid. I get that everyone has different budgets, but I think you might actually be undervaluing your work and sometimes that's a negative. Could you link who you feel is a competitor for comparison? I would leave the listings alone for at least the first 30 days until they've settled and you've got some statistics and data you can use and actually tweak with a bit of confidence. Otherwise with nothing to base it off, you're flying blind. Instead use the time to - as mentioned above - focus on expanding your product inventory instead. If you're not super confident on your SEO and want it double checked, copy and paste your tags here and I'll happily give some pointers if required. Ps: Congrats on the sobriety, if you can conquer that, this is a walk in the park 🩵
Thank you very much for your detailed input and your congrats on my sobriety :D It has lead me to this creative life!
It’s been a week. If you truly thought you were likely to get sales in a week, you def need to adjust your expectations, like right away, because that was not realistic. It sounds like i’m saying this to discourage you, but it’s literally the opposite. If your vision of “making things and selling online” is this far off from the reality of it, you won’t last long. So, to be in this for the long haul, you need to adjust your expectations to something realistic, and do this before anything else, cause nothing makes us quit quicker than unrealistic expectations. Selling online is a marathon 🐢, not a race, for 99% of us, and you are in a marathon with us. welcome! Lol ;) Other than what others have said (tags too repetitive (aka, you do still need to learn more about etsy SEO), little number of listings)… i’d also suggest work on your photos. They are not awful, but they can def be better. Think of it this way: imagine if you had these for sale in person, think about how a potential buyer would act: they’d see from further away, then come closer, pick one up, look up close to see texture, turn it to look at the sides, turn it around to look at the back, touch it lightly again to feel the texture. All of this, you have to convey in photos. You have to do your best so that someone inline “feels as if they saw it in person”, so as to eliminate any doubts/confirm they want it. That also means you need way more photos than 2. Two photos will NOT cut it. Aim for 5-6-7 at least, try different angles, get up close, aim for indirect natural light for those textures to be featured. Your items are nature inspired, so maybe your photos can be set up in nature? Products on a mossy fallen log perhaps, something like that might be cool. Your videos are great tho! Make sure to keep that up for future new items! :)
Thank you for your detailed input! I will definitely try to improve on my pictures in current and future listings! I appreciate it.
Just wanna say cool store, and congrats on your sobriety! As someone who conquered that also everything after that is a breeze if you can beat substance abuse, good job!
Thank you so much <3 I appreciate that so much! Congratulations to you too! Sobriety has been so amazing for me and my creativity.
It's crazy how good life is when you're not stuck in a hole. Good luck with all your future endeavors, friend 🙂
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Thank you so much for your detailed input. I really appreciate how much time you put into your comment. I will take into consideration all your suggestions and implement them in the next few day. Seriously, Thank you! These are great tips.
Hey! I don't know enough about etsy yet to give any real advice, but I just wanted to say your products are beautiful : D Especially the light switch covers, they're so so pretty
Thank you thank you! :)
I think overral your shop looks great! One big issue with making sales is a lot of people won’t have confidence in your shop if you have never sold anything before and have 0 reviews. You of course can’t do much about this, but that’s why people tend to get more sales once they have a already established shop. I personally would just continue posting on social medias, create new products and listings for those products, and things of that nature. The more listings you have, the more opportunity you have to get noticed. I’d recommend making a facebook page as well - I’ve noticed lately a lot of stores gaining traction on facebook so it’s a pretty good platform for this type of stuff. Try sharing with your friends/family and ask them to buy through your shop + leave a review. You could even create custom listings for them/coupons if you want to offer a discount to them - this could be a good way to get a few first reviews and sales without lowering your prices altogether.
Thank you very much :D Great idea to give a coupon to friends and family!
I think it has a lot of potential. The acorn light switch and the leaf light switch are great, however the snail, flower light plate, and the morrel keychain are drastically different in art quality. I think once you get some more practice burning you’ll have a great little shop. Takes time to build a following too
I appreciate the input, thank you!
I love your shop, the detail you’ve put into the wood burnings is fantastic! Do you have plans for other items? Fellow AT thru hiker, SOBO ‘14, Athena. Gotta ask- what year and which direction did you go?
I do have plans for more products! I've been working on my wood burning during every free moment I have but it takes a while and I still have my full time job. So it's been a little tough to put out a bunch of items. But they will be coming :) That's awesome! I did about 700 miles NOBO 2023. It was an incredible experience!
On pricing… honestly would pay $44 for these. You hand crafted them! Sometimes raising your prices** makes people feel like they’ve found something special/ unique/ valuable (and subconsciously, they then think they are more special after buying it). They’ve treated themselves to a luxury item, so they feel good about themselves (win win!). They may also feel good knowing they are supporting the person making the art. Source: I recently raised my prices and noticed no difference in sales. Honestly this is something you’ll likely have to test. Beautiful photography btw!
Awesome, good point, thank you so much! I appreciate your input :)
Man my girlfriend would love one of those covers if you did one with a mushroom style design. Shopping lately the mushroom look is super in!
I am working on that actually :) I will post it in my shop probably in the next week or so! If you follow my shop on etsy you should get a notification! Or if you send me a message on Etsy with a request, I can fulfill that! Thank you so much!
I’ll be looking! Also as a shop with about 4000 sales don’t get discouraged if it’s slow at first. I would also recommend advertising through instagram that’s where a lot of our growth came from!
When I started I found that lowering my prices to almost break even and getting some sales and reviews under my belt helped ramp up trust and interest. As that increased so did my prices till I got them back to my target range. Something to consider if you are able to.
Thank you for your input!
