How To Sell On Etsy Using A Print-On-Demand Business Model

1. Introduction: Whether you're looking to start a new side hustle, or have always dreamt of becoming a business owner. There's never been a better time to jump into it and begin selling with Etsy. Hello everyone. My name is Julian and I am a small business owner, and I also run a small YouTube channel as well. I've spent the past two years running multiple Etsy stores. Were a few of them individually reach in six figures, and I'm still running them currently to this day. In this class, I want to show and teach you all the steps that there are two, creating a successful Etsy store and hopefully begin making sales as quickly as possible. I hope this class will not only inspire you to begin selling on Etsy, but I also hope it will open your eyes to the broader opportunity to making money online. And now freeing it really can be once you receive your first check from online income, if you've ever doubted yourself when it comes to starting a business or trying to make money online for the very first time. I can assure you that there's never been a better time and it's never been easier, especially with Etsy where the whole platform is user-friendly and so easy to navigate with this class, I will cover the whole process in setting up your Etsy store from start to finish in as much detail as possible. As I know. It can sometimes be this small things and this small details that throw us off. I will also covered the print on-demand of business model as this will be the method that I intend to show and demonstrate in this class. I hope you can follow along and take notes or even create your Etsy store alongside the video as we progress through the steps, this way you can fully experience the process in real time to your learning. I'm really looking forward to beginning this journey with you. And I'm even more excited to hear about the results that you're going to achieve from selling on Etsy. 2. Etsy & Print On Demand: Welcome again to the class, and I just want to thank you for joining me here and for making that very first step in creating your own successful Etsy store and online business. Now, just before we get started and jump right into it, I do want to let you guys know that you can find the class workbook under the projects and resources tab. This will help you if you intend to create your Etsy store alongside the video and as we progress through the steps. And it can also help you if you intend to create your Etsy store at a later date. That way you can head back and reference any information or notes that you've taken down. Let's get started with the basics and the foundational information that we need to know before we can actually go ahead and become a successful Etsy seller. So firstly, if you haven't heard of Etsy before, it's basically in e-commerce website that specializes in handmade goods, vintage items, and craft supplies, which makes it a very unique selling platform to be on, as they're currently the leading e-commerce website for these types of products. They are also very well-known for their support of small businesses, as most of their sellers are in fact small business owners. Or they either sell on Etsy as a side hustle as a way to support that income. And this makes for a perfect opportunity to start your online business journey through Etsy, where everything is relatively straightforward to open up to your store and begin selling. And if you've never had a chance to browse around on the Etsy website, I'd highly recommend that you do this as well. This way you can become familiar with the style of the website and the navigation as well. And don't worry if you can't get to grips with the website gesture because I will be showing you guys exactly step-by-step how to open up your store and how to get everything up and running. Next, let's talk about how it is that we're actually going to intend to sell on Etsy because of course we have to have some form of a product to sell, whether this be physical or digital. In this case and this class, we are going to be looking into the physical products. So for this, you can sell handmade goods which you make herself, or you can sell vintage items. But in my personal opinion, the easiest and most effective way that we can self is called products is through a print on demand business model. And if you haven't heard of print-on-demand before, or maybe you've only heard a little bit about it. It's essentially a way of fulfilling products directly from a manufacturer who were either print or produce your product as soon as you receive the order and then you send it off to them. They will then have it packaged up and then shipped right out to the customer. And you will never actually have to touch the product at all. So of course, the great thing about this business model, the fact that we never actually have to hold any larger amounts of units or stock. And we never actually have to handle the order before it's shipped out and received by the customer. And we don't have to pay out or invest any money into volumes of stock. We only have to pay out once we actually receive an order, by which point we're basically just taking a portion of the money from that order and then having it put towards the fulfillment of the product. So essentially we're not actually having to pay out anything from our own pocket. So they really are plenty of reasons as to why this business model is my personal favorite. But the main benefit is the fact that it's a great cash-flow in business model with very low overhead and it doesn't take much at all to get started. The reason that we're actually able to sell on Etsy is because technically the products that we're having printed by the manufacturer or handmade goods. And by this, I mean, we're not selling anything that's mass-produced that comes straight out of a factory in China. Everything that we're going to sell has been handmade and made to order based on the designs that we're going to send to the manufacturer. And they're not gonna have any sort of barcodes, SKU numbers or identification numbers either. So they really are handmade goods. So for the purpose of this class and the examples that I'm going to be showing you, I will be using the print on demand website called Print Full. And just because I'm using this option, it doesn't mean you have to as well, just knowing that there's plenty of other options and I'll actually make sure to list them down in the projects and resources tab. That way you can check out all the other options down there as well. Now that should cover the essential and foundational information about Etsy and the print on-demand business model before we can obviously then go on to progress to the other steps. And I just want to quickly thank you for bearing with me this far. And I do apologize for those of you who may already know a lot about the things I've just mentioned. So I really do hope that you guys enjoyed the first section of this class. And this is where we should actually begin to take some action and put things into place. And then hopefully we can get your Etsy stores up and running in no time. 3. Preparing To Open Your Etsy Store: Okay, so for the first part of this class, we are going to be talking about the preparation and the process that we need to go through before we can actually open up our Etsy store. And then once we've established that, we can then begin these steps to open up my Etsy store. So we first need to understand a few things about how and what we intend to sell and how we imagine our store would look. Knowing these things will set you will store up with a great foundation and a clear vision, which are actually make the remainder steps in this class ten times easier and more straightforward to encourage a deeper understanding and full process for this section, this is where I want to introduce to you guys to the class project. As I know, this foundational step is, without a doubt, one of the most crucial and beneficial in the beginning stages. So for the class project, I'm going to ask you to identify and write down a few things for each of the following. Firstly, I want you to identify the product or products that you intend to sell. And for this part, you can write down as many as you want. But I would actually highly recommend that you keep this number as low as possible. This way you can really niche down into your category and tailor your Stuart's that one specific products. And not to worry if you have loads of products that you really want to sell, you can always create your first store around one of the main products that you really want to sell first. And then we can always come back to this at a later date and create another store or on our third store around these other products that you wish to sell. Secondly, I would like you to spend some time actually browsing through and researching your product niche on Etsy. And then once you're familiar with your product category and niche, and once you've actually found the search results that relates to your product, I then want you to begin writing down the top five products or listings that you can find on those search results that you think stand out the most. I then want you to do the same thing again, but this time I want you to list the top five competitors or stores within that niche. Once you have identified the top five products and the top five competitors, all stores within your product niche. I then want you to extract as much information as you can from them by reviewing and assessing their stores and their listings on the main things that I would recommend that you take note of and extract are things such as the keywords in the titles and their descriptions, which will help with the SEO, the title arrangement itself. So this could be how the keywords are actually arranged without their title looking too wordy, the listing images. So how professional do they look? What are the arrangements of these images, and are they real images? A mock-ups. So you need to question those things as well. And again, with the store images and the banners, other logos, assess those and see how you can make yours better and look to see what sort of style they're using base on the product niche that you guys are in as well. Also consider the layout of these stores as well. So by this, I mean, you want to review how it is that they are arranging their products on their pages. How they're also laying out their collection tiles as well. And just see how well organized and easy it is to actually navigate around these stores. And another big one that we can also look into is the pricing options and the buying options from some of these products. As this would typically be a reason as to why a customer chooses one product over another, although they may be the same, it could literally be a difference in the pricing options, the sizing options, or any of the other buying options. So this is another one that you want to make sure that you're aware of, especially within your product area and your niche. And of course, there are plenty of other things that we can review and we can research into to ensure that our Etsy store is optimized as possible. So while do is list a few things down in your workbook that you can also spend some time looking into and reviewing. So again, for this project, I want you guys to list out the top five products that you can find within your niche. The top five competitors or stores within your product niche as well. And then try to write down five things for each review point, whether this be good or bad about the store or the listing, just make sure you put in some sort of bullet points or nodes of information. This way you can reference it back. And when you go to create your own Etsy store, you know exactly what you should be doing and what to avoid as well. Once you've done that, you should be ready to go and you will have a much greater foundation when it comes to starting and building your first Etsy store. So I'm really looking forward to the next section of this class. This is where we will go ahead and open up the Etsy stores and get things going and really put things into motion. 4. Opening Your Etsy Store: Okay, So now we're gonna be moving on to the store creation process, which is where we're actually going to go ahead and open up our Etsy store. And hopefully by this point, you already have an idea as to what products you intend to sell. This way, it will help you when it comes to open up your Etsy store and give you a good sense of direction and for the purpose of this class. And to give you an example, I'm actually going to go ahead and create a clothing Etsy store, which will be tailored towards entrepreneurship and the hustle niche. And here are hopefully sell some hoodies, t-shirts and caps and things of that nature. And again, I will be using a print on demand supplier called printf full, but this doesn't mean you have to use them as well. You can use any of the others that you wish. The only reason I'm going to use printf is just as a way to show you and demonstrate the creation of my Etsy store. So don't feel like you have to follow along and do it step-by-step as I do, you can obviously then take the information from the steps and follow along based on your own supplier. So first things first before we just go ahead and sign right out to Etsy, we first need to actually have an idea as to what sort of name we want for our store name before we do sign up. The reason that I actually bring this up well, before we even get started in signing up is because you actually want to know what your store name. Well, before you do get started, this way, we can actually create an email address that we use to sign up to Etsy. But this e-mail address, we want it ideally to be as professional as possible. So once we've identified our store name, we can then actually create an email address as tailored towards this store name. This way, it really does look as professional as possible when a customer does come along a message just through directly through our e-mail, rather than it being our personal e-mails. They will first then contact the business or store email, and it will look so much more professional. So for this, I would actually recommend you spend some time and actually sit down coming up with some new names and some words that you wish to use fewer new store name. And basically just come up with a list as many as you can, and then we'll pick out a few from there. So once you've established a good, solid list of potential names that you would like to use. This is where we can then start to select our view and then filter them. And so we get to the main store name that we're going to use. And the way that we're going to do this is by using a website called brand snack.com. And what this will allow us to do is actually check the availability of all of these store names that we've listed. This way we can actually filter through and see which ones are available. From there we can make our final decision. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to show you guys an example here. Now I'll pull up the website for my new clothing store that I'm gonna be setting up for this class. I really liked the name of valor as it basically means courage in the face of battle or in the face of danger. And I really feel like this relates a lot to the knee shot I'm trying to target, which is entrepreneurship. As I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs are actually dealing with a lot of heavy tasks and projects they need to tackle and battle every day. And basically that is the direction that I want to take with this Etsy store and this clothing store because I really do like the name balance. So hopefully we can pick up the name on this availability. And if we can't, all I'll do is just change up and try find another variant. As I really do think there's a great correlation between the name and its meaning and the products I intend to sell. So I really do recommend that you guys tried to find a name that links quite well to your products as well. So what I'm gonna do here now is type in the word valor into this website. And we'll search to see if it's available. And we'll give that a couple of seconds to load up. So after around ten to 20 s of letting the website run the search results is come back and told me that the word valor is actually available on the Etsy website. But if you guys do happen to really like a name that you want to use for your Etsy store and not available. So say in this case that battle wasn't available because I'm selling clothing. What I could easily do is just add Valla clothing onto the end of the store name. And I'm sure this will come up with, this is something similar as to what you can do as well. So if you really are attached to a name that you think has a gray meaning behind it. And it has a great links for the products that you're intending to sell. I'd advise just adding in some other variant keywords as clothing store or if you're selling mugs, add mug into the name as well. But now that I've actually just had a little think about it, I actually really like the name valid clothing versus just Bella because if someone was to come across the name valor as a store name on Etsy, that really could mean anything. I actually quite like this as a store name, so I probably will go ahead and use Biola clothing. And now we're going to move on since I've established my new store name, I'm actually really happy with it. So from here, we're going to head over to create a new e-mail address that will then be used to create our new Etsy store. And also bear in mind that this e-mail address will know only be used to create your Etsy store, but it will also be linked to any other business. Kelsey, you have the Cray or social medias. So it really is a great way of not only setting up your Etsy store and having a professional look to your business and your brand. But it's also a great way of actually organising or the business material and the emails that you need to handle. I would highly recommend that you do this each time you set up an Etsy store. So if you are intending to make multiple stores, I would highly recommend that you have a designated e-mail address, each one of those stores. That way you can just compile and organize everything a lot easier. So anyway, for this part, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to be using Gmail to sell my new e-mail address because I know it is just generally the most easiest and convenient way of setting up a new email. And just as a quick side note, seeing is we're already on this topic. If you guys did actually want to own that domain name for your store brand or your name. You can do so by going to somewhere like GoDaddy. What I mean by this is this used ballo clothing as an example. If you wanted to own the email address that says sales at Biola clothing.com. You can do that by purchasing that domain and then actually setting up your email that way. And I would actually recommend that you guys do this if you wanted to own your own website or