How to Make $2,000/Day on Etsy

we are back with Vlad cookson code the owner and founder of tagpop he is the number one pet supply shop on Etsy and he only started with 500 and made over 250 his first year and now he is making over 60 000 a month in 2022. [Music] so now it might take us an hour when you add more products to your store in theory you're gonna get more traffic you can go from a hundred dollars in sales a day to a thousand dollars in sales a day Etsy makes it very simple for for regular people to start selling on Etsy I don't know about you but I am so excited to hear of lad's growth Secrets let's get to meet them hey good to see you it's it welcome back to the Etsy Madness yes thank you so for those of you who have not seen the interview is that we wanted to ask Vlad once again what is tagpub and how did you start so tagpop is a shop on Etsy we sell dog collars we make our dog collars from scratch so we go from pre from design to printing to sew in the straps to finalize in the collar to shipping I mean everything from top to bottom and we started all of that by by buying fabric from Joanne's from the local Joann's with a 100 sewing machine you know sewing straps the best way that it could buying buckles on Amazon and then transitioning over to China's manufacturing so started off humbly and now I'm here a wonderful so what are the crucial skills that you have used to scale your shop um there's a lot of them but I think some of the very important ones is being able to do graphic design being able to create a brand and that's using graphic design and understanding the SEO and the mark you know what is the market demand and my history with building websites even though you don't build it on Etsy but you understand how things work and how you want to present the product with within milliseconds because you only got so a short amount of time to sell your to your customers so all of that kind of you know I've been using to scale on my Etsy shop so okay so you're throwing out these words SEO so what what is that yeah for those of you who don't know what that is can you just briefly describe it so SEO is search engine optimization it is it's how you optimize your listing when you are selling on an algorithm because the algorithm needs to categorize it needs to index you a certain way and it's an indexing meaning or categorize you in a certain way and you need to be able to communicate listen stay with me you need to communicate to the Etsy platform the search engine what you're selling essentially right and there's you got to use words you got to use um the title has to be titled a certain way your description has to be written a certain way to specifically talk about what you're selling so the customer is looking for it you're right there for them okay so someone that's simple just watching this and they're like I want to do something like this can they just start just buying the products and doing themselves and then figure out the SEO stuff later on yep Etsy makes it very simple for for regular people to start selling on Etsy you don't have to be an SEO specialist Etsy provides a lot of resources also you can follow me on my YouTube channel I talk about all of this stuff all the time so make sure to do that link will probably be in the description I hope so I do talk about that and it might be overwhelming and I try to simplify it as best as I can okay that's helpful yeah foreign so when you first started how many products did you have and where are you at right now yeah so we started off with dog bandanas and dog collars right dog collars you're starting you know sewing them on my sewing machine bending as I could also sew them on my sewing machine so I just kind of did that I still sell them now a bandana is not so much I saw a lot more profit margins on dog collars so we've really went in that space uh my mom however she loves the bandanas she loves to sew so she's doing the same tactic that I use in my shop she distributes her keywords by finding different uh fabrics and Joann's that she could sell if it's Easter she's finding Easter Bunnies Easter eggs Easter colors and social Soul bandanas with that same strategy in mind so is your mom part of your business she got she got her own thing in the early days I used to work with her together on the Etsy shop until we start our own but uh again using the same same techniques and we still sell bandanas as much we do that during Christmas time we sell them a plaid bandanas Buffalo plaid and we started selling sublimation tags those we stopped upselling for the reasons that the quality of sublimation on ceramics or any hard surfaces not really good and dogs they scratch themselves and then the phone numbers which is really essential for the ID tags because that's what they're for would be scratched off so we decided to just stay with engraved because engraved just stays there forever so there's sometimes when the quality is just not good enough we don't sell it and I I actually at one point opened up a cat store a cat collar store I closed that down pretty quick because our callers though they were at three quarter inch width they were still too heavy for cats you know it's it's right now mostly dog tags then uh dog dandenas a little bit and dog collars [Music] in your business what is that one single thing that a business owner can start doing today that would help them grow their business exponentially yeah so essentially you want customers