What Are They Doing That I Can Do?...A Quick Study of Etsy's Top 10 Shops

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.

You can see the original treasury on Etsy here.

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           

2                      1                         N                               138                  Private               T, FB, P, I           

3                    16                         N                               154                  Private               T, FB, P, I           

4                      2                         N                                 71                     882                  T, FB, B             

5                      2                        N                                    2                  Private                     FB                 

6                      8                        N                                   61                 Private               T, FB, P, I           

7                    14                        N                                   67                  1481                      FB, P, I          

8                      7                        N                                   14                        5                      FB                 

9                      1                        N                                     9                     143                     FB, B             

10                    1                        N                                   65                 Private               T, FB, P, I          

*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.