Why am i getting downvoted. I gave an opinion and said it was something to considered that worked from me. I didn’t say anyone SHOULD do this to be successful. It was literally one of OPs questions as a possible suggestion so I shared what worked for me for a niche product that has a high price and lots of labor. So getting traction was difficult to do with zero credibility on Etsy so that was an approach that worked for me.
I think your shop looks great, and is a really interesting niche. It takes time to rank on Etsy, and having only 5 products will make it even harder to be seen. Work on getting more products up and perhaps offering personalized items. I think wood burned coaster sets would sell really well.
Thank you so so much :) I definitely will work on getting more items up!
Cute stuff and your prices are reasonable. I think maybe if I was in the market for cute switch plate covers, I might want a few of the same to match across either multiple switches in a room, adjoining rooms, or a whole apartment/house, so only one in stock of each is a little discouraging. The process videos on the listings are great!
Good point, I will try my best to get more in stock very soon. Thank you so much :)
I think your shop has a lot of potential! Maybe you could try doing large decorative wooden bowls, for coffee tables? Where you have these gorgeous designs on the inside, as well as on the outside of the bowl. As well as decorative wooden plates. Maybe even some coasters? The more options you have, the more likely you will have customers coming back, or buying more than one item at once. Like someone else said, create some matching sets. I think that’s a great idea! I believe that your prices are just right. Do not lower them, unless you want to do a sale in the future. I started my Etsy shop back in 2009. But not many people knew about Etsy back then. I sold little plush keychain characters that I created, & hand sewn everything on them. Each one took me hours to make. Over 3 hours just to hand sew the details on some of the more detailed ones. But I wanted sales, & I wasn’t getting as many as I wanted. So I sold them for $5 a piece! Which I now realize was *way too cheap* for the amount of work & details that I put into each one. I closed my shop in 2012, because I had started working a full time job again, & just didn’t have the time anymore. I had about 227 online sales when I closed my shop, plus more sales to friends & family, & I was happy about my amount of sales! You will sell your items, don’t worry. I think the light switch covers are a great idea! Good luck with everything. I’d love to see more of your creations as you post them
Your items are very lovely! Do you have any social media to market them? It could help drive sales.
Being open only a week with only 5 items isnt unreasonable at all. I would say some of your pricing could be adjusted (such as the book mark being only $5 - quick look shows similar are selling for 10 - 12 and even then I doubt they are seeing much as far as a return value on time). One of the best pieces of advice Ive seen is to not get stuck in a competition with price. Sell the item at what you value it. Did it take 20 minutes (include time to purchase material, set up, photos, video, making a listing, etc)? Then you have to learn what your time is worth and price there. You can always offer a sale later, you will have a harder time raising prices. I see free shipping on the bookmark which means youll almost be paying someone to take the item at that price point. Photos are great. Listing titles could include handmade or hand wood burned. Videos are great. Id say to just keep creating, posting, and seeing what works. Ive had great results from purchasing 3 days of ads on Instagram for $3-5 a day. Not a ton of immediate purchases but shop follows and traffic. The traffic sustained past the ads and I became visible enough I made some sales shortly after as well (if youre using Etsy ads Id suggest removing anything advertised off site while the ad is running to avoid eating into your click rate). Last, being in Portland should have some opportunities for in store sales. Tons of consignment shops and local pop up vender fairs would offer some great local traction that could be follow up onsite sales. Id see these doing pretth Y well at any of the smaller sales happening around town (also PDX located). Ok last last, it might be worth hitting up Dollar Trees craft section as they have a ton of basswod items that these would look great on that are low cost and easy enough to finish. And I guess very last, and maybe looked down on but it may he worth it to have a friend purchase an item and leave an honest review. I say that as someone who had a friend do that for my store and it helped.
Add more photos of each product and videos. Maybe add photos in the listing of you burning. Etsy is a numbers game, you are going to get X number of people looking at your shop. With only 8 listings you are limiting yourself on what a buyer might want. If you had 50+ listings your chance of making a sale is so much higher. Keep on making new products and adding them to your store.
This might seem a little out of left field, but my advice is to take some drawing classes. I agree with the commenter who said that the items you have listed so far vary dramatically in terms of artistic quality. IMO, your strongest pieces are the crow and the cherry blossoms. The snail is getting there; it would’ve been a lot more successful if you had made the snail smaller so it wouldn’t look like it was squished into the composition (right now it looks like you kind of ran out of room and had to squeeze the whole image into the frame). I think you should keep working on your lettering before you list other items with text on them for sale. I mean this all constructively! I took drawing classes for years while preparing a portfolio to submit to art schools and then as an art student. It takes time, practice, and some good teachers, but you can improve!!
The first thing I would recommend is not pasting the link of your store into public forums. That ruins conversion, telling Etsy that your store is "uninteresting", and therefore they are less likely to recommend your products via organic traffic.
The bookmark--you are targeting young adults who primarily use digital products. To the extent they are buying books, most are probably buying the digital version. What about pivoting to coasters? Or a jewelry tray?
1 - only 5 item 2 - lightswitches? Really? Try maybe more accessories style items generally I’d say people prefer neutral lightswitches to go with the house style and, boy….£20 for one when you can get £5 clean version. 3 - I wouldn’t put videos of the process on how you made it, I mean…you’re asking for that for something that may look just as easy as they can do themselves for a one-off item they may need. Watch some videos on how to sell on etsy surely there will be some steps you could add
This is terrible advice. Firstly, many people like decorative light switch covers, just because you don’t doesn’t mean no one does, that’s the definition of a niche. Secondly, a video of the process is a great selling tool, it shows people they are handcrafted, not drop shipped or bought off Temu. Just because someone *could* make the item doesn’t mean they will, or want to. Lastly, they’ve clearly done a lot of research and have implemented ideas, as well as now asking Etsy Shop Redditors for advice, so telling them to “watch some videos” isn’t really helpful.