to come back right because you have a stream of searches people search and they find you and then there's advertisement you say hey I'm paying money search me they'll click on there and they'll leave and they'll net they they didn't purchase your listing and so what they're going to do is they're going to come back but now Etsy will now suggest that product because they've clicked on it so now Etsy suggesting your product so that's a that's the second way the Third Way is they've bought from you before and they're coming back and that's the cheapest because you haven't spent money on them and they just came to your shop directly so what you want to do is run advertisements if you can you know if you have the budget for it to make sure that you create a quality product you you ship on time make sure you really pursue those good reviews so that they come back because they were in awe of your product but if your product was mediocre they're not coming back awesome so would you say adding more products to your Etsy Shop will increase your revenue or what are the potential dangers of doing so no I I think it's I in fact I talk about this on my Channel all the time uh when you add more products to your store it just by in theory you're going to get more traffic because you're ranking on different keywords you're you're putting yourself in different corners of etsy right if I'm selling a dog collar harness dog tags bandanas those are all keywords those are all corners of etsy that people are going to be exploring and you're you're draining them back into your little shop so a lot of times what people do if they do like a print on demand if they do dig selling digital products you'll have stores that have 3 000 listings you know they'll be just posting as much as they can if it's the digital product you don't actually need to photography or anything like that so that would be a strategy of a lot of shops is really span yourself as much as you can with quality listings of course not just you know quick and dirty listings that really don't convey to the customer but with quality listing if you can and you have the ability to produce the product or digital if you can post this that often that's a great strategy to try to post as much as you can if you can't fulfill those orders or those kind of products [Music] Killers for an Etsy shop that that any business should be absolutely aware yeah that's a good question and that's a very important one that a lot of people don't recognize when they're opening up a shop you cannot do branded things right copyrighted stuff trademarks right yeah you can't do Nike you can't do Marvel you can't yeah and a lot of people do that they'll do baby sharks stickers you know but you don't own the baby shark and in fact my wife she sells onesies uh from home but onesie is a trademark so you have to use bodysuit right so you have to be aware of what is a trademark and what's not like velcro is another trademark that I didn't know about uh but that's but you're just being aware that you don't sell you might get away with three months or four months of sales but at some point that's going to shut you down the second really important one is understanding your capabilities right if you can sell a lot right you can rank on the top of the top but if you can't comfortably or status with satisfaction complete the orders you're going to run into a lot of trouble people are going to complain people are going to leave bad reviews you going to start ranking down so make sure your production and your sales go in parallel right you'll it'll test your production if you increase the sales and you but change them and make sure that you're ready to welcome more orders if you are going to keep growing so what things were you thinking about when you were thinking of scaling your business yeah so I definitely had to think about the future and I need to think about hey what are the things I can do now so that later I cannot struggle with it right I could have stayed buying fabric from Joanne's and just because there's a there's a design that we sold really well and I actually went to every Joann's in Washington yeah yeah of all the Joanne's that I literally drove we drove you know we had to go to like uh Seattle and you know knock out all those because that was selling really well so I I saw that frustration I'm like okay something has to change we gotta if we are going to be scaling I need a better solution so that's what when I came up the idea why can't we just print our own fabric and so I started researching what is sublimation and you know what fabric can we print on and it's polyester and so I I started to look into that more and I bought the printer the problem is I needed a heat press so that you can't print fabric without a heat press so yeah and I had to come up with a jewelry rig system using a basic heat address so I would just print maybe 10 feet by like however wide the heat press was and press I had like a strip of design cut onto the paper cut and then the fabric with the same shape and I just press it hold it for 30 seconds open it and move it press it again so I would just do that and so it was during that time it wasn't very efficient but I knew that I'm going to get a heat press at some point and we're gonna we're gonna roll this much faster but I did needed a solution for my variety of fabrics that I'm going to be selling just out of curiosity what would something like this run a typical