How To Boost Etsy Sales: The Simple Way That Generated $1,293 in 7 Days

You probably know by now that I’m a little bit obsessed with Etsy.

Don’t get me wrong, I love e-commerce in general, but there’s just something about the virtually instant feedback loop of doing something inside the Etsy platform that makes it even more exciting for me.

I wanted to take just a few minutes to talk about a test I’ve been running recently in my wife’s at the store and why I think it needs to become a regular part of your arsenal.

Before I jump in and outline the experiment, I wanted to quickly address a myth that we were able to debunk with this test.

In just about every forum, Facebook group, Twitter thread, and YouTube comment section about Etsy, someone is screaming about how the only thing that really matters is perfecting your Etsy search engine optimization.

Although I will not dispute that optimizing your listings is important, it’s not the only thing that matters.

As we’ve discussed at length in the past, one of the biggest ways to know you’re going to rank at the top of Etsy search is to get more traffic and sales from your listing than your competitors are.

If you are the top-selling listing, even if it’s not perfectly optimized in every way a customer could search for your product…you’re likely to rank at the top.

This begs the question, how do we get sales and traffic, if we don’t already have sales and traffic?

This is the chicken or the egg problem when it comes to getting more sales on the Etsy Platform.

Now, there are a bunch of ways to do this, including building an email list. (You can find our full process here) or getting a boost from consistently launching more products on the platform (You may want to check out what happened when we launched 30 products in 30 days).

But what if we can’t dedicate the time needed to launch products every day or we don’t yet have an email list?

What happens if we are just getting started?

What happens if we don’t want to turn on Etsy ads?

Is there a way we can use Etsy to our advantage and start driving traffic and sales to our listings without spending any money at all?

The answer is yes.

We can boost new or existing stores and very quickly start to gather traffic and sales to our listings by using one of the built-in Etsy features, which they have recently started to supercharge.

What is that feature, it is the Etsy Sales feature available inside of the “Sales and Discounts ” feature located in the marketing tab of your store.

The Rules:

Just to clarify how we laid out this experiment, we decided to rely on what would only happen by turning on the sale feature inside of Etsy.

This means, we didn’t drive any additional ads either through Etsy or social media platforms and we did not use our email list during the 7 days of this experiment.

The only thing that we did, was turn on the feature for 7 days and let it run its course.

Our Results:

I’ll get into why this works and how to set this up here in just a minute. But before I dive too far down that road, I wanted to share our results.

Although I’m not claiming that you’re going to have this exact outcome, which relies on too many factors to get into here, I am saying that based on our results, this is a great thing for you to try.

With that out of the way, our results for simply turning this feature on and letting it run for 7 days is that we were able to bring in 24 orders and $1, 293.35 in revenue.

One thing I know you might be asking is okay but after the cost of goods and the discount you offered for the sale, what did you make?

Keeping in mind we only used a 10% discount for this test and we typically have around a 40% margin, this would mean that even though we offered a discount on these products, we were still able to net a little over $400 in profit.

Not too bad for a few minutes worth of work and a couple of buttons clicked in the back end, eh?

Why This Works

At this point, you might be wondering why this works, especially with new listings that aren’t established in Etsy’s organic search yet. 

There are three main reasons.

Notifications 

Although this doesn’t necessarily apply to stores that have just launched, for everyone else, this is a big deal.

The first big reason that this feature can work( and is even more powerful for stores that have been around for a little while) is that Etsy actively notifies the people most likely to buy your products.

When you activate this feature inside of Etsy, they send a push notification and or email to everyone who has either favorited a product inside of your store or the store itself.

This notification lets people who are actively already interested in the other things you have to sell. Know that there is a discount.

If people like our store or our products, they are some of the most likely people to purchase from us, and even getting just a few visits from these people can go a long way to boosting the products we offer during the sale.

Even better, if they end up buying that product. We not only get traffic but also sales which will further increase the visibility of that particular product.

Etsy Sales Boost

The second main reason this feature is so powerful is what we refer to as the Etsy sales boost.

Similar to the new listing boost, where you will often see a traffic increase every time you launch a new product, the Etsy sales boost can help bring in traffic in a few different ways. Ways.

The first is that Etsy has a variety of dedicated pages, especially during sitewide events, where people can go to see only products that are currently on sale.