your own Shopify website, be on Etsy as well. So I would look into that if you are looking for a longer-term plan, but if not, I will just stick to the normal Gmail address, which we can do for free. And just for the purpose of this class, I will be sticking to the free version. So I will just be going ahead and creating a normal Gmail e-mail address. So one way to do is quickly go ahead and get that all set up and then I'll check in with you guys. This all done and we can then talk about the next few steps. So I wasn't actually able to get the exact same handle for my email address, which is Ballard clothing. So I didn't have to adjust it slightly and add in some other words. So you can use things such as sales or support if you do happen to run into the same problem as well. So if you can't get the exact same handled donate that stop. You just add in an extra word or two because it will still look highly professional. But anyway, let's move on and let's actually go ahead and set up our new Etsy account so we can open up our new store. So first things first, what you're gonna wanna do is open up the ETC homepage. Once you've done that, we're going to scroll right down to the bottom and we should see a tab which says cell. We're then going to click on the button that says sell on Etsy. And then we're going to be greeted with a new page. So from here, we're going to click Get Started. And there will be greeted with a pop up, which is where we're gonna go ahead and insert our new Gmail address or e-mail address. So if you give me a moment, I'm just going to type in my email address and then I'll see you in the next step. Then once you've put in your email address, you will then be asked to put your first name in and create a password. Once you've done that, we can click Get Started once more. And this is where we will then start to go through the first initial steps. The first step is going to be the shop preferences. And this will basically come down to your own circumstances and where your shop will actually reside. So you won't need me to tell you much about it, but you basically just need to put in your shop language, your shop country. You will shop currency and then they'll ask you a little bit about how or what best describes you as a sell out. So wherever you're gonna be doing this full time or if you're gonna be doing it part-time, then moving on to the second step, this is where we're actually going to have to put in the new name for our store. Luckily, we've actually already done their research and we've already put in the time to know what we want. So cool our store. So most people, when they actually do open a Etsy store, they'll get to this point and then they'll rush to think of a new name or a store name as they just want to get it over and done as quickly as possible. So lucky for us, we've actually gone with a calm approach and we've actually managed to think about it. And we've given ourselves time to know what we actually wanted to call our store. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to put in my new name and it should let me know. And there we go. So as you can see is available. So I'm gonna go ahead and click, Save and Continue. Now for the third step, which is essentially where as the one used to go ahead and create your first listing. But I wouldn't worry about this too much. The way I want you guys to actually approach this step is by going for it in sort of like a draft and mindset. So I want you to go for it and fill out as much as you can based on what you know and what you're going through, intend to sell. So in my case, I'm going to create a listing for a t-shirt. So I'm going to make it very drafts. So I'm going to put in T-shirt, hassle clothing entrepreneur. So I'm basically fill it out as broadly as I can because what we're actually gonna do is, um, later on down the line in the class, I'm actually going to go through a whole section and explain to you the best way of actually optimizing your listings. So just for this step, so we don't get caught up in it. We're just going to go over this is drastically as possible. I've just finished up with my draft Etsy listing here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to run it through with you guys this way. You can get an idea as to how you can do yours or if you wish to replicate mine based on the products that you intend to sell. So first things first, we have the photos. So Etsy actually requires that you upload at least one photo. So why did is I just went to Google and found an image of just a plain T-shirt and uploaded that just as a reference. So it's all correlates to everything else. So once you've done that, we can then move on to the title. So just for now I've caught Entrepreneur Hustle clothing, t-shirt. I may add more to it, but I'll leave it as that because like I said, is just a draft listing. And then what you're gonna wanna do is when it comes to. What about this listing? You're going to want to take another company or person, then a finished product and made to order. So in this case, if you are going to be using a print on demand supplier, you have to stay that another company or person is producing these products for you. Otherwise, Etsy can potentially shut your store down if they find out that it's not actually handmade goods and it's not coming directly from you. So just don't lie to Etsy because they will find out so be as authentic as you can when it comes to these sort of things. Then of course, in my category I'm going to go for t-shirts. So obviously this applies directly to the products you intend to sell. So make sure you take the right thing and then moving on down, we do have some optional boxes that we can fill out. Like I said, this is a draft listing. So I'm just gonna go over this very briefly because we are going to come back to create a more in detailed listing later on in the class where we really aren't going to blitz the whole thing and make sure it really is optimized and perfect. Because at the moment, while we're going through these steps to get our Etsy store open it really, we don't really have enough time to go through this and optimize it the best that we can unless you've really do dedicate a whole day where you can fill this out. So then moving on down again, we have the renewal options. You want to take that as an automatic and it's a physical product that we are selling. And then I've basically just copied a brief description from Print Full about the product I'm selling. So again, I will come back to this to fit out properly. And then here we have the production partner. And you will have to fill this out if you are using a print on demand supplier. Because if you do find out that you're using a print on-demand supply and you haven't told them they can instantly shut your store down and they can suspend it. So I'd recommend that you really do fill out everything and be as authentic as you can. So here you can see that I've put print fall. I'll show you what it looks like. So I've put print full, I've put the descriptive title as production partner. I've put the location of their headquarters and then I'll just put about the production partner. And then we will leave that as that for this section, this is where you can then create different collections and sections within your store. As of right now this is gonna be the first listing, so I'm just gonna leave it as is. But if you do happen to later on down the line have multiple collections and designs. This is where you can then separate them and then moving onto tags. This is where you have up to 13 tags. We will again come back to this later on when we go to optimize our listing. So for now, just chuck in as many keywords that just comes to your head, you don't have to use them. All right now because like I said, we will come back to optimize this. Then scrolling on down, we have the pricing section. So for this, I would recommend that you guys just putting in a random number or random price. Because later on in the class, I'm actually going to go into detail with you guys how you should actually set up the margins for your products. So don't worry about this too much now, then for the quantity you can put one all the way up to 999. And then for the SKU, this is basically a way for you to reference the design. So I'm just going to put zeros, 01 for the variations. We're going to leave that blank for now because we're not too sure what sort of colors or sizes that we're going to be selling. And then moving on down, we have personalization. I'd leave that off for now until you know, if this is something that you want to include in your listing. And then for delivery, you're going to want to put the country of origin, which will most likely be your home country. And then for here I've actually put the postcode of the print full headquarters as this is typically where a lot of the order is going to be shipped from. And just as a rule of thumb, the processing time for most print on demand suppliers is around one to three business days. And then for the delivery you, I'd recommend that you just put your origin country for now. We can obviously expanded into the US, but we're not too short as to how much the shipping costs are going to be. So for now I just recommend putting the delivery time of three to five days and you're going to select three delivery. And I'll explain later on, why are we doing this? And then once you've done that and you've ticked all of the options that needs to be ticked or given information, we can then click, save and continue and move on to the next step. Then once you've clicked Save and Continue, it will then tell you great job on your first listing, and it will give you the option to add more listings. But what we're gonna do is we're going to do this later. So we're going to click through this later. Now moving on to the fourth step, which is where we're going to actually put in the details and the information in order to get paid when we do make sales. So for the first section is going to ask for tax purposes what type of seller ru, and for most cases we are gonna be an individual. So you would only take incorporated business if you are sort of like a limited company. But for most cases you probably answered just click individual. And then what you're gonna wanna do is scroll down and then you're going to put in your own personal information. So what I'll do is I'm going to do mine now quickly and then we'll move on to the next step. Now moving on to the fifths that once you guys have put in all the information and details and bank details in order to get paid. We're now going to have to do the reverse to this. So we're actually going to have to set up a billing with Etsy. So when we do actually go to list some of our products, they are going to charge us around $0.20 or 16 p every time we create a new listing. So they may have to charge us if we don't make any sales. One thing I will quickly say about this is don't let this discourage you about before that Etsy may have to charge you for putting in some work into creating your listings. I'd rather you actually see this more as a reason. Who lights a fire beneath you to actually get started and begin running your Etsy store and optimizing it as quickly as possible. This way Etsy won't actually charge you within the first month. So let this be a reason as to why you're going to work even harder to make sure you receive some sales. This way, you never actually get charged for opening your Etsy store because this is the ideal way we want to open our business with basically little to no cost upfront perpetuates. So what I'm gonna do is quickly fill out this information again and then we'll catch up on the next step. Now for the last and final step, before we can go ahead and actually open up our new store at C basically wants us to create a two-factor authentication method for shops security. So what you're gonna wanna do is add in text messages. Or you could do phone, or you can use an authenticator app from my method, I'm just going to use text message. So I'm going to click continue and then I'm going to add my phone number and then I'm gonna have them send a code. And then this is how they will authenticate me every time I sign into my Etsy account. Then once you've gone ahead and receive their code from Etsy and you've passed the two authentication app or method when you'll be greeted with a bunch of backup codes. So I'd recommend you either take a screenshot of this or save the codes, will copy the code somewhere and keep them safe. Once you've done that, we can then click the Open your shop tab. And this is where we really do get started. There we have I now have my new Etsy store, which is called Ballard clothing. And this really is the point where we have to start to put the work in and get the ball rolling in order to build our successful Etsy stores. 5. Creating Designs For Our Products: Now for this section, I want to show you exactly how we can prepare for our product creations and some of the best ways that we can go ahead and create some of these graphic designs to go on these products that we intend to sell. So in my personal case and for this example, in this class, I'm going to need to go ahead and create some form of graphic designs that tailored towards the niche of entrepreneurship and hustle. And I'll also need to get a feel for the style of these designs that could potentially go onto t-shirts and hoodies and things of that nature. And please don't put too much pressure on yourselves if this is the very first time that you're ever dealing with graphic design. As for the first few designs, is literally just going to be a case of us becoming familiar of the style or the designs of the products that we intend to sell. And we also need to understand that it may take some time for us to further develop our design skills towards the tailored designs and the style of designs that we're trying to produce for these products because it won't come to you immediately. But the more and more time that you spend creating new designs, you will then of course began, see improvements over time. So there are a few different ways that we can go ahead and create these graphic designers to go on the products that we intend to sell. One of the first and most popular suggestions that I would say is some of the Adobe softwares, which will be the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator. But secondly, we do have the option for some of the online editing softwares, with some of them being free to use. And the most popular one that I know of is a website called Canva. And this one does actually come with a free subscription that you can sign up to, but there is also a option for the Canva pro subscription and I believe you can get a 30 day free trial with them there. So what I'll do is actually make sure to put a link down in the projects and resources tab. You can check out that if you wish. And as I can imagine, most people probably won't actually have access to the likes of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, as they are, of course, a paid software subscription. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use Canva as an example and as a way of showing you how I'm actually gonna go ahead and create some of these graphic designs. And of course, you don't have to use Canva at all. You may actually already have access to another online editing software, or perhaps you have access to Photoshop or Illustrator or softwares like that. So that really is completely fine. But just for the purpose of example of this class, I will be using Canva, right? So let's jump straight into it. So here I've just opened up Canva. The first thing I'm going to want to do is create a new template of around 5,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels. Once I've done that, I'll then click create a new design. This will then open up a new window which will become my design template. And I'll make sure to use the same dimensions for the remainder of my designs as well. Now I need to actually consider what sort of design I want to make. And if you perhaps don't actually have any sort of idea or base point to work with. I'd highly recommend that you search for evil, Google or Etsy within your product niche or area. And then so we'll just get an idea or take some inspiration from the search results that you get. When I say this, I don't mean directly copy from any of these search results that you come across or you want to do is basically just take inspiration and get an idea as to what you want to design. So as an example and for my personal case, trying to set up my new Etsy store, I've just typed in entrepreneur t-shirts. And then from there I'm going to click on images. And this way I'm just going to then scan through all these search results and then just get an idea, become familiar of the style within this product niche. And then I can get an idea as to where I should head with my new design. So just based on these search results that'd be shown to be here, I can get a general idea of the style within this product niche. A lot of them seem to be very plain text and minimal text styles as well. So I'll keep this in mind when I go to create my first design. There does seem to be a few with some cool and unique graphic design. So here we have hustle mode with a bottle on, a button on, sorry, which are alike. We also have the entrepreneur with the red box, but this could actually be quite sketchy in terms of a certain brand that you may know of. So yeah, I would recommend that you just flick through, get general idea as to what sells birth, and then head back to camera when you're ready. Once you've spent some time looking around on Google or Etsy at some of the familiar or similar product designs. This is when we can then head back to Canva and get started on our own. And from here you can either potentially do some form of sketches to get an idea when you wanna go or you can just jump straight into it and began working on an initial draft. So for me personally, I know that I work best when I just jumped straight into it. And for the first design, the only thing that I have in mind is the word hassle. So for the next ten to 15 min, I'm just going to work and play around with that. And so I come up with something, so I'll check in with you guys once I have a final design. So here I now have the first design that's going to be used from my first Etsy listing. And while it doesn't look like much, it's just the start to a very wide collection. So if you are in the same situation and you're not all too happy with your first design. Just know that they will gradually get better and better over time as you, of course, create more and more designs. So try not to become a perfectionist right off the bat of y's. This could actually put you into an immediate halt and block queue from one since it go any further because you're not happy with the first initial design. You will then start to tell yourself or why should I bother with the next when I can't make the first one this good. So do just allow yourself the time and just accept the designs that you make for what they are and don't judge them immediately. But anyway, now, I'm going to need to go ahead and actually export my design. This way. We can then actually start to put it on some of the the mockup templates which will then be advertised as shown as our product images on Etsy. So here we're gonna go to File, click the Download tab. If there were then going to click on PNG, you might want to bump it up to around 10,000 pixels. That way you can get the best quality out of your design. And you're gonna wanna make sure to take the transparent background box. And then from there, it was just going to click Download. And then once it's finished downloading, what you're going to want to do is click on the file and then open it up. And then from here you can check just to make sure that it has in fact been downloaded as a PNG file, which it has because we can see this sort of gray background behind the design and it isn't white. Then once you've done that, we can then look to the process of actually creating some of these example images and product images that are gonna go onto our Etsy listings. So I'll catch you guys in the next section. 