This is the item that sold:
It generated quite a lot of views and hearts even before it sold so it may be an item I make again in the future! The matching earrings are still in the shop :)
It's kind of thrown me, because I totally wasn't expecting anything to sell until I'd started marketing/advertising fairly aggressively which I plan to start on Monday. It left me scrambling to get all my shipping stuff together and ready to go today, so I went down to Paperchase and bought some nice card and paper which will last me for an age. Everything else, I've managed to recycle!
I also hadn't put together any business cards yet, so threw together these really quickly in about half an hour:
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I know they're not as good as they could be but I think they're pretty good for just half an hour's work. I like how I'll be able to rotate the pictures to keep up to date with my current stock :)
Hopefully, I'll be blogging a lot in the future about my experiences setting up shop. I think it could be useful to other potential sellers to be able to avoid the mistakes I make!
So, without further ado, the things I have learned so far:
1. Research, research, research! Read everything you can find about setting up an Etsy shop, designing your collection, putting your image together, marketing etc etc. It's saved me countless mistakes, I'm sure. Though I'm equally sure I'll make plenty of my own!
2. Have a good number of items to open your shop with. I'd suggest between 10 and 20 at least! Upload the first few all at once and then:
3. Stagger your item listings! A couple every hour or so during peak hours if you have the stock to do so. Having a mostly US customer base, Etsy peak hours tend to be pretty late here. I'm still experimenting, but so far I've found that listing items at about 10pm here in the UK generates the most views.
4. Have all your shipping stuff ready to go as soon as you set up! You may be lucky like me ;) And you'd be surprised about the number of small things you don't even think about until they're big problems shouting at you in the face--like, having no glue or sellotape to seal the box and put the address on...*facepalm*
Tomorrow, I'm off up to Leeds to see my sister for the weekend! (And maybe her husband will make brownies? :D I live in perpetual hope!) So, I won't be doing much with my Etsy shop. I plan to take photos of a few more items tomorrow morning which I'll be listing up in Leeds, but otherwise, I'll be taking a break. It's only just started but I feel like it's been months! (Well, technically, it has, really!) I had a bit of a breakthrough with the novel I'm writing recently, too, so it'll be nice to get some of that without feeling guilty about not doing Etsy stuff :)
I might also be able to get the light box tutorial up tomorrow. It'll probably depend on access to the computer, but we'll see.
See you soon
xxx
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