person does he need something your size bigger smaller yeah so that's the most expensive thing we have in our shop so if you are robbing this place I would go for that you just need a forklift for that so but it set me back 30 000 well thirty five thousand dollars and uh I did buy that one with cash when we made uh when we made money when we made the money our first full year we like hey I need that heat press so at the end of the year right before you know a year was over we bought the machine put it yeah he's got it set up so that's awesome guys if you want to hear more about how Vlad started his tag pup on episode number 10 on our podcast which is www.upflip.com forward slash podcast [Music] all right Vlad so when you first started what were your total earnings for that year and what are you on going for 2022 yeah so we've been into for two years so we had two years of earnings so the very first one we did about quarter uh three quarter of a million so 750 uh we're on track for 1.5 this year just because

we're now launching onto Amazon handmade and maybe potentially towards the end of the year uh have our own website wow that's amazing I am so excited to hear more about what you guys are doing yeah so what other tools that have helped you grow and scale your your Revenue I think the number one tool that comes to mind is what let me stop you right there because the number one tool for the job is send in blue our valued sponsor for today's video get this scent and blue will have your marketing running like a well-oiled machine whether you're a marketer a small business or part of a sales team sun and blue is an all-in-one marketing and email platform that empowers your business to grow and have stronger customer relationships send in blue will crank out personalized emails captivating SMS campaigns custom landing pages quick sign up forms automated workflows and so much more they even provide personalized support to get your business set up and that my friend is how you get marketing done right better yet try it yourself send in blue is giving up clip viewers a one month free trial all you have to do is head over to the link below and use the promo code that I think should be on the screen right now as I BX upflip be sure to check back in the future videos to see how send in blue is helping blast business wait we're doing another video yeah maybe you'll get the original host next time all right all right so lastly we talked about how you track and how you manage your customers orders can you just briefly tell us about that one more time yeah so I use uh applica it's a 30 party app it's called ship station and allows you to to process orders on a larger scale so come come over here look at this so it looks like there's just a mess right here right there's so many orders how in the world are you going to find it well it's the nice thing about shipstation is we start from that table and we start putting orders in just in a basic order and we scan in that particular order working our way down we scan the top barcode the top barcode is more of an action barcode so it'll add the order into a list in that particular order so when we're printing a shipping labels we'll print in that same order and then we sort the shipping labels into each uh order and then using these little Clips they hold the shipping labels so a ship station like I said allows us to print all of these orders shipping labels at a much more you know Fast Pace we use this much of this amount of pack packaging on the Etsy platform used to take us four five six hours so now it might take us an hour wow so it cuts down the work by significantly and that's just printing shipping labels uh on Etsy would be four or five hours uh shipping printing shipping labels here actually would take us more like 30 minutes just sorting it out scanning it that's that's awesome and I love your long table looks like you made it yourself yeah I had a friend that built this you know so I was getting too busy and I didn't have the time to build it myself I could hire somebody to do it for me so there you go so you probably don't have these kind of skills so just hire a friend who can do it right that's right foreign changed ever since you started and or what does a monthly budget look like for you yeah so on Advertising uh Etsy does allow the maximum of a thousand dollars and I pretty much maxed it out is that a day well we never spend a thousand it's just basically I'm giving uh at CD the say hey go ahead and spend up to a thousand I don't care there's no limit on me but that's the only spends like 200 of that okay so it's like 200 a month or a day a day oh so and uh when people are just starting running advertisement Etsy will only allow you like twenty dollars and you got to grow up to that oh that's smart but even when you put twenty dollars it doesn't mean it's going to spend twenty dollars it might spend 50 cents it might spend two but it'll only expanded if people are clicking on your listing if people are are interacting and it's starting to grow on the algorithm if that's not happening you're not going to spend money on that is there any way you can expedite that say spend my twenty dollars tomorrow I wish but no that that's that's the beauty of etsy is that it gives a fair chance to a lot of people it used to when I just came in you can put a lot of money on this listing and say hey I'm willing to spend a thousand dollars on one listing and it'll shoot