Why would you split up your etsy shop?

I swear, every day there's a new thread in the etsy forums by a shop owner trying to decide whether to open a second shop. Ninety-nine times out of 100, I think it's an awful idea.

I mean, I just blogged about how the best way to promote your shop is to have more items for sale... when you split up your shop, you're diluting your efforts exponentially. Why do you think Target is so successful? Because people run in for a box of detergent, and right there in front is a fabulous new dress they never imagined needing today. But they buy it! That's what you're missing out on, the serendipity, the combining.

I've even seen people suggest that you post links to your other shop from the listings in your first one... what a mess. Those links should be around to show people around to things you think they might be interested in. If you start a second shop, you're basically assuming that they're not interested in your new product line. So what's the point?

And don't get me started on the etsy functionality headaches... customers at your second shop won't be able to see the feedback you've earned from your first one. When you post in teams, people can't see that you have multiple shops. Customers can't combine shipping on orders from multiple shops... that's a barrier that can DEFINITELY cost you sales.

I think people try to split off shops for all the wrong reasons... they want a new banner, or they want a different color scheme in their new products and don't want the backgrounds to clash. Puh-lease. 90% of your shop sales come from the search anyway, customers don't get to etsy through your shop unless they're your friends, and they care even less about your color scheme.

The whole point of etsy is that shoppers buy from people. There is only one you. Don't try to be a conglomerate, be yourself. Keep your shop as your shop and have it reflect all the dimensions of your wonderful personality. That's what people love about buying handmade.

The #1 way to promote your etsy shop

Last week I caused a bit of controvery by shutting down the "promotion" threads in the etsy contest team. You know... the threads with titles like "Show me your flowers!" and "Post new listings here!" and "July items that are BLUE!". It felt to me like we had almost two teams going on within our team, passing unnoticed like ships in the night... we had people who discussed interesting ideas in unique topics and got to know each other, and we had people who ignored all that, came in for five seconds to post their new listings, and then move on to their next team. Hit and run. So I ran a test, not just in our team but in other promotion teams. I found their "post new items" thread and posted a simple question: Who is reading this? And guess what I was answered with? A bunch of posts of people's new listings. Never a reply to the question. Nobody read my post, and nobody was going to see those new items that everyone was blindly and carelessly posting.

Here's what I told my team... when you post in those threads you feel like you're doing something to promote your shop. Hey, it's called a "promotion" thread right? It's promoting! You log ten minutes and think "I did ten minutes of work to help my shop". But the effect is zero, because nobody's paying attention to those threads... like you, everyone is posting and then running off into the next room, it's like a giant echo chamber.

You think you're reaching out and touching your audience? The reality is, you're only touching yourself. We might as well call it etsy-baiting.

So what's the BEST way to promote your items? Ready? Here's the secret...

GET OFF THE INTERNET AND MAKE SOMETHING.

Seriously. Every time you post up another new item in your shop, your shop becomes more legitimate, more active, and you have another thing that some buyer might run across. You want to sell that green zipper pouch? Make a blue one! You'll now have something to grab the attention of someone searching for blue, and they'll see your green pouch when they check out the rest of your shop because they're SO impressed with the blue one they made.

Buyers are constantly searching for random things you might never think of... every color, every theme, every weird little item. The more different things you have up, the more likely they are to run across your shop in their searches. And that is your target audience: people searching etsy for something to buy. Not other shop owners who spam teams. Not people who add you to their circle if you circle them in return. Not the echo chamber.

What are they searching for today? Maybe something purple, maybe something with mermaids, maybe a a necklace with purple flowers, you never know. But they won't buy it from you if they don't see it. And if they do find it from you, they very well might check out the rest of your shop.

I've been blogging for years and I always tell people that the best thing you can do to promote a blog or website is to post often and for a long time. You can read up on search engine strategies until you're blue in the face, but the bottom line is that search engines are looking for content that's just plain good and not trying to fool them. When they crawl a website they're asking two huge questions that can't be easily faked: 1) how much content is on there? 2) how long has it been around? 3) has it been updated recently?

Same story with an etsy shop. How many items do you have, and when was the most recent one posted? If your answers are "a lot of items, and the newest went up today!" then your shop is going to do a million times better than someone who has eight items but spent four hours today etsy-baiting in promotion threads (they might even go blind)!

So people, stop posting in teams, stop annoying me on twitter with your repeatitive boring tweets about the same new item over and over again. Stop blogging, if your heart's not in it. Get back to creating! Make something, post it up, see if it sells... isn't that what got you into etsy in the first place? Quit trying to outsmart the system and just be good, and your shop will do so much better.

My etsy pet peeve of the day: all the jpeg shop banners

It's no secret that the average etsian is more likely to be a good photographer than a computer expert, and that's okay. We're all good at what we're good at. But something has been bugging the CRUD out of me lately: jpeg shop banners that should NOT be jpeg.

The jpeg file format was optimized for compressing photographs... images taken of real life, where colors merge and shades change and backgrounds blur. For product photos, it's super.

