If your sales in your Etsy print on demand shop are slowing down, what should you do? Is it the time of year or are your sales really down? In this episode I’m going to talk about 5 things you can to do help increase your sales so stick around and let’s talk about it.
First off, let me just say this is not one of those “do these five things and you’ll make thousands of sales” lists. I’m going to talk about 5 things that I’ve really done with my Etsy shop that have helped me get more sales. There is no simple list of a few easy things that will make you thousands in revenue in a short amount of time. My shop has made over $100k in revenue but that took a little over a year. I’m not the most successful Etsy seller in the print on demand business so you can certainly get to six-figure revenue in less time, but that’s not exactly what you would call a “typical result”. You can work really hard and do things right but if you don’t find a few niches where all the right factors align, it can be discouraging. You can also achieve a good sales volume for a while and then run into slowing sales. That’s exactly the situation I ran into this year.
Shop Statistics
My Etsy shop achieved $100k in revenue in about 18 months, but so far in 2022 I’ve only had about $17k in revenue. There are a few reasons for this. First, I have to take responsibility for spending less time on my shop earlier this year. I’ve been spending more time on the POD Insights YouTube channel and my main 9 to 5 job has been busier this year, so I’ve had less time to spend managing my shop and adding new listings and that definitely has had an impact. But let me also point out that retail and online sales do have a “slow time of year” in the first quarter. There are a couple holidays which have sales opportunities like Valentine’s day, but generally speaking, January into March is a slower time of year for sales. Consumers have just spent a lot in the Q4 holiday season and it can take a while for them to get back to spending regularly on discretionary items like a cute mug. However you can tell on your Etsy stats page if your sales are slowing down because of the season or actually falling below your shop’s previous performance.
After opening your stats page, set the time frame to a period you want to compare to the prior year. For example if you want to compare January 2022 to January 2021, select the custom option and enter January 1 to January 31, 2022. Inside the stat graphs, you will see a stat comparing the results to the same period for the previous year. You can see this comparison on each tab for visits, orders, conversion rate, and revenue. For example, my shop had 163 sales in January 2022 and this was a 7% increase over January 2021. However when I change that to February, my sales volume was down 25% compared to 2021. What did I do in 2021 that I didn’t do in 2022? Did anything specific change that I have control over? Etsy does provide your monthly statements for your financial account so I could look into that to see specific items that were selling last February and I would recommend doing that in case that helps me identify something I might be able to control. But now that I know how much my sales are down, let’s talk about 5 things that can be done to start turning things around and getting back to higher sales volume.
Sales & Pricing
First let’s talk about sales, and I don’t mean sales volume. I mean running a sale in your shop, as well as looking at your pricing strategy. Do you run sales regularly? Is your pricing strategy set up to trigger purchase behaviors? Are you priced significantly higher than your competitors? These are all questions to ask yourself. I’m going to discuss two types of strategies for running sales in your shop and why you should be doing one of them. If you’re not using the “run a sale” feature available in your Etsy shop, this alone can help trigger more purchases.
There are two ways to approach running sales. Etsy makes it very easy for sellers to offer sales for a percentage off included items or when a customer’s order is over a set amount. Sales can run for up to 30 days and you can schedule several sales in advance of when they will actually be live for customers. When it comes to strategies for this, there are two main styles. There is the “occasional sale” approach and the “always on sale” approach. The “occasional sale” approach is what you might consider the more traditional style, and it involves setting your regular prices at a fair level that will provide you a healthy profit margin while still being competitive enough so that you make regular sales. But periodically you put either your whole store or various sections of your store on sale for 10-20% off the regular price for a limited time. For example, you would run typical retail sale events like a Black Friday sale or Cyber Monday sale, or just one weekend per month, really it can be at any cadence but the point is that you’re not always running a sale. Your pricing should be fair and competitive, but also set at a level where you still make an acceptable profit during your sale events. You might price a t-shirt at $18.95 and make a $5 profit per shirt regularly and then settle for a $3.25 profit when they are on sale for 10% off. Basically you’re hoping to make up the difference in increased volume. This strategy usually involves some intentional marketing or announcements about the sales you’re running, such as social media posts sharing the information to your followers and email campaigns for your subscribers. This strategy can and does work well for many retailers, both in-person and online because if you know a brand does not always run a sale, then when you hear about a sale it can trigger an increase in purchase behavior. If your print on demand Etsy shop is a focused brand that cultivates a customer base that makes repeat purchases, then this type of sale strategy can be very effective. But if your print on demand strategy is to focus less on repeat buyers and more on being found in search results by the general population, the second approach to running sales can work to your advantage.