6. Creating Mockups & Product Images: Okay, In this section, we're gonna be going over exactly how we're going to create some of the product images to go on Etsy listings without ever actually having to handle the product itself in-person or take photos of them either. And this can be done by the use of mockup templates that we can source online. And if you haven't actually heard of a mockup template before, it's essentially a firewall that allows you to alter the way it looks in order to present a certain product or item in a way that suits you. And we can get a mock-up template for most products and items. No matter what it is that you're selling, you should be able to source something online that will help you create those perfect product images. And another option that we can use is from the parental demand suppliers. So when you upload your designs to some of the products that you intend to sell. They were actually giving you a mock-up already generated. So we can actually use those as well. So I know for a fact that prints File and Print Full both do this. So even if you are selling a product, say through a, another print on-demand website, they say a T-Shirt or even a rug, or you can do is actually head over to print four or prints bye, and then find a similar product and actually just use them mock-up generators by putting your design onto those products. So as long as they are the same products, no matter where you're getting the mockup generated from, it should be completely fine. And even if you take a moment just to browse around Etsy, especially looking at your own product niche, you actually most likely find that most listings and sellers are actually using mockup templates for their product images. One of the main reasons why they do this is because they usually have a very large collection of designs. So it's very time effective for them to do it this way. So just as an example, let's say you have 100 designs, which means you then have at 100 products. If you wanted to take an in-person photo for every single one of those products, you're going to have to order a variation of each one of those designs onto a T-shirt as an example, just to get those same shots which could easily run you into hundreds, if not thousands of pounds or dollars. So not only is it going to be saving you a lot of time, it's also going to be saving you a great deal of money as well. So what I'm gonna do now is actually showing you the two different methods as to how I would approach this. So the first method will be the mockup templates, which is my personal favorite. As I feel, you can definitely get a much more professional look out of it. And then secondly, I'll show you how we can actually generate some of those mockups from our print on-demand suppliers. First step, I'm going to be searching on Google for some T-shirt mockup templates. This way I can actually apply it to my store here now. And it's typically a lot of these files that we download will be for Photoshop. But not to worry if you don't actually have access to Photoshop because I will show you guys another method as to how we can do something similar inside of Canva. So here what we're gonna do is I'm just going to click around on a few different links that I've popped up. And then hopefully I can actually find a mock-up template that I would like the local, and hopefully it's free. So if we click something like this link, we should be able to find a few different templates. So if I click on this as an example, this could work quite well. Is it download page, so we'll go through and then see if we can get it for free. And we wait for that to load. There we go. So now it's just downloading. Soon as it's finished, I will then open up and show you what we can do inside of Photoshop. So here I've just opened up our new mockup template. So typically with these templates, they do like to watermark them with some sort of layers. So that does seem to be this top layer, so we can easily just click and delete that. Then next we need to locate where we actually make the mockup adjustments. So this is where we can go ahead and put our design. And typically you'll find it under something like Mocha. You scroll down and then you see this little layer here. This is where we can put our design on the front. So we're going to double-click on that layer there. This is then going to open up a new window. So this is where we're actually going to go ahead and drag and drop our design into like so. Then once that's been placed inside of the layer, this is where we can actually go ahead and adjust the design to sue or fit the t-shirt or the product the way we want it to. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to probably make this a tiny bit smaller or drag it up slightly. Command a, which will select all none. I'll make it white. I should know we'll do a new layer Control D, and then we'll get rid of that layer. And then what we can do then is once you're happy with the size and the placement of the design, you can reference it back to the mockup templates. So what you'd want to do is save this layer. Once you've done that, you can then hop back. You can then get an idea of the placement. So I'm just going to keep playing around with this and so I get a good idea and placement of where I want it to be. Okay, So now I've just touched upon the design and made sure it's fitted quite well. Next, what you're going to want to do is you might have sometimes find that you have the collar and the sleeves and the bottom part of the show. They may all be colored. So we're going to do is do the same again. And you're going to click on each individual layer within that mockup file. You're then going to want to color them the same way you have with your t-shirts. So if you are going for a white t-shirt, we need to do is just fill these layers and completely white. And then same again, if it's like a black t-shirt or a black mug or some form of product like that. As you can see that I now have my final product image on my final mock-up template. So just within a few clicks, which literally took me less than a minute or two. I've managed to get a product image for my new design. So can you imagine how much time you're saving just by doing this, but every individual new design that you make from here, I'm going to do is actually just go ahead and save this as a JPEG into my documents, all my files. So it's then ready to be uploaded to Etsy. And just as a quick side note, the more mockup templates that you can get your hands-on will then of course, allow you to create more product images for your Etsy listings. So I'd advise trying to get hold of as many mockup templates as you can. We've tried to make sure they look of a similar style to each other. However, if you don't actually have access to Photoshop, let me show you guys a method that we can use inside of Canva. So of course this will be free for you guys to use. Firstly, you're going to want to go onto somewhere like Google and just type in, say, T-Shirt product templates or wherever it is that your product may be. And then once you come across some images that you like, we're going to save them and then import them into Canvas to use. Just as an example, here I typed in T-shirt mockup template into Google Images. And then after a while I did do some scrolling to find this image, but I'm now happy with this one. So what I'm gonna do is save this and now import this over into Canva. So now I'm back inside of Canva and I've just uploaded that new image. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to drag and drop it into our design template here. And we're going to make sure we fill out the whole size of the template. So there we go. So now we've bought that adjusted. What we're gonna do is actually import our design file back into Canva and make sure that we have it uploaded as a PNG. So I'm gonna do that now quickly. Once you have your design uploaded inside of Canva, we're then gonna go ahead and do the same thing by dragging and dropping it into our design template. And then from that or you're going to do is just sizer and adjust it the way you want it to look to suit your new product template. Here I'm going to adjust it like so. And I mean, within a few clicks, I'm already happy with the way it looks. And I will quickly mentioned that Canvas does actually habits own smart mockup templates, but personally I don't use them and I find them to be somewhat unreliable. So what you can do is as an example, if we go to Edit Image and then we scroll down to smart mockups and they say this click t-shirt. Well, you can click Apply and we'll get rid of this. But there you have it, it's just gone blank. And then when you do save it, the design would be massively printed over the t-shirt. So you can give these a go as well with the canvas mockups inside of their own software bar, I would recommend the method that I just showed you guys. And lastly, we can actually generate some of the mockup images directly from our print on demand supplier. So just for this example, I'm going to head over to print full and then I'll show you an example from there. So now that I'm on the print full website, the first thing I'm gonna do is head to products and then I'm going to click on men's clothing. And then one would they want to do is find where the t-shirts are. So click the drop-down box for that. Next, what you want to do is actually head to the product that you intend to sell. So again, if you are using a different print on-demand supplier in order to generate your mock-ups, just trying to find a close match of the product that you are actually going to sell. So in my case, I'm actually selling this product variant here. So I'm going to click on this listing. Next, we're obviously going to select the color which you want to use for your design. So in my case, I like the white t-shirt and it doesn't matter or too much about these sizing options are from there. You'll then go up, go on to start designing. This will then open up a new window, which is where we can go ahead and upload our designs. So what I'm gonna do here is click on this button here, which will allow me to upload a new file. So I'm now gonna go ahead and upload my first design. And then once that's finished uploading, you also want to make sure that you're uploading the PNG file. By the way, once you've done that, we're then going to go click apply. And what this is going to do is it into place on our new template. Then from there you're going to do the same thing as we did before your child play around with it and adjust it until you find a way where you're happy with it or an arrangement or orientation of it as this example. I mean, I'm pretty happy with that. So once you've done with that, we're then just going to go through the same process as you would when you are buying their products. But once we go to adds a car, this is when we can then actually get the mockups generated for us. And then once the product has actually been moved over to your basket, we are then going to want to click continues to check out, but don't worry, you won't actually be following through or making any purchase. This is literally the last step that we need. You're then gonna go on preview here where it gives you the option for the mock-up. And there you have it. We now have our new mockup. And you can easily just go ahead and save this as a JPEG file. And we can then use this as one of the product images to go on Etsy listing. So that is going to conclude this section of the class, which is where we have covered the graphic design, the mockup templates, and the product images as well. So I really hope that you have been able to follow through so far throughout this class and take down as many notes or either follow along while we were trying to build your Etsy store. And if you have been creating your Etsy store alongside this class and as we've been progressing, are actually highly recommend that you guys spend a little bit more time on your mockup templates and your product images over the graphic designs that you are hoping to create fuel products. The reason I say this is because the mockup templates that we use and the product images that we create from the initial first listing that we make will basically act as the foundation for the rest of our listings for our Etsy store. So I'd recommend that you basically nail this in down as much as you can and make sure it looks as professional as possible, right from the get-go. That way you don't have to returns were at a later date to touch up on any of the mockup templates and then have to redo all of your existing store and designs. And if you are just taking notes so far, are highly recommend that you write this point down as a key note because it will just save you so much time later on down the line. And it will just build a great foundation to your Etsy store. 7. Creating Your First Etsy Listing: Okay, and now for one of the most important aspects to setting up your Etsy store, which is actually the product listing creation. So in this section I'm going to run through everything in as much detail as possible when it comes to creating your Etsy listing this way when it's all said and done, it should then rank in the search results as high as possible. This way we can make sure that we have everything ticked and check off. And then we'll hopefully we can begin to make some sales as quickly as possible and begin our journey towards a successful Etsy store. So let's jump right into it. So as you can see, I've just opened up my Etsy listing again, which we did previously do in draft. The first thing you're going to want to do is go ahead and actually upload all of your new product images. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that now. Then what you're gonna wanna do is someone she's sit back and somewhat review your own images as a collective group as you see them one-by-one. So what I mean by this is you're going to then review them for the way you see them in arrangement and how you'd think the customer would view them when they're going through them one-by-one. So let's say as an example, you wouldn't put this as your primary imaged because it doesn't sell the design or the product. This is more of an informational image. So typically you'd probably put these images towards the back. So if I'm sitting here and reviewing these images, first thing I'm going to do is pick the best one that stands out the most to me personally, it's gonna be evil one of these two, and I think this one's the best. So I'm going to make that the primary. I'm then going to move the informational images to the back. And then I'm going to review these mental images and it's trying to view it from a buyer's perspective. What would I want to see next? So personally here I've seen the t-shirt. I want, so maybe actually see it close up of the design, so I'll move that one across. You may want to see a model or an example of it being worn. So you can swap these two out personally, I actually like this one because it sort of follows a theme and then you get this gradual change towards the information or images. So I like this collection of images, but I would highly recommend that you somewhat sit back and review your own images and put them into an arrangement that makes sense from a buyer's perspective. And just as a quick side note, I did actually go ahead and find some more mockup templates to use. And I did actually go back and readjust my initial design. And the reason for this is because I wasn't too happy with that first design. I didn't really like the way it looks. And so this is definitely something that you can look to do for your own design. So if you do happen to create a design or your initial first design and your 5050 a power, you're not too sure whether you like it or not. You can always then go back and revisit it. But with these mockups, I did go and put in some more time. So these will be the final mockup templates and images that I'm happy with. And these will then laid the foundation for my Etsy listings on this store. Then moving on down, we're going ahead to the title, which may actually be one of the most important things after the product images when it comes to your Etsy listing. So based on your title alone and the key words that you use within your title, this is what will determine how well your listing actually ranks within the search results on Etsy based on SEO and an algorithm that they use. So here I would actually recommend using a keyword research tool. And for an example, I'm gonna be using a website called Laura, and this is free to use. And again, you don't have to use this website. You can use any other website or tool that you wish. And here I've just opened up the website for this example. And you will need to sign up and you will actually need to link your Etsy store in order to use this dashboard. And so what I'm going to do from here is actually go to the key word finder. And the first thing I'm probably going to put in is hustle t-shirt as that is the first initial product volume going to be selling. What this is going to do, it may take a moment. This is going to get back to me with a bunch of keywords that are similar and that I could potentially use. And here you can see that we're starting to get some of these search results back. So similar keywords that are being listed. We have parcel, t-shirt designs, hustler, t-shirt, grind, money. So these are some of the keywords that we can use. And again, I would basically do repeat this process over and over again with as many keywords as you already have. And what we can also do is based on this keyword, we can actually see the other listings and the titles that they're using. So if you do come across a listing that's very similar to yours, you can kind of check out our competitors listing title and get some inspiration from that as well. Okay, so here I've just finished