you to the top but that gives a an unfair Advantage for those that have money I want to sell and it really is a fair free market on Etsy so it sounds like something recently that they just did a change yeah well it's more like a year and a half to two years ago so just just right after I started they probably saw me and like wait a minute we got to do something else I love it [Music] hey why don't you give us a tour last time we were here so just show us around so right now we have all of our orders out because we're kind of towards the end of the day they're going to be shipped out tomorrow we're just getting them ready for tomorrow we have our printer down here this is where we print all of our designs we print it first on paper the kind of ink we use is sublimation ink which means it's temporarily sitting on there and then once we bring it over here this is a roll to roll heat press uh basically we put our designs on the bottom it covered with fabric and then it goes through the heat press being applied some pressure with heat it transfers that ink over onto polyester it binds to the polyester and that's how we get it those the polyester prints yes and in case if you guys did not uh watch the last video please go back and take a look at it it's amazing what this machine here does all right so wrap here is where we do our straps again it's a mess right now we got really busy in the past week so we got some nice things so we have our strap machines this is where we sew all our straps when we cut at the fabric we store all the straps that we have sewn here in the shelves I built this myself and this is my kind of my workings so it's again a more efficient way to put the straps in pull it out cut however much you need and you got an access for the full library of awesome I love it well you know since last time we were here looks like people are very busy around here yeah so yeah Kudos on that yeah thank you are there any downsides to scaling or did you have any issues or challenges when you're growing your business uh yeah I think I I think every business goes through this but I think inventory is one of the big ones just because you're growing faster than you've sold yesterday so if if you're going to have an increased sales next month your past month's sales the the money that you got from last month are not going to be enough to scale up to your inventory I don't know if that makes sense it's an uphill battle and you're always fighting inventory because you never have enough money so if it was the opposite where you made a lot this month but not enough the next month will be easier because you can buy smaller amounts so you have the income but it's always an uphill battle if you are scaling if you are growing that's a good problem to have so I think inventory has been really a challenge and it keeps being a challenge okay so somebody watching this right now and it's thinking hey I want to scale my business and I'm hearing what Vlad is talking about and I want to make sure I don't run out of inventory and they get so much inventory and at that point you need to store it and what if you don't use all that is there a way to ship it back yeah yeah so my my biggest strategy that I try to use as I really try to Source everything here from the United States the two the things that I do Source from China are like buckles and fabric those are the only two things I Source from China everything else I try to get from the states like that's why we use Uline because if you run out you can just order right there you don't have to store you don't have a storage space now with buckles they're just kind of small you don't need to store a lot of it with fabric I try not to have a pre-printed fabric I have white fabric that I store and then I use it to print the designs that we're selling and that's a big mistake a lot of people have is they buy that minimum order from China or they the minimum order from any manufacturer and it could potentially sit there and not be sold what we do is we are we have the ability to change the fabric and that allows us to not to have to order a bunch of that design we just print a little bit and we'll see if it sells if it doesn't we'll be only print it a little bit that's all if there's a design that is selling a lot well we'll just print a lot of it wonderful and last time you mentioned with Uline you click today and tomorrow it's arriving yeah it's a beautiful service how convenient I love it [Music] so what are some things that the owner can do to scale their business on Etsy yeah so that's very important to know the difference between what you're doing to make some money on the side because some people like to see you know a little make a little hobby side uh side gig but what do you do to make it scalable that's what we want and that's really important to understand are you going to go into a product selling a specific kind of product are you nerding out about you know gloves or are you nerding out about hats but you need to think about can I think about you know clothing or do I need to think about the wedding space or am I looking at Engravings because you need to think about how can you pursue other products with either the machineries that you have or the talent that you have or potentially you know what's your direction for example I'm selling pet products but I'm not just selling dog collars I'm selling Tags I'm selling bandanas we're selling leashes harnesses right we're