The “always on sale” approach can work well if you have a relatively low percentage of return customers. This strategy involves increasing the regular price of your items and then basically keeping them “on sale” full-time. For example, if your target sale price of a t-shirt is $18.95, you could set the regular price at $22.29 and run a 15% off sale which brings the price down to $18.95. Why would you do this? Because seeing a sale can trigger a purchase decision when someone might otherwise say to themselves “I’ll come back to that again later”. So you’re probably thinking “don’t customers see through that if your products are always on sale?”. Yes and no. Will some customers identify this marketing tactic? Sure. Savvy shoppers know these things and can identify them. And returning customers may remember “all of these items were on sale the last time I looked too”, but don’t forget, we’re assuming that your shop strategy focuses more on being found in search results and less on repeat customers, so a good portion of the people viewing your listings are seeing the sale price for the first time. There’s an additional way you can leverage marketing psychology and trigger more purchases using this method. Etsy gives you the ability to run a sale for up to 30 days. However Etsy also shows the customer a countdown clock on each listing when a sale is within 24 hours of ending. So once a sale is ending in under 24 hours, Etsy lets the customer know that if they want to lock in the sale price, they have limited time. You can take advantage of this by not running a sale for the maximum 30 days, but instead setting your sale to run only 2-3 days at a time. That way several times per month, your listings are showing with limited time left on the sale and that can trigger more purchases. Yes, that does mean more work for you. But you can schedule all your sales for a month in one sitting if you set aside some time to do it. I would not recommend this strategy if your shop does have a significant customer base that returns regularly to make repeat purchases, for a couple of reasons. First, some of them will quickly identify your sales strategy and it may be a little off-putting to some people. I personally am not offended as a customer when I identify these types of things…but then again I am an entrepreneur myself so I’m expecting that all businesses are doing whatever it takes to make a sale and if it happens to work on me then good for them. However some customers may question your pricing if they notice. The second reason is that if you’re able to build a base of returning customers, then the more traditional sale strategy is a better approach in my opinion. Your customer base will be on the lookout for special sales events and you can even send them special loyalty discount codes via email to trigger more purchases. But don’t overlook the “always on sale” strategy if you focus on selling primarily through search results.
What’s the right percentage for sales? Well, the answer is that it depends. For the most part, typical print on demand items like t-shirts and mugs that tend to be priced under $30 require a little higher percentage off to really trigger buying in my experience. Customers tend to think of 10% as insignificant for an item that only costs $14 to begin with, if you use a mug as an example. Even though a price of $12.59 may be attractive for a mug, the sale itself doesn’t seem attractive. Honestly I believe that many customers expect 10% to be an always-available discount because of how common it has become to offer at least 10% for any person that signs up to be on an email or texting list. You know, that pop-up message that shows up whenever you access a store’s website that says “get 10% off your first order when you sign up for emails!”. Because that’s been the norm for several years, customers are starting to see 10% as something they deserve rather than a good deal. My personal experience is that a sale of 15% triggers more purchases but 10% off doesn’t seem to. 20% may trigger slightly more sales than 15% but I’ve found pretty good results with 15%. Now, one really important thing to keep in mind is your pricing and sale strategy also will determine what your sale percentage should be.
If you go with the more traditional strategy of only running sales occasionally, then your regular prices need to be competitive enough to still be making regular sales. That means you have to be careful about the percentage you select for your sales. For example, if your regular t-shirt price is $18.95 and your total cost per shirt is $12.00, then you are making a profit of $4.70 or 25% per shirt when they are not on sale. That will decrease to a profit of $2.98 or 17% when they are on sale for 10% off, and $2.13 or 13% if they are on sale for 15% off. Now if you decide to run a higher sale for an event like Black Friday, say 25% off, you are almost breaking even at $0.41 profit or 3%. Because your regular price had to stay competitive, it will limit the maximum percentage you can use to run a sale. But of course, you need to check the pricing levels of your competitive because if the competition supports higher prices, then you can start with a higher profit margin and have more breathing room to run a sale. We’ll talk more about the competition later.
