Dot Point Critique: eefink

This post is part of series providing brief critiques for etsy sellers having trouble making as many sales as they would like. Hopefully it will also be useful for others, and you can find a really detailed self-service critique on my blog if you'd like some further tips.

The 'Dot Point Critique' shop for today is eefink.etsy.com

Ok- I love eefink's shop- it's super cute and original, which is always an important factor. The photos are also great, which is often one of the major things holding sellers back. The only thing I'd recommend in relation to pictures is to make sure no edges are chopped off in gallery mode, as this is how items appear on the front page etc.

Number of Products
The first problem that immediately jumps out is the number of products- I always recommend having a minimum of around two pages of products as a good rule of thumb (at the time of writing there were about 7 products listed). This is for a number of reasons- it gives your customers choice, it makes your shop look active and like a complete store, and each different item has different keywords associated with it, so each ones provides a different chance for you to be found by buyers searching on etsy or google. Also, having more products means people might buy more than one thing!

Keywords
Another thing that could be improved is the use of keywords in titles and tags. Colour is something that's missing from both, and buyers and treasury-makers both often search using colour. Both areas could also contain keywords relating to the illustration on the cards- for example the card above says nothing in the title or tags about what the picture is beyond 'comic' or 'cartoon'. You really need to use specific keywords so that buyers will find you in searches both on and off etsy- there are so many items listed that are comics or cartoons, so extra keywords will help you stand out. I would also include the number of cards in each set in the title so that buyers scanning through lots of items don't have to click on the listing to find out how many cards are being offered for that price.

Profile and Pricing
The profile for this shop could contain a little more info to give a feel for the story behind the illustrations- part of the appeal of buying handmade is often that there's a bit of a story behind it. In relation to pricing, to me it looks as though some items are a bit underpriced, although that's obviously a matter of opinion. Some sellers who are having trouble making sales think that they need to have low prices to sell, but this can sometimes actually work against you. When pricing your items, don't forget to take all etsy listing/relisting and PayPal fees into account- I've seen a lot of new sellers who are actually paying for people to buy their items! In eefink's case, I think people would be happy to pay more for such cute stuff!

Promotion
It's immediately clear that the main reason for the lack of sales in this case is very low traffic- nobody's finding the shop! You can see this in the low views recorded for each item. One thing that would help a little is keeping the shop up to date a bit more- relisting some items can help keep them in the etsy search, although whether or not frequent relisting helps depends very much on your shop (I don't relist a great deal for example).

Mainly though, off-etsy promotion is going to be critical here. I can pretty much guarantee that with more products in the shop, building up a substantial facebook and twitter following would start bringing in regular sales- probably quite a lot! Both FB and twitter can be used very effectively, but they need to be done correctly. I would advise building up twitter first, and then using that to gain a facebook following. You can find detailed information on this blog about how to get more twitter followers, and I recommend having at least around 2000, otherwise it's not likely to have much of an effect (and I'd be aiming for at least a few hundred facebook fans).

Hope that's helpful for eefink and other readers! I'll be posting a call for other people who would like a shop critique soon, so keep an eye on the blog (you can subscribe by email above on the right side panel).

If you'd like to help eefink build up a follower base, you can find her here:
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Posted by Morphologica

www.morphologicadesign.com - Laser Cut Jewellery Inspired By Science