Today was the second installment of Career Service’s DIY: Lecture Series. This segment was all about Etsy.com, and making the site work for Pratt students. For anybody who does not know Etsy (eht-szee), it is a website where people sell their handmade goods. Everything from photographs and fine art, to knitted scarves and wooden furniture is sold on Etsy.com. Etsy is an online community of artists and crafters who sell their wares, and chat and learn with and from one another. There are three million registered members and 200 thousand active artists on the site. Each month, Etsy has over 500 million page views, 23 million visits and 8.3 million unique visitors. Etsy began in 2006, with annual sales of $3.8 million dollars. Through August of 2009, Etsy has already made $100 million worth of sales this year. The massive amount of business that Etsy does means one thing: you should check out Etsy.com, and see if using it to sell your products is right for you.
The way that Etsy works is that each user sets up a “shop,” which shows announcements, a banner, a profile, and selling/buying/shipping policies. Sellers create a name for their shop (it can be their own name, or something more creative), and can then post items for sale in their shop. Etsy charges twenty cents to list an item for four months. This means that if you are listing three of the same purses, it will cost you sixty cents. After the four months, you must renew the listing. If you sell an item, Etsy also charges a 3.5% commission.
Two women from Etsy, Anda Corrie and Danielle Maveal, spoke to students in a lecture room in the basement of the Activities Resource Center. They explained the five steps to using Etsy:
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- Develop a product line—Make something new and unique, or upcycled.
- Name your shop—Choose a name that is easily able to be Googled (i.e. not “Soap,” because that will turn up too many unrelated hits). Check to see if any other businesses already use this name. It is not a bad idea to just use your own name. Use the same name for Twitter and Facebook. This way they are all linked together.
- Photos—Take good ones. Show details of your work, including the back, etc. Pay attention to lighting, and make sure the product is clearly exhibited. Etsy has high photo standards (compared to eBay, for instance).
- Tell your story and show your style—Art tells the artist’s story. You can speak in the first person in your shop descriptions.
- Enjoy the community—You can chat with, critique, and promote other’s work. You can also join “Teams,” which are based on common interests, location and genres of work. Use the human connections to your advantage to promote your work.
Corrie and Maveal included some other tips in their presentation. They talked about using the Etsy Showcase to promote your work. To be part of the Showcase, you pay $15, and are then showcased for a day on the site’s homepage. This ensures that everybody going to Etsy.com that day will see your product. You can also pay $7 to be featured on a certain community’s page for a day.
Another tip was to tag your work with keywords. Most Etsy.com buyers search the site for keywords (like “purse” or “wedding invitation”) to find what they’re looking for. You can have up to fourteen tags per item.
If you have your own website, and would like to promote your Etsy shop, you can create an “Etsy Mini” widget to showcase your work and link to your Etsy shop from your main website.
Etsy has a whole bunch of information on their site about classes that they teach, and information about how to be a successful online artisan, so explore it if you have some time.
Next Tuesday, there is another lecture for Seniors about Applying to Graduate School in Career Services, East Hall 1, from 12:30-1:30.
By Natalie Apuzzo
