It’s that time of year again! The holiday season! For consumers, that means that they are going to be hitting the stores, shopping online, buying more than they ever have, and exploring the goods and services that we as Etsy sellers offer!
As a business owner, this is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) times of the year where you will end up making about 50% or more of your yearly revenue in the last quarter of the year. Since you run an Etsy store, you need to be prepared to capitalize on this opportunity that will set you up for success throughout the entire year and hold you over during the slower months.
In this article, we are going to be talking about our Checklist of things to pay attention to this Etsy Holiday Season!
Let’s Get into it!
Making Sure You Are Ready For Increased Orders
Almost all sellers online who have been around the block will point to the holidays as the biggest time of year for the most revenue.
As long as you have a quality product and a solid brand, we are talking about 3-5X of an increase in the amount of sales during quarter 4.
This means that you as an Etsy seller will now have even more emails and sales flowing through your account and you will need to make sure you keep up.
Many, many, many of the sales that will occur are happening because these sales are gifts for other people.
Since it is the gift giving season, you need to make sure you have processes in place to make sure orders go out the SAME day they are placed if possible. This will ensure that the products get to the customer on time, leads to a great experience, and will have your customers ordering from your shop again in the future.
Grab yourself a coffee and be prepared. If you do not have any processes to make sure shipping and handling happens as quickly as possible, now is the time to start thinking about what you can do.
The last thing you want is delays, angry customers, and Etsy refunds happening left and right. Be prepared, and your Q4 will be a great success.
Make Sure You Are Stocked Up On Inventory
Q4 and the holiday season is insane and if you have never experienced it before, we can bet that at some point, you are going to run out of inventory or materials. This is why it is a great time to start planning how much you will need.
If you expect 3 times as many orders, it may make sense to buy 4-5 times as much inventory and materials.
Why?
Because it is usually better than expected, and if you do NOT run out, you will be far far ahead of ever other shop that does (and potentially scoop up some extra sales because of it).
Not only that, but if you do not use all the inventory in the last month of the year, you still purchased it, and can be deducted from your taxes (we are not accountants, please speak with a professional before doing this).
Make a list of all of the materials that you will need to sell your products and start stocking up a few months in advanced. You will thank yourself when you are in the middle of a rush!
Over Optimize Your Etsy Shop
This is one of the biggest things that you can do to stand out during the holiday season.
SEO shbould be the number one thing on your Etsy Holiday Season Checklist if you want to make the most of it.
If you have an optimized Etsy shop, you will beat out your competitors which leads to more sales.
“but I already optimized my listings”…. I can hear you say!
SEO is more of a fluid thing when it comes to selling on the Etsy platform and before holiday sales really start to kick off, now is the time to go back, and take a second look at the listings that you have out there.
We want to focus on 3 main areas:
- Titles
- Categories
- Attributes
There are a lot of other areas that you can focus on, but I think these are the main 3 that you need to take a second look at and make sure they are really dialed in.
Titles
There are a lot of Etsy business owners who do not have solid listing titles.
You want to make sure that when you are writing a title for your product, you are being both descriptive, but also concise AND using keywords that customers are searching for.
Take a look at other products in your niche, and you will start to see what we mean.
You want to have a title that is both short so that the customer can purchase your listing and understand what they are getting, but also with keywords that are relevant to the listing so that you are showing up first in the search results.
We would recommend that you take a look at some of the Etsy SEO tools that we have written about, as these are the easiest way to get your titles dialed in.
Categories
The next thing to pay attention to is the specific categories for your listings. Just like your titles, you want to make sure that leading up to the holidays, you are taking a second look to make sure that the products you are selling are properly categorized. You want to get as niche as possible here.
Why?
Because this is one of the ways that Etsy will match up your product with a customers search query.
The more niche you go, the more details Etsy will have to match you up with potential buyers, and the more sales you will make!
Attributes
When you want to make sure you have as much product visibility as possible, then you need to double check your attributes before the holiday season hits.
Attributes are sometimes hard for business owners because they will flip flop between genera and category specific attributes
We recommend that you use the most niched down attributes that you can.
The reason for this, is again, Etsy will use this to match up your listings with what customers are typing into the marketplace, so the more niche you go, the better chance you have at having the most visibility!
Social Media Frenzy
Finally, you want to make sure that leading up to the holiday season and DURING the holiday season, that you are on social media and your posting is on point!
Lots of Etsy sellers forget to keep posting when the order flow volume becomes a lot to manager.
Get yourself on Facebook, Instagram, even Tik Tok, and get to posting about your products…multiple times per day.
Yep, you read that right! You want a constant stream of content that is going to be marketing your products to the masses.
Don’t get lazy or skim out on this.
We recommend that before the holidays hit, you plan out a content calendar in advance to make sure that your products are getting exposure every second of every day during the biggest sales season of the year.