Ask me Anything About making money on Etsy (Etsy AMA)

Seven4 said:

Do a lot of people return stuff on Etsy? Or what is your return policy?

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No. As long as you offer great customer service ship on time or faster and offer good products you are fine.

Lets be clear though you cant really drop ship on Etsy and I see a lot of people asking questions pertaining to that side of thing. Do you make your own products? Etsy is a marketplace primarily for handmade goods, you can also sell digital items, vintage items and craft supplies there but that's it. You can however work with companies like Printful and Printaura to make some products for you. As long as its your design you can work with approved manufacturers to make your products and ship them.

William702 said:

There are currently 222,804 listings with the keyword/tag "onesie" listed on Etsy so not sure why that happened to you. Maybe Gerber singled you out as Etsy have to receive a take down notice from the trademark owner in order to take listings down. They wont do it off of just any old report. Maybe their policies are more in line with reality now, who knows.

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They can't take everyone down. They have to manually report each listing and I got selected in the last sweep. I know a few people who sell on Etsy. Sometimes they get a trademark strike for different items and I don't vice versa while selling the same item. Random selection I guess.

Why is Etsy better at selling than eBay, and should I operate on eBay and Etsy, or soley Etsy?

DOERAKERS said:

They can't take everyone down. They have to manually report each listing and I got selected in the last sweep. I know a few people who sell on Etsy. Sometimes they get a trademark strike for different items and I don't vice versa while selling the same item. Random selection I guess.

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Very true, they take one down and ten replace it. I have seen shops make tens of thousands of sales of Disney items before getting shut down and seen shops get closed just for listing them so it's not a perfect system by any means.

Dafar said:

Why is Etsy better at selling than eBay, and should I operate on eBay and Etsy, or soley Etsy?

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That is like asking why a banana is better than an apple. They are two different things altogether and have their own benefits and drawbacks. Sell on both if you can.

From my experience if you get a trademark notice twice from the same person/company you get shut down faster. I had a shop with 5 trademark strikes within a year and didn't get shut down. I heard the trademark strikes reset every year.

DOERAKERS said:

From my experience if you get a trademark notice twice from the same person/company you get shut down faster. I had a shop with 5 trademark strikes within a year and didn't get shut down. I heard the trademark strikes reset every year.

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I'm not sure if they reset trademark strikes specifically or if the counter for strikes in general is on a running 12 month basis. I have never sold anything that would potentially infringe on anyone's trademark. I had a few successful shops so I didn't want to risk losing them over that.

I try to stay clear from obvious infringement like Disney marvel etcs.. but most of the time it's the other Etsy sellers trademarking common phrases that get you. If you search trademark on the Etsy forums you will see other sellers complaining about that.

This is some good stuff. Replying just to keep myself in the thread.

Hello. I sell digital prints on Etsy for couple months ago and I do very well. I bought 15 days ago Tailwind and start using it to drive traffic to Etsy and my affiliate site. I wanna ask you:
1. How many pins you schedule a day?
2. Are you schedule 50/50 ( yours and the other pins)?
3. Which tool you also use. You said that you use the tool you are affiliate with and is in your signature, but I can't see that?

BakBak said:

This is some good stuff. Replying just to keep myself in the thread.

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Glad you are finding it useful.

logotrain034 said:

Hello. I sell digital prints on Etsy for couple months ago and I do very well. I bought 15 days ago Tailwind and start using it to drive traffic to Etsy and my affiliate site. I wanna ask you:
1. How many pins you schedule a day?
2. Are you schedule 50/50 ( yours and the other pins)?
3. Which tool you also use. You said that you use the tool you are affiliate with and is in your signature, but I can't see that?

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1) I set up 90 per account.
2) right now I have it set up just posting out products so 100% client pins.
3) I use tailwind. I was an affiliate over a year ago but too many people thought I was sharing this method to promote that. One idiot even accused me of owning Tailwind lol. So I just took it out of my signature. It's expensive but it does what I need it to do and It makes me a bunch of money so the price does not bother me.

Do you see a lot of your sales come from Pinterest? I never tried getting external traffic for my etsy shops besides etsy ads/google ads. I never heard of tailwind looks interesting, but there is a big gap in price from plus and professional lol. Which version are you using?

@William702 Did anybody experienced a sudden drop in visitors as well overnight during 18th/22th?They changed algo or something?This was supposed to be the big sale event.I was doing ok before the sale event ,...participated with the event ,and my shop died over night(no sales/visitors...No warnings or bad reputation.Clueless what's causing this ,any advise ?
@DOERAKERS Which version did you use,curious as well?

DOERAKERS said:

Do you see a lot of your sales come from Pinterest? I never tried getting external traffic for my etsy shops besides etsy ads/google ads. I never heard of tailwind looks interesting, but there is a big gap in price from plus and professional lol. Which version are you using?

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I have a few accounts on there, some have full usage rights but I have never used the features. I got a few accounts added in the early days for free so I mostly use those.

detas said:

@William702 Did anybody experienced a sudden drop in visitors as well overnight during 18th/22th?They changed algo or something?This was supposed to be the big sale event.I was doing ok before the sale event ,...participated with the event ,and my shop died over night(no sales/visitors...No warnings or bad reputation.Clueless what's causing this ,any advise ?
@DOERAKERS Which version did you use,curious as well?