Any time you’re running a sale, there’s a chance you’ll appear on these particular pages and get traffic from outside of the search results themselves.

This means, if someone is browsing this section and is interested in the products that you have to offer, there is a much higher likelihood that they will see your product and not your competitors because they are skipping the organic search results.

Additionally, inside of the organic search results as he gives us more visibility when we are running a discount.

Don’t misinterpret this to say that Etsy gives us favorable placement in search results or anything like that.

We haven’t noticed an overall change in organic placement during these tests, however, Etsy does something almost as good.

If you browse through the organic search results, especially during a holiday weekend, you may start to see what I’m talking about.

Etsy has started putting banners in the organic search result when a product is actively offering a discount.

This will make your listing stand out, be more likely to be clicked on in the search results, and even better, the people who are clicking on it typically convert at a higher rate than other visitors coming from organic search.

What does that mean in English?

Even if we aren’t the top-ranked product, using this feature, Etsy helps our listings stand out, get clicked on more, and convert more.

Deadlines:

The third reason that these feature works is Etsy’s implementation of deadlines.

One of the single most effective marketing tactics is the use of scarcity. Scarcity can come either in the form of limited quantities or deadlines.

Since Etsy does not control the number of products we have for sale, they rely on deadlines or expirations for their implementation of scarcity. Scarcity.

As your sale begins nearing an end, you will see a countdown timer pop-up letting people know that there are x hours remaining in your sale.

Not only will you see this on the product listings themselves inside of Etsy, but also in the organic search results where your products appear.

As we talked about above, anytime Etsy gives our listing an extra little banner, it increases the likelihood someone will click on our listing rather than our competitors.

Additionally, implementing the deadline puts people under a little bit of pressure to make the purchase decision.

Anyone that is on the fence about buying now or later is likely to make their purchase now, so they don’t miss out on the opportunity to get a discount on the product.

This is a massive conversion rate booster in almost every circumstance and is implemented in one of the most powerful ways on the Etsy platform.

How To Setup Your Own Etsy Sale

The setup here, like most things on Etsy, is extremely simple.

If you want to take advantage of this feature, the very first thing you’ll need to do is navigate to your marketing dashboard.

From here, you’re going to look for the “sales and discounts” section.

Once inside the sales and discounts dashboard, you’ll want to click on the “run of sale option.

You’ll be offered to choose either the percentage off or free standard shipping sale options.

I would advocate that you choose the percentage-off option.

From here, you’ll need to set the amount for your discount.

Typically, the more discount you can offer, the better your results will be, but you do not have to go crazy.

For example, for the experiment we are discussing in this post, we only used a 10% discount.

Next, you’ll need to choose if you want the sale to only apply to specific countries, although we typically leave this set to everywhere.

After that, you’ll be asked if you want to set an order minimum.

In the case of trying to generate sales, I would always suggest leaving this to none.

If you’d like to play with the other options, you should be able to limit the sale to people with a certain number of items in their cart or a certain overall order value.

Next, you’ll need to set the date range for the sale.

Although you can set the sale to run for up to 30 days, my suggestion would be that you let it run for somewhere from 3-7 days.

This is a long enough time to see the results, but still, a short enough amount of time that potential customers have to decide whether or not to buy your product or lose out on the discount.

From here, Etsy will ask us to give the sale a name, name it anything you want since it’s just for you and no customer will ever see the name of it.

Once you’ve given it a name, press the continue button to lock in the discount portion of your sale.

Once you have saved your discount, you’ll need to choose whether you want the sale to apply to specific products, specific categories, or your entire store.

The more products you include, the more likely you are to see results, but if you want to limit the options, there’s nothing wrong with that either.

My default recommendation would be to include all of the products in your store, as long as you wouldn’t lose money selling that particular product at a discount.

Quick Recap

Whether you’re just trying to get a nice boost in sales or you’re just getting started, using the “sales” feature inside of the Etsy marketing dashboard is worth taking a look at.

There’s not much we can do in less time and without spending a dime on marketing ourselves that will help us see similar results.

At the end of the day, this is an extremely powerful feature if the products you are selling are being looked for by people on Etsy.

If you haven’t yet, you may want to take a quick look at our article about how to create products people are looking for.