ETSY make-over

I've hit one year with my ETSY store. This one year milestone is accompanied by a dry spell of orders. What could be going on? Here is the most common feedback that I am given when I ask trusted ones for suggestions/critiques...

- A dark background can be difficult to see the items
- My items are very high quality in-person
- My items are priced too low, which implies they are not as good of quality as they are
- There should be multiple items to show the breadth of my work, in each category

And thus, I am trying something new. Here are my new, very simple business plans...
- Have a regular number of items in the store. Something along the lines of: 12 pillows, 24 button bouquets, 8 coasters, 4 other specialty items. (The items list on the website as 4 wide, so this way, I can always manipulate how the store appears.)
- Have extra listing items ready to be added when someone buys something, to maintain the appearance and flow the site for how I want it.
- Use my light-box to photograph EVERYTHING. Have the main photo be the one with the white background.
- Price everything for sustaining profit for the business....so I can keep doing this!
- Price items based on their quality. Price the "better" fabrics higher, not a standard rate for everything.
- Use item descriptions that are easier to understand, yet also more comprehensive.

We'll see how it goes!

Here's the first most obvious listing change that I've done from this site re-vamp. The top one is what the item used to be and the bottom one is the new "re-vamped" listing.

making a new light box

I haven't made too many sales on my ETSY store lately. I think I'm going on 3 weeks of no sales. Big bummer. On the other hand, it allows (requires?) me to re-examine what I'm doing and to prepare for the "busy" season that I keep being told is coming. One of my biggest issues, I think is the lighting in my photos. After reading a few tutorials about light boxes, I decided to give it a try myself.

The photo on the LEFT is what the lighting on my store shots will look like from here on out, and the photo on the RIGHT is my old icky photography lighting, which was always difficult to edit.

I still need to smooth out the back, but at least the LIGHTING is working out! phew!

Here's the tutorial that helped me the most: DIY Photo Light Box from Ninth & Bird

sketch balls

I just received a text message with this as the text:

Notice of Beacon C.U account suspension.
Please visit www.mybeaconcu.org to solve the problem.

When you go to this site, you see this screen shot:

It's clearly fake. But also realistic looking. Those links at the bottom are dead links.

So I googled this... and lo and behold... Beacon Credit Union put out an alert message on their own website on 09/13/12 warning of this going on. (You can see that alert here.)

The really sneaky part about this is that if you type in that address, but instead use .com instead of .org, you will go to an actual bank website out of Ohio.

I just wish I knew how they got my phone number! For now, I'll have to settle with entering in "you are a horrible person" into their form... (Which then forwarded me to the actual Beacon Credit Union page. So sneaky.)

Look, Mom!

I hosted a group of UU Young Adults over for a Small Group the other week, and my home was really clean for it! Do, naturally, I wanted to take photos to show momma how nice the house looked. What do you think?

7,000 views!

Remember back when 500 views was an amazing feat? I went to check my ETSY store stats yesterday and saw that it was at an even 7,000 views!



Even though this is still a super small "company," I feel really good about everything. I'm hitting a new phase of how to better do my marketing. I plan to post about it when that time comes. For now, I'm just letting all of these ideas marinate.

(And yes, I know that I need to post about the actual dinner w/ Karen and Jay. Thanks for the reminder, Mom!)

<3tdk/tkp