thinking about not about a single product but a niche and how can we what is our plan to expand with whether Machinery or you know uh product types okay so when you first started is is that what you had mine or did you focus on dog tags only and then you scaled well when I started we just anything that would sell and we we figured like hey let's go into the pet industry and uh let's see what happens and so I like I said I had a sewing machine I'm like let's try some dog collars and then I started to expand but I did have a general in mind I need to make this big because I need to this needs to supply income for me and my family so I had no choice so we needed to scale nice [Music] all right so how did you overcome those challenges that you just mentioned I mean what have you done to improve well I think one of the things is we uh because we're growing taking on some loan wasn't an issue for us instead of uh allocating our resources the money that we were earning into Machinery we thought hey let's lease the machines and then buy the inventory I mean you could have done it the other way but uh that's what we thought hey maybe at least wouldn't be too bad but a short-term lease not a long-term release you don't want to be committed for a long time we only did it for two years okay we own about 30 of the equipment that we have and about most of that equipment will be paid off with by September which I'm really excited but you only make that conclusion if you are growing and you are scaling and you see the potential of your you're not just ranking on one keyword and that's a big mistake people have is they start ranking on one keyword like like for us it was a dog collar and we're like that's it we're set but if I was just banking on that product the moment I'd rank downwards I'd be gone so my my strategy was to spider web my way into Etsy and to be kind of ranking a little bit on a lot and that allows me to if I rank down here that's fine I still keep it consistent because it's going to rank somewhere else nice and that allows us to be confident in getting getting a lease and the other thing is when we buy the inventory we don't pay for the full invoice up front we pay for 30 or half the amount you can't make a deal with your manufacturer okay so you don't have to have a lot of money up front you pay half of it and they start the manufacturing and you save up for the the other half and that allows you to kind of keep moving as you're growing I love it so when you mentioned about the spider so you're basically just growing Lakes so you more have legs as the table stands on exactly it's kind of like the water Strider you know okay to not to sink you have so many different points of contact and that's what we try to do with Etsy [Music] so ship station how does that work with Etsy or is that a different software or do they communicate yeah they they work through an API not you don't need to know what that is but it connects with your Etsy account and it all the orders that are made on Etsy will be then communicated to ship station and you can print the shipping labels on shipstation and it will say completed or pre-transit right when you create a shipping label it puts it in pre-transit right it's it's packaged and it's ready to be transferred it's not in transit yet and so obviously once they scan it then it's now changing its status and that information will then communicate to Etsy which is great and uh so you have traffic valid track information which SC wants because it started doing a star seller program which means you have to do 95 or more should be on time shipping and so you know if you and shipstation will communicate that to Etsy all right so let's go ahead and design an upflip dog collar so we're gonna make a dog collar from scratch we're going to start off from illustrator um I already got a design going all right so what we're going to do now we just sent uh our design over to this computer and we're going to upload it and we're going to go ahead and print it so um usually I print it lining up all the designs so I don't print the whole design all on one roll I try to do it vertically so I can just print many designs and then cut the fabric when it's already on the roll so sometimes it does take time for the printer and the computer to communicate because it needs to send one file and the computer then the printer needs to repeat that several times so that's sometimes the rendering and the trend transfer process does take some time all right so we just finished printing what we're going to do is we're going to we're going to cut it off it's really good we're gonna come over here to the heat press and I found a little strip of fabric we're going to use we're gonna put it right here so then we're just gonna go ahead and send it through all right so we're going to engrave on the front of this Buckle usually we use this templates I have my employees all they need to do is put in uh Buckles in these slots upload the file that goes into the template right there but I'm just going to go ahead and place that in here and we're gonna rock and roll ready here we go and there you go you got your very own upflip collar Nick come over here having it [Music] how do you keep your costs so low and what do you do as you're scaling your business what are you doing to just cut your expenses share some tips yeah so I a big thing is process you have to have a good process if your process takes a longer time you're