Last week, I hit 300 sales in my Etsy shop(!), but it got me wondering, “am I focusing too much on number of sales?”
If you’re an Etsy seller, chances are there’s one number you notice again and again, and that’s the number of sales a shop has. Whether its your shop or someone else’s, its easy to get caught up in the obsession. We’ve all been to a shop that has more sales than ours, and wondered “why them and not me?” Or perhaps you’ve given yourself a goal like “reach 300 sales this year”.
Its easy to understand why. Number of sales is the only public statistic Etsy makes available about each stores’ sales figures. So its very easy to get into a comparison game with other sellers, and set number of sales as a benchmark itself.
But while these numbers are certainly interesting, they actually tell you very little about a business’s success. First off, average dollars per sale is important. Ask anyone who’s ever worked in retail. Its (usually) far less work to pack up one $100 sale than ten $10 sales. And its very difficult to compare your number of sales to another shops number of sales if you have grossly different selling points.
Even more important than ADS, what you should really be measuring is profit per sale. Having five hundred sales doesn’t help your business if you aren’t making a profit on each sale. While it may be more fun to make that $100 sale, if it costs you $99 to make the object, you aren’t making much profit. Meanwhile, you could be making $5 profit on each of those $10 items, making them more profitable in the end.
So, while it can be fun to watch your number of sales climb, resist the urge to use that number to compare yourself to other Etsy sellers. In the end, that number does very little to tell you about the financial health of a business, whether its yours or someone else’s.
So, so true. For those of us that have our own website, do shows, sell wholesale and consignment the number of sales are way off. It is easy to compare yourself to others there. I try to keep it all in perspective. Thanks for the post. This is something that I think about too.
I’ve definitely experienced the frustration of looking at someone else’s # of sales on Etsy and feeling bad about myself, but Kerry Alice is so right, for those of us who have many other avenues of sales, it doesn’t mean that much.
Numbers are of course very useful for measuring your own goals, but only against yourself, not against others. I just passed my 100th sale on Etsy, which is great considering how little I actually put up in the shop. But those numbers don’t come anywhere close to reflecting my actual sales for the year.
Amen! It was so liberating to realize that # of Etsy sales don’t matter. I think it’s a little odd when people congratulate me on my _00th sale because I passed that number a long time ago if you really knew what I sold elsewhere. Sometimes it bothers me that Etsy even posts the number. I wish we had more control over our Etsy shops – especially the feedback portion.
Thanks for the great post again.
So true, profit per sale and increasing ADS are so much more important than # of sales. I’ve spent 14 years in retail and rung up thousands of $10-25 purchases. Often those $10-25 customers were more demanding and more time consuming than the customer that was spending 10x more $ on products that had great profit margins.
Another important thing to consider are repeat purchases. If you’re not retaining customers, it will hurt your profitability. It costs significantly more to attract new customers than it does to maintain your current customers and increase their ADS with you.
For great tips on how to improve your ADS check out Secret Service: Hidden Systems That Deliver Unforgettable Customer Service and What’s the Secret? To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience both are by John DiJulius
I think about my number of sales so much! If I see a seller who looks interesting or is featured somewhere, usually in the QYDJ, I usually look at their sales and say, “Damn, that’s a freaking lot.”
Glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks about this!
Ditto all. I often find myself obsessing over the numbers and then I realize I have just wasted an hour of time over something totally counter-productive! Thank you for letting me know I am not alone in this secret compulsive act….
Being fairly new to Etsy and so far having just 1 sale – I do this same thing. So I try to remember my other areas of business where I have already built things up and just keep it in perspective that I am new to this aspect of business and learning everything I can manage.
congrats on your # though;-)
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