Brecho Variedades

Many handmade sellers are skeptical of free shipping, because free shipping isn't free for the seller. This attitude though ignores the psychological aspects of how you set your prices. Here are the two most common scenarios for free shipping:

Always Free - The seller offers free shipping all the time. In this scenario the seller has to build the cost of shipping into the price of the items.
Free as Sale - The seller occasionally offers free shipping as part of a sale or promotion. In this scenario the seller needs to have a high enough profit margin all the time to afford to run discounts*

However why offer free shipping when you still have to pay for it? For the same reason that a seller would offer 10% offer or run advertising: as a promotional tool. "Free" is a very powerful word and for online retailers an easy and affordable way to bring in extra business. In fact at least one consumer researcher has shown that shoppers will often pick free shipping over a discount even if the discount would save them more money.

For the time being I'm only offering free shipping as an occasional discount but with the prices for my raw materials and postage going up I'll soon have to revise my prices and I'm debating whether I should build the shipping costs into my prices. Regardless of what I decide in the end, free shipping will remain a valuable promotional tool for me and other online retailers.

* In my opinion this should be all sellers. If you don't have a high enough profit margin to be able to afford to discount either for a sale or for wholesale buyers then you don't have enough profit built in to adequately reinvest in the business and pay yourself a reasonable amount for your time.

Before Etsy switched their default search to relevancy you could pay $.20 to renew an item and get bumped to the top of the search results (which benefited larger sellers who could afford to spend the money to renew dozens of times a day). Relevancy search hasn't been a benefit to every seller but it is a much more fair system for sellers of all sizes, the quality of your titles and tags matters more than your budget for renewals.

Renewing items isn't totally useless though. Lets look at a few ways people find items:

• Search: Relevancy is king, if your items aren't relevant to the search you're unlikely to rank highly in results. Your titles and tags are the most important things here, however recency still plays a part so newer items that are highly relevant are more likely to show up at the top of search results.
• Categories: Etsy's category pages are still sorted by recency so people browsing that way will still see the most recent items listed or renewed.
• Your Shop Home Page: Renewed items get pushed to the top of your shop which makes it look fresher for returning visitors. You could also use the rearrange shop tool every day or so to do this as well.
• Etsy Mini: If you use this widget on your blog or other web page it is sorted by newest items (unless you choose to show featured items)
• Facebook Fan Page App: Etsy's official Facebook app puts a tab on your fan page that displays your shop ordered by most recent items.
• RSS Feed: Your shop feed (found at http://www.etsy.com/shop/yourshopname/rss ) can be used for automatically posting new or renewed items to various services like Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, etc.

As you can see if you rely only on Etsy internal traffic then renewing helps but is limited, the vast majority of people browsing Etsy use the search rather than categories so making sure you have good titles and tags is a better use of your time than renewing items. If you use external tools then the impact of renewing can be greater. Should you rely on renewing to bring you all your sales? Absolutely not. Should it be a part of your overall strategy? Yes, renewing a handful of items regularly that are close to expiring is a good idea.

Renewing Tools
You can save yourself some time by scheduling your renewing using the following tools:

Clockbot - Lets you schedule specific items to renew, this is a free tool (not counting the $.20 listing fee from Etsy). You can schedule for days or weeks in advance but every item and time has to be selected for each scheduled renewal which can be time consuming.
Etsy on Sale - You can buy unlimited renewing options in monthly increments, I use this tool just because I can schedule renewing to occur at set intervals automatically (every 9 hours currently). It costs a small amount of money but I personally find it worthwhile for the convenience.

There's recently been a lot of stress in the Etsy community over the search being switched from Recency to Relevency. I'm not stressing. Why? Because the same things that help you in the Etsy relevancy search are also the things that help you in Google searches and if you've read this blog enough you know that I think Google is what you should be focusing on.

The first page of any Etsy search is 40 items, that means that you can't be on the first page of every search that would be relevant for your items. It's impossible. What you should be striving for is a well rounded listing that isn't trying to be at the top for only one or two searches, but a listing that ranks well if not at the very top for a wide range of related searches.

There's a concept called the "long tail" that is very important whenever you are talking about search engine rankings. The idea behind the long tail is that many search terms are only search for rarely but if you rank well for enough of these little searches you will get a lot of traffic. So stop worrying that you aren't on the first page for "dress" and start making sure you are titling, tagging, and writing descriptions so you will rank well for "blue cotton seashell print dress" in either Etsy or Google.



