Week 15 Update on The Science of Renewing Your Etsy Items



Cuff links by MetalsinTime on Etsy

 Back in February, I posted an initial update to show the amazing success I was finding by playing the Renewing Game, as outlined by my girl Steph at nerd JERK.  It has now been 15 weeks since I began renewing items at strategically planned times every day, and I wanted to see how the numbers were looking thus far. 

To review briefly, I used Google Analytics to determine when I was having the most traffic to my shop, and then I scheduled different items to renew during those times using http://www.statsy.org/.  That's all I did.  It's that simple.  For those of you who aren't familiar with how Etsy works, when you do a search for a particular item, your search results are sorted in chronological order by the most recently listed item first.  Thus, to get the most exposure, you need to make sure your items are showing up first, and you can do this by renewing your items.  While you do pay to renew an item, the same price you'd pay to initially list an item ($0.20 per item), the return on your investment can be extremely high.

Why is this important? If you choose not to renew your items, you run the risk of falling deep in the search results and never being found.  Each listing on Etsy "buys" you 4 months time.  If you've got items in your shop that were listed 2 or 3 months ago, the odds of having those items seen can get really low.  If you're in a popular category, you might not get seen at all, as Etsy will only show the first how-many-ever thousand items in a category!

I've heard many sellers flat out refuse to renew, just because they simply don't want to spend the extra money, or feel its Etsy's way of ripping you off.  If you fall into this category, keep reading.  I've got evidence to show this renewing can actually work to your benefit!

For this comparison, I looked at the last 15 weeks that I've been strategically renewing (January 1 - April 16) to the previous 15 weeks (September 18 - December 31). 

Here are the cold, hard facts:

Item views:  increased by 161%
Revenue (aka money made!):  increased by 206%

Is that incredible, or what?! Its also interesting to note that there was 1 entire week in March where I didn't renew at all.  I was on vacation and didn't want to shut the shop down, but didn't want to encourage a high number of sales either :)

Would you like to see similar increases?  I firmly believe this will only work well for you if you have a sufficient number of items in your shop, if your item descriptions/tags are already fantastic, and if your item photos are great.  If you're already there, take notes on Steph's article, give this a shot and see where your sales go!

Renewing Success! Preliminary Results......

Its been three weeks since I implemented the strategies outlined in nerd Jerk's article about being smart when planning your Etsy item renewals.  Even though its still early in my experiment, I was eager to see if it was working so far.

I ran the numbers comparing the three weeks of my experiment (January 19 - Feb 10 ) to the previous three weeks (December 28 - Jan 18), and was surprised to see that it *IS* working, even after just three weeks!  While a lot of my Etsy friends are reporting a dip in visits and sales, I'm experiencing an increase in both.

Here's what I did:
-Determined my highest traffic hours of the day using Google Analytics
-Used http://www.statsy.org/ to set at least two items to automatically renew each day during my peak traffic hours
-Edited most of my listings to cross promote my items by including a link in the beginning of each listing to a similar shop section or matching/coordinating items

Here's how it went:
-My unique visitors have increased by 11%
-My page views have increased by 14%
-I saw a 38% increase in the number of first-time shop visitors

Here's how that translated into sales:
-My number of sales increased 200%

-My revenue increased by 65%

WOWZA!!!  Yes, it is still early, but I'm thrilled to be seeing these statistics thus far in my process.  I'll definitely keep analyzing.  I also learned something about my peak times, which happen to be around noon and then again at 7pm.  I saw better results when I only renewed items during the noon hour, as opposed to splitting them between noon and 7pm.  I now only set my items to renew during the earliest peak hour of the day.  However, when I renew items very early in the day (at say 8am instead of waiting until my peak time of noon), I had lower shop/item views.  In summary: renewing early in the day doesn't necessarily bring more visitors for me, but renewing at my first peak hour of the day does bring in more visitors, even if that happens mid-day. 

Has anybody else been trying this experiment?  How has it been going?  If you haven't done it yet, are you planning on it?