Etsy Site-Wide Sales and Traffic Statistics

There has been a lot of discussion and concern in the etsy forums lately about views and sale levels, so I have put together some graphs based on the pieces of information etsy provides each month in their 'weather reports' in the Storque (including March2010). The graphs should be of general interest too if you'd like to see how etsy has grown over the past three years.


Standard Normal Distribution Plushie by NausicaaDistribution


Numbers for each month have been adjusted to take into account the fact that not all months contain the same number of days (otherwise the results can be misleading). This was done by calculating a daily average for each month then multiplying by 30 to give a general idea of actual monthly levels (not a perfect approach, but I thought it was appropriate for this blog post).

Disclaimer:
I have purposely avoided providing much interpretation of the figures presented here so that people can draw their own conclusions- stats can often be interpreted in a number of different ways. Also, keep in mind that it can be difficult to make predictions for individual cases (ie shops) based on these kind of averages, and to know whether small changes reflect normal variation or 'real' changes. I think the relative measures in the second section are most informative in terms of questions or concerns about sales and traffic (eg average number of sales per shop).
I collected the information by going through each weather report and (after quite a bit of hunting) found a record of the data released by etsy concerning the number of sellers for 2009-2010 on this blog run by DuhBe. If you're making any important decisions based on the data it would be best to check the numbers for yourself.


Basic Measures

Average Number of Items Sold 2008-2010


Average $ Amount Sold 2008-2010


Average $Price of Item Sold 2008-2010
The increase here could be due to an increase in item prices in general (or possibly a trend towards purchasing more expensive items)


Pageviews 2008-2010
(Etsy didn't provide the figures for the missing months)


Number of Active Etsy Shops 2009-2010
Defined as shops with at least one active item, displayed by etsy here: www.etsy.com/shops_sellers.php
The figures in the graph are based on these numbers as recorded by DuhBee


New Listings Added 2008-2010
Etsy reports 'newly listed items' in their weather reports. I don't know whether this includes relisting etc (probably doesn't include all listing activity), so this graph is just intended to give an indication of the pattern of listing activity over time.


Relative Measures

Average Items Sold per Shop 2009-2010


Average $ Amount Sold per Shop 2009-2010


Average Views per Shop 2009-2010


Average Number of Sold Items vs Newly Listed (%) 2008-2010
This graph gives an indication of whether the relationship between sales and newly listed items is changing (if competition for sales were increasing due to lots of new sellers joining the site without a corresponding increase in buyers, the percentage would be expected to go down across time). As noted earlier, this is based on newly listed items, but presumably there would be a strong correlation between newly listed and relists/renewals.


Average Views Relative to Each New Listing Added 2008-2010
As for the previous graph, this is based on new listings. The absolute numbers therefore may not be very informative because a proportion of those pageviews would be views to other pages/existing listings etc, but it may give an idea of the general pattern of the relationship between listings and traffic (including the competition aspect mentioned above).


53 Percent of Statistics are Made Up Cuff Links by Bellamodaartist