But lots of etsians don't use photos in their shop banners, they want a professional clean "website" look. The banners have digitally created text, smooth lines, perfect gradients... stuff that doesn't occur in nature, just publishing. And that's okay! If you use the right file format.

When jpeg compression sees a perfectly straight line with contrasting colors on either side, it doesn't think the cleanliness is all that important. It approximates the colors on either side of the line... that's why you get jpeg "artifacts", or the little blurry dots and squares on the edges of an otherwise clean field of color.

They can be subtle... but they always look like crap.



So what format should you use?

If your banner consists of very few colors, like text on a plain background, gif will make for an accurate representation without using a whole lot of kilobytes. The fast-loading image will make people happy.

If your banner has lots of colors, but consists of mostly digital components like text, gradients, lines and shapes drawn in your graphics program, .png may work the best. While the file sizes can be slightly larger, .png is a lossless algorithm so your lines will stay crisp. Play with it a bit, see what it does to your file size.


by Louis Brandy

If your banner is a mix of photos, textures, and digital components, .jpeg still might be the best choice but be sure to check the compression settings when you save the file. If your quality is lower than 95 or so, you could end up with a cheap looking banner.

We work so hard on shop cohesion and lovely banners, it's a shame to think of losing quality because we pick the wrong option when we "save as". Don't be afraid to drift away from jpeg, even if it's the format you've known and loved for years. There's no such thing as the perfect tool for everything.

Why I'm not protesting Etsy over what "handmade" means

I guess now that I have my own etsy blog I can yammer on about ANY etsy topic I want, without caring about whether I'm talking too much about etsy. That's a nice feature, huh?

So I haven't weighed in yet on the handmade controversy but I wanted to say something because it's an issue I feel strongly enough. This week a lot of people complained that Etsy wasn't doing enough to make sure the items sold on etsy matched up what etsy claims to be ("Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies"). Regretsy, a site I love for other reasons, accused Etsy of putting a shop on the front page that doesn't actually make anything by hand but instead resells products made overseas by a wholesale company. Etsy investigated on their own, and said that the shop meets their terms of service.

The controversy I see is that NONE of us make everything by hand, and Etsy allows you to "get help" with the things you do... artists don't have to make their own prints to sell prints, a sewing type like me doesn't have to grow her own cotton and die her own fabric. I can buy fabric from wal-mart if I want, roll it in a big glue ball and call it my creation. It's handmade!

I have my own definition of handmade, and in the contest website I'm up front about it... I don't think digital downloads are handmade. I don't think a single store-bought charm looped through a string with a clasp is handmade. So in the contest, I reserve the right to remove those items... although I usually don't, because they usually don't win anyway. No harm done. And, well, I guess that's how I feel about everything on the internet. Maybe it's doesn't meet MY definition. Maybe it's not something I'd buy. But I am not the queen of the internet so who cares?

Etsy has been accused of not shutting down resellers fast enough, yet there are plenty of shops being shut down... just read Energy Shop's story of being accused of drop-shipping to get what I mean. And so when you say "Etsy isn't doing enough", be careful what you wish for. If Etsy's reseller radar becomes more sensitive, more shops will trip it. Then your shop might trip it. Is that what you want?

I always ask the same questions in politics too: there are people who are okay with starving kids if they can have a welfare system that no one could possibly freeload off of. That's impossible, guys. The only way to have a freeloader-proof system is to have no system at all.

When someone buys a bag from my shop they know what they're getting. They are NOT getting a bag made from hand-spun fibers sheared from my animals and woven in my basement. They ARE getting a bag that's my own design, modified from some tutorials and lessons from family of course. I buy the fabric at a store, cut the fabric into rectangles that I measure myself and sew them to commercially-available zippers using my sewing machine in my house. It fits my definition of handmade, and if someone buys from me it must fit their definition too.

There are also shoppers who'll buy a $3 necklace that looks a lot like one from a store. They can see that the etsy shop has 3000 sales and 500 items in stock. We can all call that shop out or report it or ask Etsy to take it down, but the bottom line is that those shoppers know what they're getting. They're not kidding themselves about it being handmade. Those are not my customers! So who cares?

In the debates and accusation, I've seen a lot of elitism... people calling themselves artisians above the rest. I've seen a lot of racism... as if no artists live overseas? I've seen a lot of classism... "I have a studio in my house so obviously I'm an artist, you people who do this to scrape by, who won't markup your wares to hundreds of dollars, should not be in my same marketplace". And really I think that's where a lot of this handmade debate is coming from. We all want to set the bar at ourselves, we all think Etsy should see why I am different and special.

Etsy is what it is, it's not magic, it doesn't exist to make you happy. And this week, amid all the craziness, they're sticking with their policies. That's good! I think we should follow the example and stick to our shops, and making them better, and keep finding the items that we're interested in. Let capitalism do the talking, and buy from the shops that you know sell handmade. I will not participate in any protest against Etsy because I don't like the roots of it, or what it's asking for. I do not want to make Etsy a police state. The frenzy needs to end.