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Did you see more traffic than usual and a drop in sales or less traffic too? The usual answer to this is that you had a lot of people visit at once from a promotion which lead to less conversions and a big ranking drop because the algo things it's not as popular. I have seen it happen a thousand times. However if you are saying the views died off too then that's really strange. They change stuff so often that it is bound to affect some shops negatively.

Do you see sales come in from Pinterest?

what type of product d oyou think sells easiest on etsy? why would i choose etsy over my own shop or ebay?

DOERAKERS said:

Do you see sales come in from Pinterest?

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Yes!!

RA1NMAN said:

what type of product d oyou think sells easiest on etsy? why would i choose etsy over my own shop or ebay?

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Check out www.craftcount.com you will see lists of the top selling shops for each category and overall. You will be able to see daily sales figures etc so it's a great site to do research on. Wedding products, gifts, apparel, digital items, home goods. These are all things that sell well on Etsy.

Why would anyone want to choose one over the other, why can't you use both? Etsy is way different to eBay and we all know the benefits of having your own site. If I had to pick I would choose Etsy over eBay every day of the week as you will get a lot more for your products there. There are huge arbitrage opportunities selling items from eBay on Etsy

Hey William! First, THANKS FOR THIS. Appreciate the insight.
I've read the entire thread from pg 1! One thing I'm missing is any details on methods of building your social / getting that free traffic.
Obv understand if you want to keep that to yourself, but if you're willing I would LOVE some more insight into how you drive traffic to
etsy via social... How many accounts you create to promo a shop, what kind of content strategy you use, and what tools you use to automate
(I know you're on TW for auto pinning, but are you manually setting all those pins up in advance for each account? / what do you use for fbook?)
I ask because so far I've spend 100's of hours on social and nobody is seeing anything I post, so clearly I'm missing something!

RDeezy said:

Hey William! First, THANKS FOR THIS. Appreciate the insight.
I've read the entire thread from pg 1! One thing I'm missing is any details on methods of building your social / getting that free traffic.
Obv understand if you want to keep that to yourself, but if you're willing I would LOVE some more insight into how you drive traffic to
etsy via social... How many accounts you create to promo a shop, what kind of content strategy you use, and what tools you use to automate
(I know you're on TW for auto pinning, but are you manually setting all those pins up in advance for each account? / what do you use for fbook?)
I ask because so far I've spend 100's of hours on social and nobody is seeing anything I post, so clearly I'm missing something!

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My pleasure. I use Twitter very successfully to generate traffic. Youtube is another top source. Depending on the product you may want to use influencers to help grow your social media and presence. If you work on those things the sales follow at a frighting pace. Especially if you're making the products yourself like we were. I have lots of accounts on lots of networks, dozens on most for promotion and some that admin pages or admin group boards.

Really the key is finding something that you can automate and that you can scale. lost of sites have limits on the amount of actions you can do, lots don't though so if you can automate some of those actions you will be way ahead of the rest and can game the system. its not just about automation though. it's about efficiency. Some of the tools I use allow me to speed up processes to 5 micro seconds when it took me 1500 - 2000 manually. Things like this can give you an edge which most on Etsy have no clue about.

For info on the Pinterest stuff you would be better off going through some threads I started in the Pinterest section.
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/m...tup-cash-20-100-a-day-pinterest-method.939656
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/method-ranking-pins-on-pinterest.1011251
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/ask-me-anything-about-pinterest-pinterest-ama.980034

I just use FB for appearances. I do plan to learn about fb ads and my skills up in that department but as of right now I have not used fb ads. I have used groups and pages in the past to drive traffic but to be quite honest it is now just so much easier to work with influencers that I mostly do that. The growth I see in clients social media is insane and the influencers are doing all the heavy lifting. Instagram is just as good as youtube for influencer marketing but I see longer lasting results with youtube, especially when I use a few growth hacking techniques to make sure the content that the influencers are putting out gets seen.

What kind of thing do you sell? Obviously dont share any links to your stuff, just general info to give me a better idea.

Hope that helps.

HI William. In one of your earliest replies you have stated this
1."dont price yourself out of the market" - If all my competitors are selling for $28 - $40, then what might be the repurcussion if my selling price is $8-9.
2." if your selling products you make personally make sure you have some sort of inventory so that you can ship out an order fast " -- I am not based in USA and assuming major buyers are from there. Shipping time of 8 - 10 days sounds okay?
3. If I use a transparent pricing like list the material cost, labor cost and factor our profits for every product..How will the etsy audience react on this ?

Your thoughts please. Thanks for doing this AMA

SellOnlineee said:

HI William. In one of your earliest replies you have stated this
1."dont price yourself out of the market" - If all my competitors are selling for $28 - $40, then what might be the repurcussion if my selling price is $8-9.
2." if your selling products you make personally make sure you have some sort of inventory so that you can ship out an order fast " -- I am not based in USA and assuming major buyers are from there. Shipping time of 8 - 10 days sounds okay?
3. If I use a transparent pricing like list the material cost, labor cost and factor our profits for every product..How will the etsy audience react on this ?

Your thoughts please. Thanks for doing this AMA

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1) You will crash the market or people will assume your products are inferior.
2) Any extended amount of time is not OK, a lot of people in the US wont and dont buy from people outside of the US, especially on Etsy due to the whole hand made in america stuff. 8 - 10 days is not terrible but its not good either.
3) That's none of anyone's business, keep that private unless you want the whole world copying your products and pricing. It wont get you anymore sales. and will just bulk out your description.