up on my title. The one thing that I would point out is that you want to arrange all these keywords in some sense or in a way that doesn't make sense when the customer is reading it. So of course, she wants to fit in as many keywords as possible in order to engage the SEO with Etsy. But at the same time, you don't want it to look too cluttered and you want it to make sense. So here I've tried to arrange it in a way where a customer can read it. And although the keywords are being mashed up, you want to arrange them in a way where it can be read. And just to quickly mention, in case some of you didn't know what SEO was, it essentially means search engine optimization. And what this is where an algorithm will actually pick up on certain key words from say, a listing or a website. Then tailor it to someone who is say, inquiring about a t-shirt. And this will then pop up within their search results, say on Google or within Etsy as well. So is best or we optimized our listings in the best way that we can. That way we can actually have the algorithms work on our side. And then moving on down, we're gonna be looking at about this listing out. What we're going to want to do is make sure that we take another company or person. And the reason we're going to be doing this is because we are going to be using a print on demand supplier. And if you aren't, then obviously you can adjust this to your own circumstances. And the main reason that we need to make sure we take another company or person if we are using a print on demand supplier, because we have to be 100% honest with Etsy of wise, they can easily suspend our account for not being truthful with them. So I'd recommend that you do everything with authentic outlook. Make sure you're being honest when you are creating your listings and you're setting up your Etsy store. So then we're gonna move to this drop-down box here, where we're going to click a finished product. And then again, moving on to the Box. Aside from that, we're going to click made-to-order. And the reason for this is because we're only making these products once we actually received an order from a customer. And then where obviously the anger is send over to the print on-demand supplier. Moving on down, we're then going to head to the category section. And for this, there should be fairly straightforward and will be based on your own circumstances and the product that you intend to sell. And then moving on down, we're going to look at these optional drop-down boxes. So I'm gonna be looking at the color boxes and I'm gonna make sure to fill these out. So for my example, here, I have a white t-shirt with a red design. So I'm going to click the primary color as white, and then the secondary color will be red. So I'm going to make sure to take that. And then as we move down to the additional optional drop-down boxes, if you do find anything that does apply to your product, then I'd highly recommend that you do list there and you select something. So for here, sleeve length, I could do short sleeve size that doesn't apply neck line. I'm not actually too sure, but I could definitely click one of these for the t-shirts. And then again with the coping styles, the occasion and the celebration. So if you do find that anything applies to the product, the robot to list, I'd highly recommend that you select it. And then moving on down, we're going to look at the renewal options. And here you're going to want to make sure you have automatic tick. And the reason for this is because when a customer buys from your listing automatically, you want to make sure it's back in stock and ready for the next customer to purchase. So if you do click on manual, what it's gonna do is actually require you to then go ahead and then update the listing to show that it's in stock. And so the next buyer can come along and actually purchase it from you. Then we're going to look at type. And for this section, we're going to want to make sure we take physical. Next, we're going to be filling out our description box here. And again, this is gonna be one of those things that will be very much foundational to your Etsy listings and then as you carry them forward for future designs. So what I've done here is I've actually gone ahead and opened up a Google document. This way I can actually start to draft some form of a description before I edit it inside of Etsy. And the best way I would recommend you do this is by using bullet points. So here I've basically greeted the customer with a little bit about the store and the mission side, almost like an ethos to the store and the brand. I've gone on to stay a little bit about the products and the materials and things of that nature, so you can do that with your own product. And then I've also got bullet point for delivery. And now this is one of those things we will have to come back to in the next section where we'll review the delivery dates and the times and stuff like that. And then the bottom, I've just put a little Contact Us tab. So this is how you can actually construct some of your descriptions. And of course there's the one of these things you can come back to, but I would recommend that you have foundational and done quite well from the get-go. So what I'm going to do here is just simply copy and paste this into my Etsy listing and then I think that'll be good to go. And another reason why you want to make sure your description looks as professional as possible, because this could be a deciding factor in whether a customer buys your product over another product on Etsy. So you want to make sure this looks as professional as possible. This way the customer can actually make an informed purchase decision. And then moving on, we're gonna be looking at the production partners. So most cases you are probably going to be using a print on demand and supply. So you will need to make sure you fill this section out. So what you're going to want to do is go over here and click Edit, or you want to add a new production partner. First, we're just going to want to put the name of the print on-demand supplier's website name and the older put it at the top there, then you might want to add a descriptive title. So here we can just put production partner and this is what will be displayed to the customers. And for location, you can typically find this location on their website. So as print full as an example, we can go to the homepage. And if we scroll down to the bottom, we can see in their footer, we can actually see that addressed that. And then we can add this into the ETC settings as well. And then when you go to about production partner, you don't have the right too much. You just want to give a quick description about what it is they do for you and what they are. So here I've just put a fulfillment, warehousing and shipping service. The small online retailers. And then for the last part, we're gonna go down to about your partnership. And here you're just going to want to select the options from the drop-down boxes that best applied to you. And for most cases, if you are doing a similar thing and methods of what I'm doing here with this Etsy store. You can go ahead and actually tick these similar options as well. So once you've done that, you can then go up the partner and then that will be that section done. Okay, Now here we're going to look at section. So if you do have certain collections of designs, this is where we can then go to break them up. So in my example here, this is, I would say a hustle or entrepreneurship design. So I'm actually going to want to do, it's going to go ahead here and add your first section. So I'm gonna go ahead and call it Entrepreneur. And our collection is called it that click Save. So we'll ask now going to do is save that as a collection title. So anytime I add new designs that fall under this collection, which is entrepreneurship and hustle. I can then add it to that. But this say if I want to create a finance collection, I can also add that and then create designs for that collection as well. So this is a great way of actually organized new designs and it will help when it comes to your Etsy storefront as well. But of course this is optional. So if you don't intend on creating any more designs beyond a certain collection, you can, of course, just leave this blank. And now moving on to tags. So we're actually going to approach this in the same way we did with our title. But here we can actually do a little bit more to ensure we use the best tags possible. So one way to do, again is I'm going to head over to the website or Laura. But this time I'm actually going to be using their Chrome extension, which you can download for free. And again, if you don't want to use this website or their extension, there is actually another method that I'm going to show which shows you both the exact same process. So don't worry if you don't want to use this website or extension. So quickly if you are going to use this extension, I'll show you how we're going to use it and why are we going to use it? So first you're going to head over to the EPS, the ETC, sorry, page, website. And then from there you're going to want to type in the same product niche or the same sort of product that you are about to list. So here I'm going to type in hustle t-shirt. And what we're going to want to do from this set of search results is we're basically just going to compare and take inspiration from some of the other sellers and listings within our product niche. Here, or I'm going to do is just hover over some of the listings that I think are selling quite well. And one way we can identify this is obviously by how high they rank in the search results. And secondly is based on the amount of reviews this seller has. So as we can see, this seller had only has one star review. This is an ad as well, hence why it's ranked so highly. So try to ignore ads if you can, because they're obviously paid to be there. So here this is quite a good one. So they have almost 13,000 reviews, which is a lot that Etsy. So they're doing well. And what you're going to want to do if you are using this extension is you're going to hover over this little icon here, click that. And what it's gonna do is actually generate all the tags that this listing is used. You are using, sorry. Then once that's done, you can actually then go ahead and look at the bottom here and it will show you the tags are using. And we can actually then use these tags for our own listening or use them as inspiration to them, find similar keywords to use. So just as an example here, I actually quite like the fact that they've used quote t-shirts, inspirational, motivational T-Shirts, hustle, hustle up. So these are words that I can now actually go back to my tags and apply as well so I can remove caps, fashion self-employed T's are and let's say motivational quotes was the other one as well. And then from there, you'd basically just repeat the same process with another listing. So I'll do the same one here. And then here we go. So they have t-shirts, hop, gift, workout, motivational, girl, boss. So these are keywords, but I actually really do prefer the keywords from this listing. This is how we can actually get a feel for the keywords within our product niche. And just to show you guys the other method and the other process to this, in case you didn't want to use this website or the Chrome extension, you're going to want to basically do the same sort of thing and identify a top-selling product within those search results. So you're going to click onto their listing page. You will then going to right-click anywhere on that page and you're gonna go down to the bottom where it says view page source codes. You've done that and it opens up. You're then going to want to press Command F or Control F if you're on Windows. And then you're just going to type in tags. And typically you will get a bunch of hits. And if you scroll right down to the bottom around this area, we scroll right to the left. Then boom, and then here you go, you see to hit marks for tags. And then below you will see the text that they're using CC, like Can and I Will motivational shirt, brave, inspirational quote, quote, t-shirt. So these are the exact same keywords that we were shown when we use the Chrome extension. And it doesn't really take that much longer. So don't worry if you don't use this extension or the website that I showed you, once you've gone ahead and done your keyword research, and this can be done through the process I just showed you guys or another method that you personally prefer. You then want to make sure that you fill out all of these tags. Etsy actually allow you to input up to 13 tags. And I would highly recommend that you optimize them and use them all. Here in my example, I have actually just gone ahead and done my own research and I've updated a few of the tags. So I've added doing quotes, motivational T-shirt, inspirational quote, t-shirt and T-Shirt gift. And I also removed some of the keywords that didn't quite relate to the product. Now for the materials, and of course, you can actually fill this out if you have a certain product that actually specializes in some form of material, and this is actually a key selling point. So then moving on down, we have the section which is inventory and pricing out what mass you're going to do is I'm going to cover this in the next section of the class. Reason for this is because there is a bit more in detail things that I need to cover with you guys, which will be the profit margins that we need to work out. And we also need to actually figure out the cost of goods from our print on-demand suppliers and the front, once we have that information, we can then work out how much we're going to charge for our products. So I will definitely cover that in far more detail in the next section. And then moving on down again, we have variations, but this will actually tie in with the pricing section. So like I said, I will cover this in the next part of the class, and then after that we have personalization. So in some cases your designs may actually require personalization. So here you can take it and when you do all it does is asking you to give some form of instruction to the buyer so they can fill it out based on requirements you want from them so you can have that order fulfilled. Then lastly, we have the delivery section, but again, this is one of those things on what I cover in the next section of the class, because this will tie into the profit margins, the sales figures, and how we actually use the information from our print on-demand suppliers. So like I said, the next section of the class will be purely dedicated to these last final hurdles of creating our listing. So once we've got parts that section, we really are on the home straight to having our Etsy store up and running. 8. Profit Margins & Delivery Settings: Okay, So in this section of the class, we're actually going to conclude the listing creation process, which will actually cover the final steps, which is the inventory and pricing and also add delivery section of our new listing pages. And the reason I wanted to slightly separate this section from the previous section because, because these last and final stages that we're going to go through, what actually takes us away from the ETC, editing website and the tools that they provide. And we're actually you then got to go onto our print on demand supplies, websites and extracts a lot of information from there. Before we do jump right into it, I would actually recommend that you either open up a spreadsheet so you can log all the information on the figures that we extract, or you can actually just write them down on a piece of paper. So that is completely up to you based on your own preference. So we will be extracting a lot of information from our print on demand websites. And what I mean by this, we were actually be looking to see how much the products are going to cost and how much they're going to cost once they're shipped as well. So that's one piece of information that we need to extract. And then based on those diggers, we can actually then work out our sales amounts. So this will be how much we want to go ahead and sell our products for. The other side of this is we also need to figure out the delivery settings. This will be things such as the processing times to have the order fulfilled and then also the delivery time. So this is all information that we can only extract from our own print on demand websites. So hopefully by this point you've already picked out the print on-demand website or supplier that you're going to be using. And you've also picked out the product that you intend to sell. And if you haven't just yet, that's okay and it's completely fine. Just make sure you replicate the same sort of process when you go to do it yourself. First things, but I assure you we're going to want to open up your spreadsheet or you're going to want to make sure you have a piece of paper and a pencil in hand. Then once you've done that, you then actually going to head over to your print on demand website and you're going to approach it as you would if you were going to buy or fulfill your first-order. So what I mean by this is you're just going to gradually go through the steps. For, as an example, for my design, I'm going to click the white t-shirt, or typically probably go for a large or medium. And then I'm gonna go start designing. And I'm basically just going to follow through the steps. And so I reached checkout. And then when you do reach this stage where it gives you the option to agile design in, you want to make sure that you go ahead and actually treat it almost as if you were about to fulfill an order. So you're going to want to make sure you input your design and you adjust it to the way you would sell it. So once you've done that, you can then click Add to Cart. And then once you have your product adjusted and designed correctly, you'll then want to go to continue checkout, but not to worry, we're not actually going to check out at all. All we're doing is using this as a process to understand how much it's going to cost us depending on where we're shipping it to as well. So thanks, you're gonna go continue to shipping. And here I'd actually recommend that you just fill out your own personal addressed this way you can get an idea as to, as to how much it's going to cost you to have your product fulfilled your own home country. So as you can see here, we now have our final total amount, which is going to be our cost of goods shipped. So this totals to be 18, 29, and this is to have the product shipped to my home country. And the reason why we're doing it in this process, in this way is because if we were to take the information from our print on demand websites, just from an informational page. It may not actually look as realistic and we may get caught up in different figures. So when we go to do our pricing margins, we may actually skew the numbers slightly. So in doing it this way, you really do get a realistic view and understanding of how much it will actually cost you when you go to fulfill your orders. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to take this number or this figure here which is 18 pounds, 29, and then references back to my spreadsheet or I'm going to write it down so we can make this as simple as possible. So if we put COGS, which stands for cost of goods shipped, we can then put the country below where we intend to ship to and how much it's gonna cost us all in all. So we can then actually now create a list of all the different countries that we're going to ship to. And when it does come to your preference for the different countries that you do want to ship to, I would highly recommend that you actually consider the main five, which is the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. And of course, if your home country wasn't just listed there, I would highly recommend you. Obviously, you find out the cost for your home country as well. So you can deliver that. Then once you've figured out where it is that you want to ship to whether that's the main five or gestural home country alone. Your them just gonna wanna go back and repeat the same process by changing the country and just adding in a random address for that country. That way you can get an idea of how much it's gonna cost. So just as another quick example here, I've now just changed the address to the US. And as you can see, this has actually changed the price. So instead of the 800-pound, as before, is now 15 pounds, 14. So all I'm gonna do now is head over to my spreadsheet and make sure that I put that in as well. Then once you've done that, you would just kinda wanna repeat the same process for your remaining countries. Then once you've got the cost of goods shipped, the figures for each one of the countries you're going to deliver to you Then just want to give them each a average cost. And the reason I say this is because let's say you're shipping a product to the USA, depending on the different state that is being sent to, you will incur a different tax amount. So this is where that 15 pounds, 14 where it's shipped of Pennsylvania may change to 16 pound if it was being shipped to California. So just go ahead and give them a rough amount. So here it says 15 pound 14. But instead I'm just going to put 14, 50, dash 16. So that way I can just get an average amount as to how much potentially cost or if it's going to be cheaper. Now once you've gone ahead and found the rough average price for each one of the countries that you're going to shift to. This is where we'd now go into bigger our sales price to ensure that we make profit on each one of our orders. And there really are plenty of different ways as to how you can reach your final sales price. But basically, I'm going to show you how I would do it. And I'm going to show you guys step-by-step and explain exactly why. So the first thing that I'm going to do is come up with a number as a multiplier, which will act as a standard multiplier that I can apply it across all of these figures hit for most e-commerce websites and sellers, their profit margins are typically around the percentage of 20 to 40%. We need to keep this in mind when we do use our multiplier. So what I'm gonna do is start off by using a multiplier of 1.6. And then from there we can actually test out to see if it will give us a profit margin percentage between that 20 to 40%. The way to know if we are in the right area with our multiplier is what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our cost of goods shipped average for one of the countries. So for, I'm going to use the UK as an example which is 18, 25. I'm then going to times it or multiply it by 1.6, which is our multiplier. This will then give me 29 pounds and 20 pence, which will be the sales amount. Then once we've reached this figure, where then actually going to want to times it by 0.9. And the reason we're gonna do this is because Etsy will typically as an average, take around ten per cent of a fee for the transaction that they've given you through their platform. So that'll be ten per cent taken from the sales figure out, which leaves us 26 pounds in 28 pence. And then of course, we need to factor in our cost of goods ships. So the amount that's going to be expensed when we pay for the product to be shipped to the customer. So for this, we're going to -18 pounds and 25 pence, which lever leaves us with eight pounds of three pence profit. So now what we're going to want to do is work out wherever this is within those profit margins that we want. So we're going to divide this by the total sales amount, which was 29 pounds and 20 pounds. And that will give us around 27.5 per cent within profit margins. So that's still within those 20 to 40% margins. Another thing that I'm going to consider, when I actually run a sale on my products, I my listings, will they still actually turned out to be profitable and will they fall in-between this 20% and 40% profit margin that I'm looking for. And the reason I bring this up is because I actually use this as a method to sell on my Etsy stores. So what I'll do is I'll actually run a sale every 24 to 48 h. And what this does, it actually puts a timer on the listing pages for my products. So when a customer does go to visit one of the product pages there then greeted with a timer or a count down for a sale. And what this does is actually induces an impulsive purchase. So in most cases, when a customer is considering whether to buy my product or not, this can be one of the key and most crucial sales tactics that causes them to make an impulse purchase because they actually feel like they're going to miss out on a deal as they see that countdown timer. So typically I will run a sale anywhere 10-20% and I'll make sure it's everybody's every 48 h. And just as a quick example, I'll show you what I mean. So I'll click on a listing that is running a sale. So here we've got one here. So they are running a sale, but they haven't got it within the 48 hour period. So if I click on this one and here we go. So these guys are running a sale which ends in 23 h. So the way I approach it is I want this to appear on my products all the time as this really can actually cause impulse purchase format, the customers are viewing our products. So what I'm gonna do here now is work out our new sales amount based on the fact that we will be running a tenth, 20 per cent discount every day. So the first thing I'm gonna do is slowly increase our multiply to 1.8 per cent. Once I've done that, I will then basically repeat the same process as before. So I'm going to take my average cost of goods shipped from the UK, which is 18 pounds, 25. I'm then going to multiply this by 1.8 per cent, which will give me 32.85 pence. So I'll make sure to note that down. This is when we now repeat the same process as before, but we will add in one more step because we are going to be running, say, a 10% discount. This where I'm now going to have to multiply it by 0.9, which represents that 10% sale. This thing gives me 29 pounds. I'm 56 pence. So I'll make sure to jot that down. And the next step will be the same as before. So this is where we will multiply it by 0.9%. Again, this will represent the 10% transaction fee that Etsy will take. So this would be 26.60 pence, I believe I scored a 61 once. You've then got that figure, this is when we will then need to factor in the expense of paying for the product to be shipped to the customer, which is. Because 18 pounds, 25, so I'm going to minus that amount, which will leave me with eight pound 35 or eight pounds, 36. And the weights to know if this is still within your profit margins percentage, which is that 20 to 40% is then we're going to divide this by the 29 pound 56 pens because this will be the actual sales amount which the customer pays for 29 pound six pence, which gives us a percentage margin of around 28 per cent. So that's still within the 20 to 40% that we're looking for. So I hope that section was an all too confusing. Please feel free to watch that part back to ensure that your calculations progress in the same way. So what I'm going to do now is actually head back to Etsy. So I'm now back on the Etsy listing editor. And the first thing we're going to want to do is head to inventory and pricing. I'm going to make sure that we tick domestic and global pricing. And what we're gonna do is now refer back to the spreadsheet or the notes that were taken down. So we're going to make sure we put in our sales price while our home country. And then when it comes for the everywhere else option, which is our global sales figure, this is when we then can actually take either an average or we pick on higher amount to basically cover our sales figures for all of the other countries that were going to serve. So in my case, it 31 pounds and 99 pence. And this will ensure that I'm making a profit no matter where this cell it's coming from. So whether that's Canada, US, New Zealand, Australia, and the reason we do this. So we can actually separate these sales amount depending on who is buying and where they are buying fonts. So as you can see here, it's going to cost a customer from the UK 27 pounds, 99 pence. But as for globally it will cost around nine to nine pets. So this way you can actually give a fair pricing margin depending on where they're buying from, especially if it is cheaper for you to ship to your local country. And just as a quick side note, I do want to touch on the fact that if you do find a country is charging far above this sales amount and you won't make anywhere near as much profit. Well, you can do is actually then just add some shipping costs to that country. So let's say as an example, New Zealand is chat is going to charge me a lot and I won't actually make all too much profit from this global pricing. I can then just add on an additional postage costs directly to that country. So once you are happy with the pricing that you have for your home country, annual global pricing as well. We can move on down to the quantity. And here we can just put in 999. This way when we have to renew our stock, we don't actually have to worry about it for a very long time until you have sold 999 units of this product. It's best just to put it there and you won't have to touch it again for a very long time. Then moving on to the next section, which is the SKU. And this is basically just for an internal reference. So we can actually link back this design and this product listing to our own internal files and documents. So as this is the first design that I've created, I've put 001. And another way you can do it as well is if this is within a certain collection. So as you can see here, is within my entrepreneurial collection, I can even go as far as to put EC zeros 01. So this will represent that this is my first design within this collection. So for now I'm just gonna leave it as zeros or ones, but this is more just for your own personal organization. Now gradually moving on down, we have the variations section, and this is basically where you're going to add in, wherever you have some form of different sizes, or potentially you're offering a different type of color for your product. So in my example, MY case here, I'm going to have to offer these t-shirts in a small, medium, large, and extra large option. So what you're going to do is want to click add variations. You're then going to want to click on the drop-down box here. And you can pick any of these options here that they offer. But I'm just going to click, create a new variation of men, just going to type in size and then add that there. And this allows me to then create different options within that dropdown. So I'm going to click small. I'm going to type in medium, I'm going to type enlarge. Lastly, we will have extra large and, um, they actually even do X XL. So once you're happy with the options that you've listed, you can then click, Save and Continue. What this would then do is create a drop-down box for your Etsy listing where the customers can choose their size options. And let's say in the scenario where you want to have a T-shirt that's offered in black and white, and you want to offer the different size as well. The way we can approach this is in the same way and what we're gonna do is just add another variation. So we can then just call this one km or add that in. And you're gonna wanna make sure you tick though, sorry, ignore that. So you won't need to tick. Prices vary for each color that you're then going to want to type in, say why or black. Once you've done that, this will give the customer the option to say, pick a white t-shirt in the size option of medium. And this will still correlate to your global and home country pricing as well. Okay, and now we're moving on to the last section of our listing creation, which is going to be our delivery settings and a lot of the information that we need in order to fill this last part out will come directly from our print on-demand website. So that's where you extract the information as to whether how long they're processing times r, which is basically how long it's going to take for them to print the products or produce the product. And then have it shipped. And then you're also going to want to find out the delivery times based on each delivery country that you are serving. So first things first, what we're going to want to do is make sure we missed all of the countries that we intend to ship to. So I've already listed the UK, but here I'm now going to add in Canada, the US. I'm also going to Australia and New Zealand. And then from here, what you're going to want to do is for these drop-down boxes where it says delivery service, you're just going to click other because typically it will be quite hard to find what career service they are using from these print on demand websites. So just apply that to all of them. And then when it comes to the drop-down boxes for delivery time, this is when you're actually going to head to your print on demand website and find where it tells you how long these estimates are going to be. And along with your process and tolerant buys a rule of thumb that most print-on-demand websites do take around one to five business days. But unfortunately, Etsy only gives you the option for one's a three or freeze or five. But the reason I'm just going to put one to three is because if a customer sees three to five days as a processing time, this could actually put them off. For my sake, I'm going to put 123. But now all I'm gonna do is check on the print full website to see how long it's going to take for them to ship to each one of these individual countries. So I'll just do an example here for the UK. And they state five to seven and I'll quickly do the US, which they claim is going to take 17 to 19 days. So you're going to want to make sure you put in that same amount. So for the US they claimed 17 to 19 days and the UK was five to seven. And then all you're gonna do is basically repeat this same process for each one of these countries. And then lastly, what you're going to want to do is deal with each one of these drop-down boxes for the countries, which is what you will charge. So if you know that there is a country that is going to cost you more in shipping. So in my example, I know that Australia and New Zealand are going to cost me around about five pounds extra to ship. So y can do is actually list this as four pound 99. And then for an additional item, I could just do two by 99 for every item after that, I'll just do the same for New Zealand as a rule of thumb. But as for the UK, Canada, the US, I know I'm going to provide or offer free delivery. And another reason why you want to do this and actually add in your delivery costs into the cost of shipping. The cost of goods shipped, sorry, is because Etsy actually prefer and they will actually rank your listings higher if you do offer free delivery. And this is especially with the US. They really like it when US listings actually offer free delivery. So make sure you can do that and offer that if you can. Now that's all the sections complete for our new listing, we can now go ahead and actually click Publish and wait for that to load. And there we have it is now published and save our new listing. And what we're gonna do is quickly view this listing so I can check it out and see how it's looking so I can scroll through the images and see the arrangement that we spoke about earlier in the previous section. I can also check to make sure the sizing options are there and the color options. So I actually need to edit this and remove those color options. As for the most part, this is looking really good. The description is there as well. So that will conclude this segment of listing creation. And I really hope that you all able to follow along and take as much as you could from each one of these steps that I showed you. And I really do look forward to seeing the final listing pages that you produce. 9. Store Logo, Banner & Profile Image: In this section we're going to be covering our profile image, our store banner, and also our profile image for our store. This way we can present it in the most trustworthy weight and professional way as possible to the customers and buyers of Etsy. And again, linking back to some of our graphic design processes that we've been using throughout this class. We can now go ahead and use our preferred editing software. So in my case, I'm going to use Canva, but as again, you can use whichever one is that you personally prefer. So first things first that I would recommend we do, especially if we don't have an idea as to what we want to use for our logo and asked or Banner would recommend we actually go and look at some of our competitors and just get an idea and become familiar with the style that they using for their logos and store banners. And once again, I'm not telling you to directly copy any of their work. This is more just for inspirational purposes and just again, idea and a sense of direction as to where you want to be taken yours. So here we have to do is basically just nitpick some good ideas and even take away some of the bad things that we don't like as well so we know what to avoid. So just as a quick example, I'm going to show you how I would personally approached this. So our type in hustle t-shirt as this is a similar keyword to product I'm selling. This way. We can then pull up some of the competitors within my space and my niche, or then click on one of the listings. And then from there what I can do is click on their store link, which will then bring up their storefront. And then from here I can then have a look to see what sort of style they're using for their logo. And in this case, they do have quite a minimal nice boxed logo, but they don't actually have a store banner. And it does appear that they're using their logo for both their store logo and also their profile logo as well. Once you've spent some time doing that and you now have a good idea and a general direction as to where you want to take your own logos and store banner. We can now actually go head over to our editing software. So here I've just opened up Canva and I've created myself and new design template. And it shouldn't matter too much in terms of the pixel size, as long as it's somewhat above 4,000 pixels by 4,000 pixels. But another thing you wanna do is make sure that you've put it into a square template. So right off the bat, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to head straight over to the text section normal. All I'm gonna do is just use a simple and minimal text font. I'm sure to type in the name of my store, which is valid clothing. And then all I'm gonna do is use this as a foundation and a base to start with. And then I can adjust this font or the style or add in some form of graphic element. And this way I can then dabble and see what sort of logo I can come up with. One approach that are highly recommend, you guys do is on that same design template that you have, I'd recommend that you separate it up into three or four different drop-offs within that same template. This way you can actually then go ahead and adjust different ones and then try out different styles and then you can compare them all within the same page. So here I'm just going to go and copy and paste this same font style. I'm going to do it four times. And then what I can do is then work through each one of these. And then at towards the end, once I'm done with all four, I can then sit back and review them within the same page without having to click one separate windows to check them out. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to quickly whip up for different ideas as a logo for my store. And then I will check back in with you guys once I have them done. Once you've gone ahead and created a few different drafts for your new logo design. What we're going to want to do is now go ahead and actually filter it down to just one. And then what we can do is actually then further develop that last logo design until we are completely 100% happy with it. And based on the way that I'm looking at these four designs here, I'm actually leaning more so towards this one here, which is the third option. This is because it's just more of a minimal approach and I prefer the word and the logo of just father itself as a full load valid clothing is very clustered and is quite long-winded and long-tailed. So I'm pretty good with this one. And I'm going to do now is actually further develop it. And then once I do that, I'll then get back to you and show you the final product. And now I've just finished up with my new logo and I'm actually really happy with how this one came out. So once you are happy with your logo and if you are inside the canvas, I'll quickly show you how we can explore it. So I'm just gonna go to File, click Download. We're then going to want to save it as a JPEG and you can bump up the size to 10,000 pixels if you wish, and bump up the quality and then just click and hit Download. And then from here we'll head back to Etsy. So now I'm back on my Etsy store front. And from here what we're going to want to do is click on this Edit shop button here in the top left corner. And then from there this will be the section where our store logo will go. So we'll click this little camera icon here. And then from there you're going to choose a file. So this will be the jpeg file that you just downloaded. And then once it's done uploading, you're then going to want to make sure you adjust and crop your icon. But for the most part, if you've adjusted it correctly inside of your design template, you can just go ahead and click Save. And then once you're happy with it, you can then click, looks good. We'll do that, we'll then save it to your store front. And if you want to back out, you can go click new shop and then you can finally see your logo. And now what we're gonna do is go ahead and look to create our new store banner. And while this will actually be optional as you don't need a store banner, I would recommend that you make one anyway. So again, what you're going to want to do is go ahead and head back to your editing software. And then from there you're going to create a design template for a new size of 6,720 pixels by 1,680 pixels. And this is because this is the required size by Etsy for your store banner. And then once your design template has opened up, we can then go ahead and get to work. And another thing I'll quickly mention about these store banner and the design process for this is we shouldn't put too much pressure on this as it won't be as important as the branding that comes with the logo that we've just created. So we've asked all banners, we can actually swap them out quite easily and quite frequently. So I wouldn't worry too much about the end result from your first initial store banner. So again, what we could do is head over to Etsy to look at some of our competitors store banners just to get a general idea of the style that we want to head towards. Or we can even just go onto Google and type in Etsy store banner. And this will also pop up with some ideas. And another thing is if you are inside of Canva, we could also use some of the templates that they provide here. So if I click any of these templates, I can use these as a starting point as well. So just to give you guys a quick example as to how I might approach this. So soon as I am already inside of Canva, I'm actually going to go ahead and use one of their templates as a foundation or a base layer. Here, I'm just going to type in clothing. And then what we're gonna do is I'm going to pick one of these templates. And then I can essentially just go from there. And after having a scroll through some of these templates, I went ahead and chose this one here. And I went for this one because I feel like it actually matches up with the minimal style of my logo. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to have to find a replacement for this image. I'm going to have to change some of this text and I'll probably replace this part with my logo. So one way to do is go ahead and do that now. But as another idea for yourselves, if you don't want to look at your competition on Etsy, I'd actually recommend that you go on Google and just type in Etsy store banner. And this will actually come up with some other options for yourselves. So if I type in that, go into Google Images, we can then go ahead and get some inspiration from some of these images as well. So, I mean, just right off the bat, I like the look of this one here that's really professional, clean and minimal. And even something like that is simple and minimal as that, that'll be really powerful on Etsy. So definitely take a look around on Google images as well. If you are short for ideas. Here, I've just finished up on my first, initial design for my store banner. And all I've done is changed a few elements out of that initial template that I took from Canva. So originally there was a man with a suit and what I did is replace it with one of the mockups for my first product. And then I'll change some of the texts. I've now put June clothing sale and also replaced the texts that was here before. We've might new logo. So while it doesn't look like much at the moment is definitely a start. And I definitely feel that it goes with the minimal style that I'm trying to go for with my branding. And like I said before, don't put too much pressure on this first store Banner as this is something that we can quite easily just swap out at any moment and it won't cause any damage or harm to the branding of our store. All we're gonna do now is go ahead and repeat the same process. So we're just gonna go ahead and save our new design store Banner as a JPEG files. I'm going to hit Download, change that into a JPEG, and I'm happy with the size, or it could bump it up slightly and then make sure I maximize the quality and then hit download. And now inside of Etsy, we're essentially going to go ahead and do the same process as before. So we're going to go ahead and click the Edit shop button here. And then at the top will see a button for banner to showcase your brand and listings. We're then going to click that. And then what we're gonna do is go for big banner and then we're going to click done. And then at this point, this gives us the option to add an image, which we'll do. There. You're just going to want to go ahead and click on your new banner JPEG file and click on open. And then once that's done, you're gonna go ahead and click Save. And then from there you can click a few shop after that. And then this is where you can then sit back and review your new store banner and make sure that your 100% happy with it. And if you do happen to see it, any imperfections or areas that you are not 100% happy with, you can then just head back to editing software and make those changes and repeat the same process. So this shouldn't take you too long and it should only take you a few minutes to fix. So don't worry if you aren't 100% happy right off the bat. Now, lastly, I want to touch on these sharp member or the owner profile image, and this will come down complete personal preference. So what I'll do is show you guys two different ways that you can approach this. The first being that you will show the profile to be yourself. So for this, you will go ahead and upload a professional headshot of yourself showing your face clearly. And you'd also then put your name on the shop owner profile as well. And the benefits of this will be the fact that the Etsy customers will feel slightly more connected to you, knowing that there is actually a real person and a real face behind the Etsy store. And the second way is to simply just add your logo and then change the profile member's name to the same as your store name. So for me this would be the same logo and then I'll change the name to valid clothing. This will work just as fine and it will look just as professional, but it just doesn't come off as authentic and it doesn't really put a face behind the brand. So again, this will come down to your complete personal preference. And there really isn't a difference between the two and there won't be any sort of make or break deal where a customer doesn't buy from you just because of your profile image. So I wouldn't worry about it too much. But just for this example, one way to do is I'm going to leave it as Julian, and then I'm going to add a professional headshot. So just to show you how we can do this, we can click on Edit shop again. We can then click on the camera icon and then upload a new image, whether that be your headshot or you can upload your logo again that I've just selected my headshot file amalgam to wait for that to upload. And then once that's done, uploading, you can then go ahead and click Save. Once that's done, you then click View shop. And then once that's done, you can go ahead and review it to make sure you're happy with it. And if you did want to change this name to the same name as your store name, you can go ahead on your shop manager, click on Settings. You can then go to about your shop. And then here you can change the name from your personal name to the store name. So that will conclude this section where we now have a new store logo. We now have a new store banner, and we also now have a new profile image as well. 10. Store Headline, Description & Policies: Now in this section we're actually going to be following along from our previous step, which is where we went and create our new logo and store banner. And this will be our headline or description. And I'll store policies, which will all play a role in combating a customer when they visit our store front. What is a store headline description or store policy? Well, let me give you guys an example to show you. So here I'm just going to click on a random listing so I can show you the sellers store front. So once that's loaded here, you can see this little caption here, that is the store headline. And then when we scroll down further to the bottom, here is the store description. And then here we have the shop policies as well. So these are all things that can actually help convert customer when they're looking further into your shop and wants to know more about you. So when a customer does actually come across your store front, first few things they are likely to look at it. It's going to be your store Banner, your logo, potentially your profile image as well so they can see who it is that runs the store. They were actually looked directly towards the name of the store. And then below that, this is your headline and this is something that they were most likely read as well. Then if the customer wants to look further into your store, but typically what they would do is then head down to the bottom of the page to look at some of the reviews. That way they can see if the other customers of your store are happy with their purchases. If they scroll down further, this is then, this is where they will then be greeted with the description about your store. And most times they will read this as well. And this is where you can actually input a longer form type of writing and descriptive writing about your business and the store. And then lastly, we have the shot policies. While this section may be boring and you may not want to do it, I'd highly recommend you do this as this may be one of the most important and crucial pieces out of the three. So firstly, let's go over how we would write our store headline. And typically this will be quite small and concise as the customer, we're only keyguards over this briefly, so it needs to be sure and impactful. So in order to do their spirit and click on Edit shop. And then below it says Add a shop title, describe your shop in one sentence. So I'm going to click here. And then in my case here, what I'm gonna do is type in quality clothing at affordable prices. So I think that will do for now. And you can obviously come back and change this any point. But I would still recommend that you put at least something and make it short, concise and impactful. Next, we can then move on down to our store description. And again, this will be a similar process. So if we scroll down, it gives us the option to add a story headline, which will basically be the same as the headline we've just wrote, but it allows us to add on a little bit extra. And then below this is where you can put your longer-form description in. Here. This is where you're going to want to be more longer form like I just said. And you're going to want to describe a lot more about your business, the mission that drive on the purpose behind your store. Here for my story headline, I've basically just expanded on that smaller headline that I just wrote. Here. I've put valid clothing is an online retail store that offers quality clothing at affordable prices. You won't find anywhere else. So it's still along the same lines as my previous headline that I just wrote. I've just expanded it a bit more. And then below, I've now given a longer form piece of descriptive content about the store and our mission. So here I've put our mission is to help everyone find their passion and joy for unique clothing by simply surrounding yourself with positivity and creativity, you'll soon be surprised by how your new clothing can help lift your mood and Outlook. And here in not only puts an emphasis on the brand and our mission behind the store, but also actually brings in a selling point and a way of enticing the customer to purchase through us. What I've done here is I've used the section here where it says, you will soon be surprised by how your new clothing can help lift your mood and Outlook. So not only have I pushed the mission of our store, but also then enticed their customers as a reason to buy our products. And for your own store, you can do something completely different. And I'd actually recommend you do if there is some sort of unique selling point to the product, whether that's some form of sustainable material that you're using, or if there's some sort of mission behind your store. So wherever that is, you give away some amount of proceeds to charity from the profits. So I'll definitely look into that if you do have any unique selling points. Lastly, we're going to cover the shop policies. And the reason I said earlier that this is potentially the most important and crucial part of this section of the class is because this is where a customer may actually read over your shop policies and potentially choose your store over another store simply because of how protected they've shown by these policies. Whether that's because there's a returns policy in place or a cancellation policy. So in order to edit our shop policies, what we're gonna do is head down to the bottom here and then click on this edit button. And then we're gonna be greeted with the options to click returns or exchanges. And in the case that most of us are probably using a print on demand website. And most websites won't actually allow for exchanges. This is because the products that we're making are of course made to order and they're essentially custom orders. So what you're gonna wanna do is probably make sure you've got this on ticked. That way a customer can't just randomly buy a product from you and then a week later claim that they want an exchange. Because then we can simply tell them that all products are made to order and we can't accept exchanges. And then for the returns option, we're going to want to make sure we leave this part ticked. And although we won't actually be able to make any returns to the print-on-demand websites. Because of course, these are products that are made to order. We want to put reassurance into our customer's heads and we want them to feel protected and safe when they buy Airbus. I probably know what you're thinking right now. You're probably questioning why we would leave this ticked if we can't actually make a return to the print on demand website, well, that's because 96% of customers won't actually want to make a return. I'd even go as far to say that 97, 98%. So it's very rare that you'll find a customer that wants to make a return. And in that one case where you do get one, you can just have them ship it to your home address. And there you go. You you're not quiet out-of-pocket because you now have a physical product that you can go ahead and take product photos where it's not all doom and gloom, but you will have to expect there, say 9695 per cent will be happy. And then the other few, you'll just have to accept them as an out-of-pocket expense. This all worth it. Provide the peace of mind for the buyers because you will definitely see a lot more sales and conversions because of it. And then moving on down, we have the contact me, we'll then box which is the time period that the customer has to inform you that they want to make return. So here we're going to leave that as 14 days and then same again with the return items back within. So this will be 30 days as well. So this will be the period that the customer has to get the products shipped back to you. And then for the next section, which is cancellations, this is completely optional and you don't have to take it, but I was still recommend that you