Successful Etsy Shop Study
Want to be successful? Do what successful people do.
"If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results."
Anthony Robbins
One of the easiest ways to learn how to be successful is to find someone in your field who has figured it out and then see what they do that you could apply to your own situation. For Etsy sellers, Craftcount has made that search as easy as a click away.
Out of curiosity I decided to to do a quick comparison of the top 10 sellers posted yesterday, August 17, 2015 to see what similarities I could find among them. Some results I had expected, but others I found quite surprising.
1. VintageGypsyRoad
2. The Velvet Acorn
3. ThinkPinkBows
4. Prettygrafikdesign
5. Rivermill Embroidery
6. PoshPeanutKids
7. LayeredAndLong
8. Yellow Paper House
9. Herrington Design
10. Literary Emporium
The Stats:
Shop #Items # Sales Aug Total Sales Date Opened Date 1st Sale Website
1 352 440 30,268 09/27/09 02/06/13 No
2 317 297 148,521 10/14/10 12/28/10 Yes
3 814 178 196,327 09/17/10 02/07/12 No
4 880 177 151,782 08/20/12 08/21/12 Yes
5 1049 162 157,280 04/26/11 06/07/11 No
6 957 159 113,383 02/08/11 05/22/11 Yes
7 180 140 82,554 10/15/12 10/15/12 No
8 85 132 23,852 06/30/14 07/01/14 No
9 530 114 76,347 01/03/07 02.20/08 No
10 99 108 4,005 04/15/12 04/21/12 Yes
Even More Stats:
Shop # of People Outside Mfg # Following #Favs Social Media Sites
1 1 N 31 Private I
5 2 N 2 Private FB
8 7 N 14 5 FB
*Social Media Sites... T (Twitter), FB (Facebook), P (Pinterest), I (Instagram), B (Blog)
My biggest takeaway from this is in the number of people these shops/shop owners are following, or rather NOT following and how many of them have made their favs/treasuries/teams private. I found this very interesting. Of the 3 shops who left their favs public their numbers are quite low. My guess is that they are too busy making goods and promoting their shops to play games on Etsy. Did they play games before they had this level of success? I don't know. Perhaps that would be a good study to conduct at a later date, if they would be willing to share that information.
I was surprised that only 4 out of the 10 shops had a stand-alone website. I expected that number to be higher.
All 10 of the shops make items which are reproducible and their photos, especially of the tangible items, are professionally done and visually appealing. There is a strong shop cohesion between the photos and the items available with all the shops.
I included the date of the first sale because I believe that gives a better idea of how long a shop has been in business than the date the shop opened. That is more accurate of the date joined, even though Etsy does not make that distinction.
I did not include whether or not these shops are selling the same goods as they did when they first opened, but when I come across a shop that catches my eye I like to check out their first sales to see how much they have evolved. More often than not the photos are a very different quality and sometimes the items originally sold are no longer offered. This is the case with some of these shops, as well.
I hope you have found this little study to be interesting and informative. All of these shops are great examples of what to do that is working. If you have the time you can follow the links to the websites and social media sites. Maybe you will get some ideas on how to improve your own shop presence. I know I have.
If you liked this little study and would like to see more posts like this, please let me know in the comments below. Also, if you have any observations that you would like to share about the statistics that I did not bring up, please share that as well.