going to charge more right we don't cut fabric with scissors why because it's going to take us a long time we actually cut everything once everything is pressed we cut it up on a roll we can cut hundreds of yards within minutes right you have to find a better process to create the product if you can improve your process you will reduce your price if you reduce your price you rank to the top so right so it's directly how do you manufacture how do you process it at home and that will then correct directly correlate to your sales okay so tell me this when you get a new employee coming on board how do you measure their performance well it's definitely not on speed uh at first at first it's not about speed it's about them really following instructions can they follow instructions because speed is only inevitable right we talk about a system called slow hand fast hands right so Slow Hands is is during those moments you need to confirm that that's the correct order the personalization is correct the fabric is correct those are slow hand movements fast hands it's taking a collar throwing into the Bible you know so it's kind of funny that I have to mention that like hey this is a fast hand motion throw it in the back in the bin hey this is a fast hand motion throw it in the garbage or uh scan it the scanning is not that hard so having our employees identify fast-hand and slow hand movements allows it to be more and more efficient that's right so is that something that you do do you monitor that exactly well I want to see if they can can recognize that but then because then they're going to naturally do that and that improves the process I love it foreign what keywords are you using that you have found to be very helpful yeah so if when you're selling dog collar the thing about fabric is people have preferences right you're not just buying the dog collar if you want to just buy a dog collar go to Petco and you get yourself a nylon collar but when they're buying something on Etsy they're like well I want a pink polka dotted.com oh Christmas is coming up I want a Santa Claus red dog collar so they're choosing different yeah when we go to the store we're not just buying a t-shirt because otherwise they'd all be black and white right there's some design elements that we're looking for so I think the number one tool that comes to mind is e-rank e-rank is a great platform it's a third-party software that shows you what things are selling well like you go on there and you can look up hey how how are stocks so so yeah so basically it's too easy it's not easy it's simple it's not easy okay you wake up early you work hard but but yeah so you go uh you go on the website you type in dog collar and it'll show you how many searches per month and then you're like oh you know the secondary term what is the what is the other keywords are looking with the dog call you find that like hey pink polka dot being searched with dog calls hey maybe I can sell a pink polka dotted dog collar so there's really good good platform to start and I think scaling only depends really depends and hinges on the beginning what product have you chosen to sell not necessarily like you can sell a really bad product there's nothing that's going to help you scale it you got to begin strongly I think e-rank is probably my favorite software and I want to provide the consumer to to satisfy that keyword that they're searching for and so I use e-rank that I mentioned earlier yeah to find those keywords and I'm typing dog collar and then on the bottom I'm looking through all the keywords that are also being searched with the keyword dog collar and then I start researching it on Pinterest on Instagram what does that word mean so if it's a blush floral what does that mean and so I go on Pinterest and I discover hey it's not a bright pink it is more like this is a blush floral right here all right so that's beautiful it's uh it's not a a hard pink it's more of a lighter pink and the flowers are not roses they're more wildflowers and I discovered all of this on Pinterest on Instagram uh well beginning with e-rank but and then I need to figure out what are the customers thinking about when they're thinking about a blush floral and so I think that's a very important one to understand is you you create a list of all those keywords you want to you want to design for and I either design it myself or I buy the designs online and I make a product you know proper title proper description proper tags for the SEO yeah and I sell it on there all right what is the next biggest thing for tagpop I mean what are your goals that you want to achieve some of the products that we do want to tackle still is harnesses we started selling some harnesses uh we want to do Martingale callers it's a caller that doesn't have a buckle but our big big goals is we want to start to advance into Amazon handmade we want to start building a shop selling on marketplaces are nice but it's nice to build your own brand but that's going to require a lot of time and resources because that water Strider effect we want to go on a macro scale instead of just keywords I love it so last time a while back when we had this interview you mentioned nothing about Amazon it was only Etsy so now you're throwing out Amazon so what's happening tell me about Amazon's trying to compete with Etsy I feel like it so they they had a section of Amazon it's called Amazon handmade so you can if you're handmade if you make