do. So I'm gonna go ahead and take that. And then where it says requests that cancellation, you're going to want to go ahead and take within four to 6 h. I'm going to give them 6 h. And the reason for this is because typically when a customer makes an order, and then by the time I've actually gone ahead and send that off to the fulfillment center, there is generally a window there anyway. So if they do contact me within 6 h after purchase, I'll be more than happy just to cancel it because I wouldn't have actually been out-of-pocket by that point. The next moving down, we're going to look at the following items that can't be returned or exchange. So you're going to want to make sure that you keep custom or personalized orders ticked perishable products. So depending on whether you're selling those, you can take that as well. Same again with digital downloads. If you are selling digital downloads, you can take that. And same again, with intimate items. If you are selling those, you can have those tick and I would leave items on sale untaxed because most times you probably will be running a sale and it's unfair to tick that, especially if you are running sales quite frequently. So I'm gonna go ahead and uncheck those and I'll leave that as is. And then you can go ahead and tick, publish shop policies Just as a quick side note and as another benefit to set up your shop policies, you will find that this actually sometimes works in your favor. So in some cases, I've actually had customers who wants to make a return, but typically they do take a while doing this and they'll contact me within this, say 45 days. And by that point, as I've stated, that they need to contact me within 14 days and then make the return within 30 days. That means they can't actually make a return. And I can use this policy to say, well, we have these policies in place to not only protect your rights as a customer, but we also have them in place to protect our rights as a business. So this can actually work in your favorite as well. Once you've gone ahead and filled out, There's three main things, which is your headline, your description, and your store policies. You can then look to actually add in those optional pieces as well of information. So here you can actually add in a video, you can add in some photos with some captions. But for the most part, I would recommend that you just fill out There's three main things, as you can always come back to this at a later stage and fill out when you have some more time on your hands. So that will conclude this section of the class. And for most part we're nearly done with our Etsy store. We only have a few more things to touch on in order to optimize our store to ensure that we're ready to go. 11. Etsy Ads For Scaling: Now for this section of the class, I want to go ahead and cover the topics and the benefits to using Etsy ads and how this can actually be a great advantage if you do choose to use it. So Etsy as essentially a way of paying Etsy directly and in return, what they will do is actually go ahead and promote your listings higher in the search results. So as an example here, what I can do is go ahead and again type in hassle t-shirt. And just to show you an example of this, the top four listings that are shown on the top row are all Etsy ads. So this means that the sellers for these listings are actually paying Etsy. So their listings are shown to me at the top of the search results. And typically you will find that ads are shown to you in every two to three rows. So you have one along the top row and then again along the fourth row, and then along the sixth, seventh, or eighth row. The reason I wanted to mention this in the class and recommend it to you this because not only is this method going to help you rank your listing in the search results much higher than also potentially gain new, more sales. But it's also going to create far more engagement involved in your listings as well. So let's say we have a customer who does come across your Etsy add. And even if they don't purchase it, there's a great chance that they actually might go ahead and favorite your listing or favorite your store. And this alone will be great for the ETC algorithm. Actually then trigger more organic traffic, just because Etsy then sees that you're getting more likes and favorites on your listings, especially for a brand new store where the ETC algorithm and the SEO systems aren't exactly going to be working in your favorite immediately. So allowing this method of Etsy as to basically expedite and speed up the process of getting new more likes, clicks and purchases Almost immediately is the best way to just get the ball rolling and get your story moving as quickly as possible. And of course, we're going to have to pay Etsy for these ads. This will come down to your own preference and your own budget as to whether you want to opt-in for this tool. But I definitely think is a great option to use if you can do so. Just to give you an example as to how I would approach this and how you can get started with Etsy ads. Here I'm going to click Sharp manager, and then I'm going to go down to marketing. Click on Etsy ads. And then from there I'm going to click Get Started. And then from here you're going to select as to why you want to run Etsy add. So I want to reach new buyers, bring more traffic to my shop, promote new products, and drive more sales. So I'm going to take all of these because I am a brand new store. Next, what we're gonna do is set our budget. As you can see at C10, allow me to run $101 per day at the moment. So I'm just gonna go ahead and start our advertising by $1 per day. And what that's gonna do is now setup my campaign and begin running Etsy ads on all of my listings. So as of right now only have one listing. So that's the only one it's going to run on. And then from there, what I would do is actually allow this campaign to run up to 30 days. That way you're giving, ETC, the time to gather as much information and data as possible. And then from there you can re-assess your budget. And the other thing you can do after those first few days is you can re-assess which listings you actually wants to carry on advertising for. So let's say I have a total of ten listings that I'm advertising. Why you would do is actually come back and give me the information based on how many clicks, how many purchases are being made through those ads. And then from there they say that only four of them are doing well, making, getting clicks and making sales, we can then do is turn off the remaining six. So essentially at that point, we would just be doubling down on the listings that we know are working and make enough sales. And once you have figured out which listings are working, we can then look to the option to scale our ads, which will then actually boost our sales and our revenue numbers through an increase of our ad spend. And at that point I would only do so if my row S, which stands for return on ad spend, is higher than my ad spend budget. We can review this and figure this out by using our Etsy Ads dashboard. So what we do is check here where it says revenue from ads. And what we'll then do is compare this to our ad spend, which would usually be shown along this tie-stall or line here. And we of course need to factor in that this will be our top line revenue number. And then beneath that we will have expenses for the cost of goods shipped and the Etsy fees that are taken with transaction fees as well. So within there, we will actually have a profit margin percentage. And once we know that profit margin percentage, we can then refer back to the Ad Spend to ensure that we're still making profit. So once you know, if you're still making money or even breaking, even after deducting the ad spend. From that point, you can then look to scale the ads and increase your day. I'd spend budget. So if you are just breaking even, I was still recommend that you go ahead and scale your ads up slightly because this is still going to bring in more revenue and clicks, favorites and just generally more engagement, which then on the flip side is going to be encouraged more organic traffic to your listings. So these ads will help more than just direct sales through the campaign alone. Now when we do look to scale our ads are highly recommend that we go ahead and double up on our ad spend. And the reason I say this is because if you only go with, let's say, a 25% increase, you won't actually see much of a difference and you will most likely just continued to see the same results. So we really want to use this tool as a means of optimizing our ads and our listings. So that way later on down the line, when we are working with far greater budgets, we know that our profit margins will be much greater and we should actually bring in more revenue and more profit. And as a side note, I would only recommend that you actually scale your campaign if for one, you can actually deal with the higher demand and the higher influx of orders and to the customer service that will also come along with those new orders. So that will conclude this section. And I really hope you were able to come away with a better understanding of Etsy ads. 12. Social Media & External Traffic: Now in this section of the class, we're going to be looking at these social media side to what Etsy store, as this can actually help generate organic traffic towards our listings and actually boost our listings within the Etsy search results. And the reason for this is because the ETC algorithm will actually pick up on the fact that our listings are experiencing a higher engagement. So I'm sure most of you know your way around the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, on TikTok. So I shouldn't really need to show you guys how to navigate around those platforms or how to sign up. But what I do want to do is cover the best methods and the best platforms that we can use in order to try and generate more sales. And what I would personally do for my own stores is out initially create an account on Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, and then just starts off with these. And the reason for this is because you will find that your content is actually pushed out more organically on these platforms as compared to say, the likes of Facebook. And these platforms are actually far more tailored towards the type of content that we are going to be posting, which is going to be photos and videos of our products as a means and a way of advertising them and entices a sale. So just to start off, especially if you are pressed for time or would recommend that you actually sign up for these main three, which again is Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. And then later on down the line, when you have a little bit more time, we can then go back to sign up for Facebook and Twitter and other platforms like that. So just to give you a quick example, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and sign up for Instagram for my new Etsy store, bile or clothing. And then what I'll do is show you the type of content that I would post and show you how I would post it as well. So here I now have my new Instagram account dedicated to my Etsy store, as you can see, already gone ahead and uploaded. My new logo, was also able to get a username which was relatively close to the name of my store, which is shop via clothing. So if you are dealing with that same situation where you can't get the exact same handle, just put shop or some alteration in there or another variant of a word close to what it is. So I think I did okay, with this name. Then I also went out and filled the description and I also put the link to my store in the bio as well. So the type of content now it's usually recommend that we post on our social media accounts would usually be real photos or images of our products. But in the case that we are using a print on demand supply it, we might not actually have any products to hand in order to take those real photos or videos. So what we're gonna do for now is just go ahead and use our mockup templates just to get the initial first post out there. And as long as your mockup images look as professional as possible, there shouldn't be a problem. So actually you continue using these images without actually ever having to use any real photographic product images. Now, I've just gone ahead and created my first pose. And the best way we can actually go ahead and obtain organic traffic is through the use of hashtags. So as you can see here, this is the first posts that I've actually put out. As you can see in the description, I've made sure to put as many hashtags as I could and made sure that they're also relevant to the image that I'm showing. Then we would essentially repeat the same process when we go over to Pinterest and TikTok. Although TikTok may be a bit of a tricky one in the beginning because of course, it is video content. Our new will more than likely need the product in hand to shoot a video for it. But I would still recommend that you go ahead and sign up anyway, just to get the ball rolling. Once you have gone ahead and sign up for all of your social media accounts, we can then actually head back to our Etsy store fronts so we can link them back there. So what we're gonna do is go click here to Edit shop. We're then going to scroll down to the section where it says around the web. We're then going to click add links to your website and social media. So for this example, I'm gonna be doing my Instagram. So I'm going to click Instagram and then I'm just going to paste my link in there. Click Save. And then what we do is go view shot, and this should then save my link. So when I go to click on that link, it should bring me to my Instagram. And the benefits of this is when a customer is visiting your store front and they do happen to click on that link, is essentially a method or proof just to show that we are a legitimate business on and just as a quick side note, if you do happen to be pressed for time and you're actually worried about how are you going to fit this into your schedule in terms of making sure you post to these accounts, you can actually use a social media planet, which essentially allows you to schedule your posts well ahead of time. So a website that I personally use is a website called meet Edgar, but this doesn't mean you have to use that one as there's plenty of others that you can look to. But essentially what this allows me to do is spend around an hour every week. What we'll do is actually then scheduled all the posts, all of my social accounts within that hour. So that way I don't have to revisit it and worry about it every day. Please feel free to take a look into that or even visit the website that I just mentioned as it really can be a time effective tool and it really is worth it if you are pressed for time and you're worried that you won't be able to post every day. Now, just as a last and final point on this section, I do want to mention that while this class has of course been dedicated to building your Etsy store, you may find that the creation of your social media accounts and you regularly posting to them, you actually find that you will build a following and almost built a brand around these social media accounts alone. And this is of course, an extremely powerful thing in order to sell directly to your followers and then actually sell it as a brand. What you would do is actually generate sales directly for your own website or Shopify website. So not only will these social media accounts potentially benefit your Etsy store directly, but it can also build a brand beyond your Etsy store and actually allow you to scale beyond the limitations of an Etsy platform. This way, you can actually then go to build your own Shopify website or another website in order to expand your revenue numbers. So that will conclude this section of the class where we've touched on the topics of social media and the benefits it can have for your Etsy store and building a brand. So I hope you were able to follow along, take some notes, and actually go ahead and apply some of these things to your own social media accounts. 13. Order Fulfillment : Now in this section, I want to briefly touch over the order fulfillment process just so you are aware for when you begin receiving orders. And generally there are two different ways that we can go ahead and do this. So we can either have them fulfilled manually or we can actually have them filled automatically. And this will be done through our print on demand websites by integrating it with Etsy. So I'm going to give you an example for both methods. But starting off, I will show you how to do it manually. And again, I will be using printf fall for this as well. Okay, so seeing as this is an example, I've gone ahead and pulled up an existing order from one of my Etsy stores, just so I can show you how it will look when you do come to do it yourselves. So essentially all we're going to be doing here is just following along the same sort of process and steps we would usually take. We're going to order from our print on demand website. So all I'm gonna do here in my case is I'm going to go down to products, men's clothing, and go to find my product which is a t-shirt, and then going to click on my products. And then depending on what the customer's ordered and depending on what design they've ordered and the size as an example or the colors. I'm then going to make sure I select all of those options. So here I'm just going to click large and then started designing. And then here I'm going to add the design for the order. So here I have my design from my example order. And then all I'm going to do is just adjust it and arrange it to make sure it's positioned the same way as I've advertised that product. And then once you are happy with its placement size, you can then just go to Add to Cart once you're happy and you've double-checked everything. And then once you've done that, you would basically going to follow through the same steps as you would going to check out for yourself. So here I'm going to click, continue to check out. And once that's done and you're happy with everything that you're seeing, you can then go continue to shipping. And then at this stage, all you're going to do is simply just copy and paste over your customer's information. So you're going to need to copy over their name at first-line of address. Obviously make sure you put their country in as well as zip code or postal code that the state that they're from as well, and the city. And then once you've done that, you can then follow through and goes down to the bottom and click the shipping method that you're going to use a most cases you will just use the flat rate shipping. And then we can go down to the bottom to continue to review. And then once you're on this final stage, all you gotta do is go down to the bottom and of course, just fill out the payment options and your payment information. And then once you're happy with everything, you're gonna go ahead and click pay now or pay securely now, and that will then lock