Wish all you want but Etsy, Google, and any other search engine is never going to tell you exactly what will put you at the top. The best you can do is write as relevant and accurate listings as you can that use good keywords that describe your items (and for Google build good backlinks). Don't pull your hair out trying to rank best for one narrow term in one search engine as your main way to get traffic, a broad approach to SEO and promotion will give you more consistent results that will protect you from major changes in just one area.  I would rather have 50 small traffic streams bringing me 5 visits each than one source sending me 250 visits because if one out of fifty disappears I'm not going to be devastated, I can just roll with the changes.

Users come first. That should be your number one rule whether you use Etsy, Artfire, or a self-hosted webstore. What this means is that while you should be using important keywords in your titles and descriptions, those are useless if your customers are turned off by the way your titles and descriptions are written or how your photos look they aren't going to buy no matter how well you rank in search.

This concept is called "conversions", you want the highest conversion rate you can get (for a web store that the % of visitors who make a purchase). If you have 5000 visitors a month with a conversion rate of 1% you are doing the same amount of business as a shop with 1000 visitors but a 5% conversion rate (50 sales per month). If you have 10,000 visitors a month but no one buys anything you might as well have had no visitors at all.

Here are three fictional titles for the same fictional product:
"Marvin the Robot"
"Soap robot lavender scented blue soy moisturizing handmade vegan"
"Marvin the Robot soap, moisturizing lavender scented soy soap"

The first is terrible, it doesn't even tell you what the item is. You can have creative names for your product, a memorable name may stick in a visitors head better than something descriptive but generic. However if the not having many clues, or misleading clues, about what the item is will hurt you as well. If visitors are clicking on "Marvin the Robot" expecting a toy or artwork not soap then that's not going to help your sales.

The second is better but a visitor is going to see it as either boring at best and spammy at worst. Why? because it's just a list of attributes of the product. People react to language in certain ways and if words don't read like a meaningful statement people aren't going to perceive it as valuable. Try reading your titles out loud and see how they sound.

The third title strikes the right balance. It both is descriptive, telling you a lot about the product (that it is a robot shaped soap, made of soy, moisturizes the skin, and is lavender scented) while also giving you product personality. If you don't know about the importance of telling a story about your business please go read All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin he describes the concept far better than I can but the gist of it is that people respond far more to being told a good authentic story than they do just being given the bare facts.

I used titles in this example because Etsy's new CEO just released an update on improvements to relevancy search and how to make titles better for search. I applaud the Etsy team for making much needed improvements to the search engine but I think it gave people the wrong idea. Ranking higher in search will not do any good if your customers aren't enticed by what they see.

SEO is something people are always confused about on the Etsy forums and elsewhere that handmade business people hang out. I'll be honest, even to a total web geek like me it can be confusing. SEOMoz which is a great SEO consulting company has a Free Beginners Guide to SEO on their website and it's really free, you don't even have to sign up for anything to get it.

I also highly recommend subscribing to their blog as well it's always full of interesting tips and insights into what's up and coming on the web.

This trick is something I just set up on my own site and is specific to blogs and sites running self-hosted Wordpress. Unfortunately I don't have an alternative for other platforms or wordpress.com hosted blogs. However if you have wordpress installed on your own hosting read on for a very cool trick to get more people to click from your site to your etsy shop.

I've been using a widget here on this blog called LinkWithin for quite a long time, at the bottom of each post it links to related posts here on the blog. I thought that it would be great to have something like this on my website but linking to my Etsy items. I searched through a lot of related post wordpress plugins before finally finding one that will pull items from an external site. The plugin is called nrelate and it lets you pull related posts not just from your blog but from any site in your blogroll. I have the links I want displayed in a separate link list and only my Etsy shop in the blogroll. I set the plugin to show 0 posts from site and 5 from my blogroll and now I have Etsy items beneath every posts on my site.

Sister Diane from Craftypod leads a class on Social Marketing. It's almost 2 hours long so grab a cup of coffee or cocoa and sit back to watch, it's full of great information on using social media tools like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. She explains it in pretty straightforward non-technical language.


Social Marketing for Handmade Businesses by Sister Diane from I Heart Art: Portland on Vimeo.

Note: The video is pretty high quality so run it fullscreen if you can to see the presentation screen better.

I came across this fantastic article on setting up post purchase customer surveys with paypal. I just set one up for my account and it was extremely easy. Also while your setting up the survey consider customizing the payment page with your logo or adding some of the other available options.