handmade stuff you saw on Amazon their fees are a lot more than Etsy so if I sell it 21 22 dollar item their fees are going to be three three dollars and fifty cents okay so it's out anywhere from 10 to 15 percent so much higher higher than Etsy no matter how many people complain about Etsy fees but the the amount of traffic that you have access to is I mean you can go from 100 in sales a day to a thousand dollars in sale today within weeks if you do everything correctly so that it's a big it's a big step and we need to get we need to prepare for that [Music] all right so we talked about rankings so how do you rank outside of etsy like on Google or other searches yeah so so Etsy does uh it does advertise on Google and other platforms but there's nothing you can do about it you pay the advertisement you you know you advertise your listings and then Etsy will try to advertise on different platforms and there's not much you can do to control that I see is that something that you can do outside of that can you you can you can grow you can open up an Instagram account you can do all that stuff you can just link it or whatever but on the platform you really can't do much else about that now do you do Instagram Facebook yeah I do oh I do Instagram we're not really big right now we are uh we just um paying somebody that has a dog and that they're going to be just recording filming them or providing them with product we're just trying to get a natural thing going it's not as big right now uh right now I'm like I said focusing on a lot of other things like Amazon handmade and my own website so excellent [Music] all right so when you have products and you have so many of them there are some of them that just drop in sales and you're like this one's not selling yeah what do you do about that how do you work with yeah so there's different reasons why it might drop one of the things that never ranked up towards the top and it never did well I usually don't spend my time on those I just come up with another product you know there's no reason to try to revive some that didn't work but if it's sold really well like recently we had a pro one of the number one product ranked down and it dropped our sales and I'm like what do I do if I could reduce the price to compete with the the sellers because a lot of times you'll have people that come in with a cheaper price and you ask yourself can I reprise my product is that going to be still profitable for me and then the second thing you ask yourself can I improve my production of speed production right if if somebody's buying and they see that my competitor is doing one to two weeks for filming but I can do it one to two days let's do that yeah right let's get back on top we gotta work hard fight for the Top If the product is a seasonal product and it starts to rank down just let it it's going to come back the same time next year because throughout the year you'll have fluctuations and you need to be aware of that and be okay be a full P saying look it's going to come back that makes sense so on on those items that do drop in price how often do you reduce your your pricing um I try that for a little bit I see you you obviously you look at your conversion rate graph and you'll see that go up and if you start to increase it a little bit and see and look at that conversion graph it's if it starts to go down and your listing starts to rank down well that's your problem you've now discovered that the conversion rate is the reason why your competitors are beating you so you got to find a way to improve conversion yeah you can you can bring the price back up but you've got to add some other value you got to add some better photos bring it to life and let the customer experience if you don't have a video put a video in there a big caution though if you are changing your photos that might rank you down even more so that you've got to be careful about there's so many stories people change the photo and they start ranking down so you got to be careful about that one thank you [Music] so we're seeing that Amazon does have higher fees but why should someone start on Etsy first and then scale to Amazon yeah I think I think Etsy understands the seller better than Amazon Amazon is a company that was like a multi-trillion billion dollar company that they're like oh let's try a handmade up but Etsy was like Hey we're that's where it begins and then it grows up and I think it creates a much more friendly environment for the seller when there's so many unknown you don't know what you know what SEO if you don't know what SEO especially you should go on Etsy right and you're just trying things out and and like I said the biggest ones is the fees got it right Amazon has much higher Seasons well let's talk about the feezon Etsy so right now people are going on strike what for the increase of fees on Etsy but the the increase has gone from five to six point five so it's only a 1.5 increase and people are complaining so oh man but Amazon has up to 15 so oh my goodness eBay is about uh 10 to 12 but etsy's the smallest he's I mean if you're selling a million dollars worth of stuff the the five point the six point five percent will be a big sum yeah and I wish it was free but you know we it's much more expensive to open up a pop-up shop in the mall than even selling on Amazon so yes you got to think of it that way okay that makes sense so if someone goes to etsy.com and they