in and complete your order. So seeing as this is just an example, I'm not actually going to go ahead and click pay now, but once you do usually this will then confirm the order. And then what they will do is the print-on-demand websites would usually then give you a order number or a order referenced. And this is what you're going to need to copy and paste the note section of your Etsy order. And the reason we do this is just simply as a way to reference back to that order and we can make sure there's a link that when you are dealing with high volumes of orders and you are dealing with loads of customers. You need to know which order is actually being dealt with and linked to the order that you've fulfilled for your print on demand website. So just as an example, you're dealing with say, ten orders and the supply goes ahead and ships out all of those ten orders within the same day and they provide you all the tracking numbers for each one of those orders. Make your life so much easier. You can then reference those tracking numbers to the order number and then you can correlate that to your Etsy order, which makes it easier for you to pass those tracking numbers over to your Etsy orders. And the other thing is if you are ever dealing with a problem with a customer where they're not happy with the order or if it is perhaps damage, you can then immediately take that order. Reference number two, your print on demand website, and then have them deal with the problem as well. And you won't have to go back and look through to see which order is that you're actually supposed to be dealing with. Then secondly, we do have the option to actually have our orders automatically fulfilled. And this is a great option if you are dealing with extreme high amounts of orders and a lot of volume. So again, as an example, I'm going to show you guys the process in order to get this set up. And once again, I will be using printf for. So here you're going to want to head to the print full dashboard within your account. And then once you are on the homepage, you're going to want to click on stores with the tool shop by icon. And then from there you're going to go choose platform. And then here we're going to click on Etsy because of course we are trying to connect to our Etsy store. So click that button there, scroll down and we could thank, and I click Connect to Etsy wants more. And then this will open up a new window within your Etsy account. So you're gonna wanna make sure that you're actually signed into your account within the same window or browser. And then from there we're just going to simply click Allow Access. Then again, we're just going to click Continue if you do reach this stage, and then we're going to click this button once more. And then once you reach this stage, this is where you can go ahead and add a product and it will immediately integrate with Etsy and become available to sell. So just as a quick example, I will run through and show you guys how we can do this as well. So we're going to click Add a product. And then here I'm just gonna go ahead and find the t-shirt that I've been intending to sell, which I believe is this one here. And then all you're gonna do is just design the product as you would before. So you're going to go ahead and drop your design in here. And then once that's done uploading, you're just going to click Apply. And then you can go ahead and arrange it and adjust it into a position that you are happy with. Then once you are happy with it, which is going to go and click Proceed and mock-ups. And then once you do reach this stage, I wouldn't worry too much about it. And you can actually use any of these mock-ups that they provide as some of them do look quite professional. So just as an example, I'm gonna go ahead with this one as the main mockup image and then going to proceed to details. And then when we reach this section, is essentially going to be asking us to create new listing inside of Etsy. So here it's only going to ask us a few of the main questions. So the title, the description tags. So for the most part you want to fill this out draft. And then once you do go back inside of Canva, you'll want to do it properly as we did earlier on in the class. After you've done that, which gonna go and proceed to pricing. And again, this is something you can touch up on inside of Etsy and I recommend that you would, because you can then add more variants. You can change out the global and local pricing and things like that. So after that, you can just go ahead and click Submit to store. Once that's done, you can then actually head back into your dashboard and you should be able to see the listing. So then once you are back inside of your Etsy store, we're going to head to the dashboard and then we're gonna head suit the listings tab here. And then in order to find the listing that print forehead just made for us, we're gonna go over here and click on the draft listing status. And you'll be able to find that listing that. And if you do want to publish it and you're happy with how it is, you can click this little settings icon and click published by would actually recommend that you go ahead into the listing and you edit some of the title, the tags, and just add in more information and details of the products. And if you can make sure to add some more images as well. Now I will quickly preference that while the use of automatic order fulfillment is extremely appealing, I would actually recommend that you go ahead and use manual order fulfillment for Alicia first 50 to 100 orders. The reason I say this is so you can actually go ahead and become familiar with the whole order fulfillment process. And you can actually make sure that there's no errors or slight mistakes in the first few orders that you do have. But once you do exceed a certain amount of orders and you begin to feel more confident and relaxed with your order fulfillment process. You can then look to switch and integrate the automatic order fulfillment process and systems. And of course, in doing so, this will actually free up some of your time and allow you to invest more of that tie back into creating more designs. So that will conclude this section of the class. And I really hope you have a clearer understanding now of the different methods that we can use when it comes down to our order fulfillment processes. 14. Orders & Customer Reviews: Now in this section, I want to explain the importance of customer reviews and how we can actually ensure that we're receiving the most and the best customer reviews we possibly can. So first, let me start by emphasizing how important customer is really can be for an online business and an online store. So I'm sure most of you are aware of this. If you ever have shopped online or you've come across a website that you're not too sure about. But most customers, when they do find a product that they like on Etsy, 50 per cent to even 75 per cent of them were actually go ahead and check the reviews before they even consider making a purchase. So we really do need to consider that while we put all of this time and effort into the designs, the products, the layout for our store, it really does come down a lot to the reviews that these customers sees before they want to buy our product. And the reason that most customers through this is because they're essentially trying to reassure themselves that this product is for one going to be safe. And to that they're actually going to receive the product that they're being shown and advertised. And I know from my own personal buying habits, especially from websites like Amazon, I won't ever actually make a purchase until I've gone ahead and read the reviews, made sure that they're all fairly positive. And I'm sure most Etsy customers probably go ahead and do the same thing. Seeing as etsy isn't the most thoroughly checked and rigorous e-commerce platform out there as compared to the likes of Amazon. So most customers do know that they're actually directly buying from small business owners, just like you and I. So how is it that we actually start receiving more customer reviews and better rated reviews? Well, the first thing we could do is actually go ahead and just send up a simple follow-up message once the customers do start receiving their orders. And this is something that I do for my own Etsy stores. So typically what I'll do is I'll just follow up with a pretty scripted message that I've already typed out. I'll then send that to them once I know that the order has been delivered. And then if I do get a response from the customer, will then engage in a conversation for around two to three messages just to make sure everything was okay with the order and they are happy with it. Then at the end of that conversation, I'll just follow up and ask them if they could politely just leave a review as it really does help with the business and it would be greatly appreciated. And most times when I do this, the customer will then actually go ahead and leave us a nice five-star review. If you are doing this for every single one of your orders, I can almost guarantee that around half of them will probably actually respond back to you. And then another half of those were actually leave your view. And of course, every time you do this and you get a new review, they do really build up. And of course, the more reviews that you gain in your acquire, all it's gonna do is build for our best as social proof, when customers do come to your products and consider whether it's a bar for new or not. So this really is a simple but yet effective way that can help build us and actually grow our business. And it really is these simple methods like this that can help build towards a successful Etsy store. So as long as we stay consistent with it and we're always looking to improve where essentially then she leaving no room for failure. And I can almost guarantee you that 90% of other Etsy sellers aren't going above and beyond like we are now. That was a robber quick section and I'm now going to conclude it. So I really hope you were able to get a better understanding of customer reviews and how beneficial they really can be for Etsy store. 15. Etsy Store Longevity & Future Plans: Now in this section, I want to touch on the long term and future plans for our Etsy stores. Because all in all, this class is showing you the foundational steps that we need to take in order to build towards a successful Etsy store and how to actually run it towards that direction. So I just want to quickly go over some recommendations that I have for how we can actually plan for the future. So firstly, once you've got your store up and running and you begin making sales, you shouldn't ever just stop there and become complacent with how things are going. You should always be looking for ways to improve and ways to actually better your store. So this can be as simple as things such as changing up your store banner if you haven't done so for awhile. And you can even go back and revisit some of the SEO keyword research that you've done for your listings. Or it could even be as simple as touching up on some of the descriptions and the headlines of your storefront. A few other things that you could potentially do. You could look to perhaps add a video to your storefront if you don't already have one. So there is plenty of different things that you can be doing. So if you do find yourself with some spare time, I would recommend that you don't become complacent with it. Now the reason I am saying this and the reason I feel then need to say this is because I've definitely caught myself doing this with my own Etsy stores a few times in the past. So I'll see that things are going well and are making general sales like a certain amount of sales every day. Once I see that all then actually begins to sit back and relax and let the store crews, and trust me, this really is the worst mindset you possibly could have for your Etsy store or for any business in general. This may sound slightly odd or weird to some people, but there's always one thing that I would tell myself that keeps me going, which is that there's plenty of other people that are working just as hard or if not harder than me and it essentially competing against my business. So there's no way I'm going to slow down or stop and essentially let my business suffer because of it. So again, there is always something that you can do to better and improve your store. And another thing you're going to want to make sure you are doing for the future plans and the longevity of your Etsy store. I just want to make sure that you're aware of the different seasons and the holiday periods that do come up. And the reason you'd want to know this is so you can actually go ahead and ensure that your shop is optimized to that sales event or time period or holiday season. So as a perfect example, we have Black Friday, which comes around every year. And mostly e-commerce stores were actually run a sale and they will have different banners and advertisements tailor-made to that one day and that event. So the same will be the case with your stores. So you might want to make an adjustment to your store banner to advertise a certain sale that you're having wherever that site 20% off, and it's a one-off event. These are the things you need to keep in mind. And again, even with the Christmas period, you may want to adjust the branding and the overall look and style of your store towards that holiday season. And whether that's even you arrange the designs in your collection within your store front to show those certain holiday season or Christmas designs first. So in order to make sure that you are ready for these types of events or holiday seasons. You're going to make sure that you are aware and you can fully prepared well before the season or event arrives. And another thing you can do to ensure the longevity and the growth of your store is if you can't find anything that needs to be improved with your Etsy store. Or you can then do is look to create more designs, new collections which will expand the amount of listings and the products that are being advertised on Etsy. And I would actually recommend that you use this time far more wisely and strategically when it comes to creating your designs. So essentially when you first go to open up your store and you're creating the first, initial designs for that store. They're going to be very broad and they're only going to be based on these designs that you want to create. And there isn't any strategic process or reasoning behind most of those designs. So most times we would just end up creating designs that firstly we like and we want to create, and secondly, we will try to create designs that we think will suit the products that we're selling. But you will soon once it gets to the stage where you're actually creating your designs with a strategic reasoning and purpose behind it. So let's say there's a new upcoming trend for a new song or a new movie. And you want to hit that trend with a new design. That is a strategic reasoning for making that design because, you know, there will be a new influx of traffic coming into ETC, because of that new trend. And the same again with keywords, if you can identify a key word that is highly popular and search for Vin, ETC. You can then go ahead and create a design for that keyword. So now lastly, touching back on these social media and the branding side of things and how this can actually relate to the future plans and longevity of our Etsy stores. We need to understand that while Etsy is an incredible place for people to start that online business, especially for those who are just getting started, it definitely has its limitations as most things do. And the limitations that I've found with Etsy is that you can only actually scale to a certain point before you essentially hit a ceiling and you can't go any further. I can't really follow around any sort of revenue cap number. And what I mean by this is I can't tell you how much revenue you're cap out before you start to experience this. The main reason I'm telling you this is because you can only serve indirect so much traffic towards your store. And the reason for this is because they have the direct so much trafficked into a product niche. And obviously there's thousands of sellers were not niche. And so there's only going to be a certain amount of customers to serve those sellers. So this is of course, where our branding and our social media following and engagement will definitely come in and help us to allow us to expand and grow our business beyond Etsy. And essentially for the long-term plan, we ideally want to build a business that can not only survive but thrive beyond Etsy. So let's say, ETC, just comes crashing down one day or they even suspend your account for whatever reason, we still have a business that can survive from there. And once again, this is completely down to your own personal preference as to how you want to navigate the long-term plan for your business and your Etsy store. So if you are happy just to stay on the Etsy platform, that is completely fine. So that will conclude this section of the class. And these are just some recommendations that I wanted to put out there just in case you do find yourself at any of these points. 16. Final Thoughts: So congratulations, you have finally reached the end of the class, and I really hope you were able to follow along with these steps and these sections of this class and also take away with you as much information as you possibly could through everything that has been shown and said to you throughout this class, I'm now 100% and that you're more than ready to begin your journey towards your own successful Etsy store. Just ensure that you take your time with everything and you put in as much effort as you possibly can, because as he really is a long term journey and things won't just happen overnight. So do make sure to put the most that you can into every aspect of your store, whether that be your products, your designs, your storefront, or even your descriptions. Just take the time in doing so to ensure that you've optimized the store to the best of your ability. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of some of your Etsy stores. So please do feel free to contact me with any links or photos or videos that you have, and I'd love to see them. I also look forward to hearing about the way that Etsy has not only changed your lives in terms of financial gain and additional income, but the way it's also change your perspective on online business and the opportunities that are out there and how freeing it really can be knowing that you can make money for yourself. So thank you for spending so much time here with me in this class, and I really hope you were able to take some value away from it. So now I can only wish you good luck with your Etsy journey. And if you do need any further support for entrepreneurship or online business, then you can go ahead and check out my YouTube channel. Once again, thank you for being part of this class and I really do wish you all the best.