Now if you use the “always on sale” strategy, you are going to set your prices with the intention of always running a sale so you have more of a guaranteed profit level built into the pricing. If we use the example mentioned earlier, you can set your regular t-shirt price at $22.29 and run a 15% off sale all the time, which gives you a price of $18.95 and a profit of 25% or $4.70. Now when Black Friday comes around you don’t have to do anything different, or you could increase the sale to 20% off for one day which will reduce your profit to $3.69 or 21%. Still a pretty comfortable profit considering it is presented as a 20% off sale which can be petting tempting to customers. So this is another benefit of the “always on sale” strategy, but again you still can’t increase the sale percentage to the point where you’re not making a profit. That point would be 35% off in this example, which would yield a profit of $0.66.
What do I do? Because my Etsy shop strategy is focused on being found in search results and offering many different design niches, I use the “always on sale” strategy and set a 15% off sale on all my t-shirts and mugs that expires 3 times per week. I run the same sale Monday-Wednesday, Thursday-Friday, and Saturday-Sunday. I almost always have more sales on the last day every time, when that countdown clock is showing.
Refresh Mockups
Number two on my list is refreshing your mockup photos. If you are already reviewing some of your existing listings and possible updating your pricing strategy, then it’s worth looking at your mockups too. You don’t have to worry about replacing all your mockups, you’re only going to be looking for a couple of specific things that could be improved.
First, as you review or edit existing listings, look at the primary thumbnail image that shows in search results. Etsy shows this right underneath the mockups at the top of the listing editor. Make sure that your design is front and center and easy to read if there is text in the design. If you did not use the available adjustment to zoom in on the design, do that now and help customers see a closeup of the design. Your listing is going to be shown next to dozens of others in search results, so make it easier for the customer to see your design clearly instead of getting lost amongst all the competitors.
You also want to give your mockups a glance to see if any should be updated or replaced. If the listing has not made any sales, consider swapping out the primary image with a new one that really showcases the design well. If you only uploaded a couple images originally, try to get some new mockups to use as many of the 10 available images as possible. If you don’t have a free Placeit account, they are a great source of professional-looking mockups and the free account has a great selection of mockups for t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and mugs.
Update Title & Tags
Number three on the list is to consider updating the title and tags on some of your existing listings. I don’t recommend this for all your existing listings. In fact, I recommend against changing your title and tags on any listings that have made regular sales. This is because the Etsy search algorithm has learned which search queries it should display your listing for, based on past click & purchase behaviors and your existing listing attributes. Changing your title and tags means the search algorithm will have to re-learn those connections, so if your listing is making sales, in most cases you’re better off not changing your title and tags. However, if you have listings that are not making regular sales (or no sales at all) and there are more relevant keyword phrases that have the potential to improve visibility of your listing, then it’s absolutely appropriate to make some changes.
Follow the same process you would when creating a new listing to identify keyword phrases that have monthly search volume and reasonable or low competition. I use Sale Samurai for research and I enjoy using it. The cost is affordable compared to some other tools – $79 per year if you use my podinsights coupon code – and it gives me the data I need to identify new niches and keyword phrases that are lower competition. I know some other sellers use tools like eRank or Marmalead as well. I’ve used eRank and don’t really like the user-interface or features as much, but they do have a free account if you want to try it out. Whatever your preferred research tool is, you should use it to identify the phrases that are going to be in your title and tags.
Sometimes I look at the listings in my shop that haven’t made a sale in a very long time but I keep letting them renew because I like the design or it’s one that I’m proud of. But then when I take a closer look at the keyword phrases in the title and tags, I start to notice things. Many of these listings are ones that I created a while ago, so even though the design came out great, I was less experienced at finding the best keyword phrases to use. Sometimes I check out the ones in my listing using the Sale Samurai listing analyzer – which is a great way to quickly see search volume for every tag on the listing in one view – and I immediately see that I used keyword tags that are too broad and general, meaning the competition is far too high to expect to show up high in the search rankings. Then I use the chrome extension to identify related phrases that have search volume but lower competition.
Again, I wouldn’t recommend doing this for existing listings unless they are not making any regular sales, but in those cases it can be a worthwhile effort and you’ll notice things about how you can continue improving your research.
Review the Competition
Number four is more of a general one. I mentioned when we discussed the sales & pricing topic that it’s important to check out what the competition is doing to make sure your pricing is competitive. The fourth thing I recommend doing is a more general review of the competition within some of your niches. Let me explain a little bit more about what you’re looking for.