want to start this business are there tools available for them that they can just start like today yeah no I I think that's one of the amazing things about Etsy it considers that the fact that it's going to be a basic had no experience to somebody that doesn't know a lot about selling or scaling and so they provide a lot of data that they can show you like if you're starting to sell and they're going to show you like hey what's your click-through rate and then you can do a little uh icon above the click-through rates to explain what it is and you know we live in the days of YouTube you can literally YouTube anything they do have blogs about how to go viral on Tick Tock how to promote your product on Instagram so there's a lot of great resources directly on the website for people to use this is so encouraging so anybody watching literally if you're just on spring break from school or if you're retiree and this is something maybe they can just start today that's right yeah [Music] so you're growing your business you're scaling from Etsy to Amazon you're still going big but did you have any mistakes along the process and what'd you do to overcome them oh there's many mistakes I think um one of the biggest ones is I I love to deal with things and I'm good with dealing with machines I'm not good with people and that's the big one so you're building a team and you know how does that person need to be approached right and when you're explaining to them like okay this is what I want you to do today they might be on a whole nother wave than what you are because you're moving 100 miles an hour and they're just starting they just got up they're just you know starting their day so being being aware of that or they might be having some personal issues that you need to be aware of you need to know their strengths their weaknesses position them of stations that are more accurately represent you know what they are capable of so that's been a big one and especially when I started hiring you know you you do a lot with that and not enough with manufacturing that kind of slows the process down and you're obviously spending money per hour because you got them that makes sense foreign one of the things that's nice when you do go on a sale it lets everybody that favored your shop know that you're going for sale so so you might get a flood of people coming to your shop so it's a great way to get you know some sales if people have favorited but also when you're running a sale at you know people just like the fact that they're not paying a full price and so that does give you a little bit of an edge a lot of times what I find people on Etsy they'll do a sale as a static sale and like it's always on sale so it's just like oh you could have paid like this but you're paying that so I try not to do that too much but yeah sales and coupons are a great one also sending coupons to people that have purchased your listing putting it in with your packaging you're saying hey here's a coupon when you come back go ahead and buy it that is cool foreign you have mentioned that you started this in your home yeah so did you have issues with uh storage uh yes a lot so we we wrote it off our whole house rent on taxes because we used our kitchen our very kitchen you said you wrote it off what does that mean to someone listening well just saying like we use the whole house that's just like we used our kitchen table as a packaging station we used our living room as a Mini Storage a temporary storage our main storage was in our you know my daughter's room and she slept with us about during that time yeah so we had a space problem that's why it kind of pushed us out to rent our shop and that's where you said the business grew yeah much better because now we can organize our shop and stations you know with the laser station the the sublimation station the heat price press station so we can organize it that way you know you got your scissors and all the things that you needed for that station so basically what you're saying is you had to change up the station names from the kitchen to the laundry exactly my wife loves it excellent okay foreign to wrap things up what is your number one key tip for Success on Etsy it's a big question but I think the the best advice I can give is be a person that is never satisfied with the current state right always go for forward go always try new things don't be afraid to explore other options right just because you're doing really well on this product and you're gonna say okay that's it this I made it and I'm gonna stay here no keep going forward explore other things explore other keywords have you started Instagram have you started Tick Tock have you tried if you're doing t-shirt have you tried bridesmaids have you tried hoodies have you tried hats you know just keep keep going forward because a posture that is explorative will allow you to survive when the markets are fluctuating because it's going to fluctuate and if you're just happy in your little corner you're gonna die down if you're not growing if you're not pedaling your bike you're going to fall over right so it says you got to keep moving all right you guys well that is it thank you so much for watching and I sure hope you enjoyed it be sure to hit that subscribe button button and like and before you go hit that link in the description below to receive your 20 off of Simply Safe home security systems till next time

2022-08-22 21:13

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