How To Optimize Your Etsy Shop For Holiday Traffic: 3 Quick Tips

As the weather starts to get colder, days start to get shorter, and we roll full speed into the fourth quarter of the year, I wanted to take just a few minutes to share with you three simple tips to optimize your Etsy shop for the holiday season.

Although many of these tips can be used throughout the year to keep your sales at a high level, they become even more powerful when they are combined with the extra traffic and purchases that happen during the holiday season.

Adding More Products:

The first tip to help to optimize your Etsy store this and every holiday season is to make sure you are adding additional products to your store.

As we’ve discussed in the past, having more products that someone can purchase from you allows us to have the potential of an increased customer value.

Not only can it increase our average purchase, especially when people are giving gifts and see multiple things that the person they are buying for may enjoy, but also in terms of bringing back repeat customers.

Just because the fourth quarter is a gift giving season, doesn’t mean people aren’t also looking out for new things that they like to buy for themselves.

When we couple Etsy’s new features designed to put stores more directly in contact with their previous customers and the ability to bring those customers back to purchase additional things they might like, it quickly becomes obvious that adding additional things to our store is an absolute must.

When we talk about adding products, we are talking about not just adding new designs but also new product types.

By taking existing designs and putting them on new kinds of products, for example, taking a pillow that sells well and turning that same design into a piece of wall art, allows us to take something that’s already working and test it very quickly.

Additionally, we should try to add at least a few new designs per week to please our existing customers and to start to expand the overall customer base.

Lastly, each time you add a product (whether it’s a new product type or new design) you get what we refer to as the Etsy bump.

Since Etsy is constantly testing and tweaking its search engine’s algorithm, they tend to give new products a chance to rank very quickly to test whether they will sell or not.

Additionally, we’ve seen overall increases in traffic from Etsy search when we consistently add products.

You may want to check out the article we did recently on how we launched 30 new products in 30 days and the insane results that it had for our store.

Add A Free Shipping Option

The second major tip is to include a free shipping option.

Although I’m an advocate of offering free shipping, with some qualifications, all the time, it becomes even more important as we move into the fourth quarter. Quarter.

The sad truth is with competitors on every platform and free 2-day shipping becoming an expectation of customers everywhere, there is a large segment of customers who will always choose the product that offers free shipping.

Although you can feel free to figure out a shipping policy that works best for you, our typical recommendation is that any orders of $35 or more should include free shipping.

Not only will this help you capture a larger number of sales, but it can also have the added bonus of increasing your card value because customers will add a second or third product to get to that $35 mark.

Lastly, the biggest concern that we see when it comes to offering a free shipping option is people are worried about the cost of shipping eating into or completely taking away their profit margins.

It’s better to offer a higher-priced product with a free shipping option than it is to offer a lower-priced product with a paid shipping option.

It may sound counterintuitive, but offering free shipping and building the difference into your price can result in a higher conversion rate and more sales for your store.

Turn On Etsy Ads

The third tip for optimizing your sales for this holiday season is to turn on Etsy ads.

For some reason, Etsy ads can be a bit of a controversial topic for Etsy sellers.

The fact of the matter is Etsy runs on two main factors: traffic and sales.

If we are lacking, traffic, we may likely never get sales, especially during a season. That’s as busy and competitive as the fourth quarter.

Additionally, even just a few visits to your listings can start to increase their placement in Etsy’s organic search.

Now, don’t take this as me advocating for you to run Etsy ads on every listing with as much money as you can afford to light on fire.

My general suggestion is to not run them on every listing and focused on either your highest margin or your most popular products.

Obviously, running ads for your highest-margin products allows you to more easily run more profitable ads.

But why do I suggest running them on the most popular products even if they don’t have the highest margins?

It’s easy, as I mentioned above, Etsy runs on traffic and sales.

Even if the margins of your most popular products aren’t as high, the additional traffic will result in additional sales, which will result in additional traffic in the form of Etsy organic traffic.

It’s this flywheel that can lead to extremely fast exponential growth for your Etsy shop.

At the end of the day, you don’t need to spend a ton to get great results out of Etsy ads.

We typically suggest that you start with as little as five or so dollars per day and then scale up from there based on what you see inside of your ads reports.

If you’ve been on the fence about trying Etsy ads or you’ve tried them in the past and didn’t have a ton of luck, this is the time of year to invest in Etsy’s advertising platform.

It’s one small thing that can give you a massive leg up in the most competitive portion of the year

Bonus: Use Etsy’s Sale Feature

Before we close out, I wanted to give you one quick bonus tip.

We need to be doing everything we can to stand out and make our listings pop during this time of the year.

If you aren’t already taking advantage of Etsy’s sale feature, this is something you need to add to your mix right now.

If you’re not familiar, Etsy gives you the ability to mark either your entire shop or individual listings as on sale.

As the store owner, you’re able to set the timeline and discount associated with the sale and in many cases, even a small percentage discount can have huge results.

The reason for this is that Etsy gives a bit of a boost to listings that are on sale.

They do this in two different ways.

First, they seem to give a little bit more favorable placement to listings that are currently on sale (just like they do when a listing is brand new).

This means we’ll be showing up more in organic search without having to do anything else.

Additionally, Etsy gives us special search features, like countdown timers that appear on Etsy’s organic search page.

These additional features make our listings stand out even more than they otherwise would resulting in more clicks and more potential sales from Etsy’s organic search.

Lastly, Etsy also shares that things are on sale with people who have previously added the new on-sale items to their cart but have not purchased them yet.

If you’ve never played with this feature, take a few minutes to dig through your catalog and find out which products have the most at the carts and favorites, and try putting a three to five-day sale on those products.

I promise you’ll be amazed by the results.