I've been featured?!

Today we pause in the photo tips blogging to bring you some current affairs.

As some of you may have noticed, an item from my shop was chosen for the semi-permanent, rotating category features on the Etsy front page (the mint green wood box):

Holy crap, that's me!

Carla716 asked me if I would write a bit about my experience with it, so here you go!

No effort was made on my part to get that spot. It was simply luck. No one from Etsy contacted me prior to the feature, though I did have a sale in June to someone who had the item shipped to Etsy HQ. Maybe they noticed me, maybe they didn't. I did see that Etsy started using a featured spot for "Jewelry: Storage & Organization", and secretly hoped I would be picked, but I never actually thought I would be!

I'm a bit flabbergasted, but thrilled, thankful and overwhelmed with orders at the moment. In the week that I was featured, I sold 12 mint green boxes and 84 (eek!) other items. (More stats below.) I was out of town for four days, and the orders piled up.

Let me tell you, this is why I don't really believe in vacation mode! What a missed opportunity that would have been. I left a note on the shop announcement, in the Note to Buyer, and adjusted the shipping time on the mint green box to 5 days. I also left my shop open when I was out of the country for 10 days in March, and I had a decent amount of sales and zero customer complaints.

One of the things I did to capitalize on the attention was to quickly put together a "blank" listing for jewelry boxes. I have dozens of colors of paint, but I haven't had enough stock to make all the colors to photograph for listings - I mostly stick to remaking colors that have sold and introducing a few new colors here and there. So I staged a bunch of the blank boxes, and listed it with every color I had as a variation.

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This listing was a pretty big hit - I've sold 12 in all different colors since I put it up on Aug. 9.

I also added bit.ly links to my jewelry storage section and a search for "mint green" in my shop. The only links that are clickable within your Etsy listing are etsy.me links. You can "disguise" bit.ly links as etsy.me if you have a (free) account. Make a bit.ly shortcut, and then rewrite it as etsy.me, and it will become clickable in your listing.

Now let's do some stat geeking!

Typically I get 250-300 total views a day (shop and listing). If I'm in a front page treasury, which happens a few times a month, it can be more than 1,000. Since late March, I've been averaging 1-3 sales a day. Keep in mind that jewelry is the #1 seller on Etsy and my items are inexpensive — most are $15 or less, and all are under $25. It's easier for people to click "buy" on something that's $7 vs. $75.


A comparison of stats for the featured item:

Something may have happened in the middle of that graph ...

Out of curiosity, I looked at some stats from last year. In August 2012, I averaged 23 views per day and sold two items. September 2012, 36 views per day, sold 13 items. October 2012, 56 views per day, sold 12 items.

So, I hope that answered some questions you might have about my experience being featured! Ask further queries in comments! :)

Jocelyn | paragraphloop