It’s never a bad time to take note of what your competitors are doing, but when your sales are slowing down it becomes even more helpful because part of the reason your sales are slowing could be related to things the competition is doing that you’re not doing. The most obvious would be if the competition has been undercutting you on price – let’s say you charge $19.99 plus shipping for a t-shirt and dozens of competitors are offering a similar design on a similar t-shirt for $16.99 with free shipping. Even if you’re still on page one, not many customers are going to select your listing if the designs look pretty much the same. But let’s assume this is not the issue, what else can you learn from the competition?
Run a search for one of the niches that you sell designs in. Check out the listings showing in the first couple rows of the organic search results and open one or two from different sellers. Instead of looking for one specific thing, look at everything. How did they structure their title and description? What type of mockups are they using? Do they showcase the design better than your mockups? What is their pricing and shipping strategy? Are they offering personalization? Are the products individual or bundled within the listing? Don’t forget to check their sales volume and customer reviews too. All of these areas are reference points for you to see potential things they are doing that are contributing to their success. I want to be clear that you’re not doing this to copy what another seller is doing. There’s a difference between learning from someone and imitating them. After reviewing a few different listings from different sellers, you can start to piece together what types of strategies might work for you and that’s the goal.
Another helpful way to analyze competitor listings is to use your research tool. Sale Samurai has a listing analyzer where you can paste in the URL for any Etsy listing and see all the tags and some statistics. I think most Etsy research tools have a feature like this and it can give you some additional information into competitor strategies. Seeing all the tags they used and Etsy search volume can be really helpful. I do this sometimes when I want to get a sense of what tags are working for other sellers in a specific niche.
Create New Listings
Ok we’re down to the last thing I recommend to help increase your sales volume and it’s the most obvious one. Creating new listings is one of the best ways increase your sales. Now, you don’t want to just crank out a ton of new listings without giving each one the attention it deserves. In my opinion, ten high-quality listings with a good looking design, great mockups and well-researched keywords are better than 50 quickly thrown-together listings with default mockups and minimally researched keywords. Generally speaking, the more internet real estate you occupy, the better your chances of getting clicks and purchases. But all that real estate needs to be occupied by things that someone actually may want to purchase. Think of it like this – if you were looking for a restaurant to eat at and you wanted a nice, sit-down traditional restaurant with a good record for quality food and service, and you drove by 50 fast-food restaurants that look run-down and low-quality, would you stop at any of them to eat? No you wouldn’t because they don’t meet the standard you’re looking for, so it didn’t matter that there were fifty of them to chose from. The same generally idea applies here – you can have a thousand listings on Etsy but if they don’t look like a quality product or show up in relevant searches, you won’t make consistent sales.
So when you’re creating new listings, put in the necessary time to add professional-looking mockups, a good description (because Etsy uses your descriptions in search now), set a competitive price, and do the research to identify the best keyword phrases for your title and tags. If you’re researching a new niche to enter, look for lower competition phrases instead of highly saturated ones. Consider offering a personalized product if you see a good opportunity for one. Just creating one or two new listings per day will get you up to 60 new listings in a month, which all have a good chance of making a sale when you put the time into them up-front.
Another thing to consider is any opportunity you might have to expand your offerings for designs that are selling. If you have a few designs that are getting regular sales on a t-shirt, make sure you’ve got that design available on other products as well, like sweatshirts, hoodies, mugs, a hat, or any product that could be a good fit for the design. You have the option of adding these as separate listings, or adding individual product variants into your existing listing that is selling. I have a video on the YouTube channel about how to make combination listings using both Printify and Printful if you’re interested in doing that. Check the article for this episode on podinsights.net for links or check out the YouTube channel directly. You can also take a design that’s been selling and make slight alterations to it, especially with some holiday-themed designs. For example, last year in my shop I created a Father’s Day design that had a retro theme to it. It sold pretty well on a t-shirt and a mug around the father’s day season in 2021 so this year, I took that design and made a mom version of it for Mother’s Day. I also added a mockup image to each listing to show that I offer the design for both mom and dad, and I linked to the other listing within the description of each one. This year my sales of both designs increased and I started to see some customers buy one of each. So creating new listings is not just about getting into new niches or coming up with totally new designs – it can also mean expanding upon ones you already have if they are selling.
Conclusion
So those are the five things I’ll be working on in my own Etsy shop over the next several months to help turn the trend of decreasing sales around. I hope you find some or all of them helpful for your print on demand shop. If you’re a visual learner and want to see any of this information again, check out the POD Insights YouTube channel because I have a video version of this list of tips as well. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform and head over to podinsights.net for transcripts of every episode with links to resources. I’ve also got a page full of print on demand resources that I recommend.
Thanks for reading.