3 Steps to Building Million Dollar Etsy Shops
So several years ago, before everyone went into lockdown, I was trying to figure out the world of E commerce and online business. I would binge watch all the YouTube videos, trying to figure out what worked and what specifically made these people so successful.
See, when I was brand new, I was making countless mistakes. I failed with probably dozens of different business ideas. And over the course of that year, I lost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. After this drought of failure, I found what I thought could be a successful business model that might be able to work for me. And it started by selling on a marketplace called Etsy.
Now, after I almost completely ran out of money, Etsy was my last hope. And this is actually where I was able to launch my business. And since then, I've been able to scale the Etsy side of my business to over seven figures. I think I could have avoided a ton of the failure if I had just focused on what the successful people were already doing in the business that I was trying to get into.
So today I want to share with you the three things that million dollar Etsy shops do that also helped me scale to over a million dollars. This can apply to any kind of shop, not just print on demand or digital downloads for my returning viewers.
I've tried to keep this as raw as possible so there's no get rich quick fluff. This is actually how you do it, if you want to scale an Etsy shop to over seven figures, a shop that can generate you multiple six figures each year. So I'd encourage you to read the whole article and hopefully you don't get too bored along the way.
3 Steps to Increase Etsy Sales Fast
Step 1: Timeline
Now, the first point is to look at your Timeline. I think the main reason for failure with E commerce is not the fact that you don't have the skills, because the skills are relatively easy to acquire. It's the fact that you get trapped with easy money and getting rich quick instead of real business growth. I'm going to show you a few shops as well as the dates that they started to really drive this point home.
Now, this first shop called CaitlynMinimalist, has been on Etsy since 2014, but she's gotten almost 2.1 million sales. That's nine years of work. For even more context, she got her first review over 3,000 days ago. If you can do anything for 3,000 days, you're going to be successful. And it likely won't take 3,000 days, but that's besides the point.
CaitlynMinimalist is now an established brand that generates millions of dollars each year just on Etsy. That doesn't even include whatever they're making on their own website.
Now for this next shop called eBollo, I've estimated they've done over $3.2 million, basically just selling T shirts. They started in 2009 and they got their first review nearly 5,000 days ago. These shops weren't doing it just to get some quick money. They were doing it to build a long term business, but it also doesn't have to take quite that long.
This shop called IkersonLTD sells print on demand T shirts through Printify. And they got their first review over 1000 days ago. They also have over 6000 listings, meaning they've posted an average of 6 listings a day for the last 1000 days or 3 years. At this point, I've estimated they've done close to $2.7 million in just three years. That's almost a million a year.
But in the same breath, I could explain how hard it would be to consistently do this for three years time. And they probably didn't see any kind of results for the first few months doing this. So why does all of this matter? I realized when I was researching successful stores that I was going to have to commit to doing this for a long time. I decided that for the first two years, even if I didn't make anything, if the third or fourth year I started making two or three hundred thousand dollars a year, that it was worth it.
A lot of the culture around E commerce and making money online is that everything's going to come fast and easy. And I think that this was my exact advantage. I knew that even if my listings weren't as good as the competition, if I could just last a little bit longer than they did, I would beat out all of the competition.
Time can be your biggest enemy and prevent you from succeeding, or it can be your best friend because you know that everyone else isn't going to put the time in. It just takes time to learn everything that you need to know and become successful. You wouldn't expect to take over a CEO position of a company and know everything right away. It would take a lot of time and effort to get there.
Okay, but this shop called MockCityStudio is selling clothes Mockups. So basically you buy these to display your own artwork on top of the item so that your customers know what the end product would look like without you having to actually print the shirt and take photos of it yourself. I show you this one because while she only has 33,000 sales, she's done it in less than a year. She opened her shop in 2022 and got her first review on April 19th.
So with an average price of $2.42, she's likely done close to around $80,000 her first year in selling. That's also in profit because they're digital downloads and she doesn't have any product costs.
So even though we're going to have a longer timefra change our expectations so we don't have to get sales today, how can we do something like the shop that we just looked at in a shorter amount of time? Here's the thing. If you don't want it to take you years before you hit the 2 to $300,000 per year mark, the key is to do more volume.
Step 2: Volume
To understand volume, I want to take you back to some of the shops that we just looked at as well as some new ones. So the shop we already looked at called CaitlynMinimalist has about 2.1 million sales, likely totaling close to $46 million. And to get there over the last 3,000 days, they've posted 1,275 listings.
The shop, IkersonLTD, that I've estimated to do about $2.7 million, 6,600 listings. Now this shop CrazyDogTshirts, mostly just selling apparel like T shirts and socks, with over 221,000 sales, has 3,004 and 473 listings. This shop, oTZIshirts, also mostly just selling T shirts, has more than 125,000 sales and 7,400 listings.
Are you starting to see the trend here? This shop called PintSizedUS, they're selling baby and toddler clothes, it could be print on demand, i just really don't know. They have almost half a million sales, and over 3,400 listings.
This shop called HeatherRobertsArt, just selling SVG graphic downloads. Over 727,000 sales, over 3,300 listings. TwistStationery, basically just selling stationary items and cards. Selling relatively boring items. Almost half a million sales as well. But they have over 4,600 listings. This shop, BeingHappyPrints, basically just sells baby shower or wedding printables. Almost 200,000 sales and over 2,100 listings.
Now, there's no direct correlation, but it's fairly obvious to me that the more listings you post, the more sales you get. And it doesn't even matter what type of product you're selling. If it's baby clothes or jewelry or digital downloads for something, the more listings you have, the more sales you get. Like, just to get really good, you have to do a lot of volume, which means you have to post a lot of listings.
Now, volume alone doesn't even mean that much. Like you could post 10,000 listings and only get five sales a day. What matters is that each time you create a new listing, you get a little bit better with the listing images, the mockups that you're using. You slowly start understanding how the Etsy algorithm works and how to use SEO. Each time you post a new listing, you get a little bit better than the last time. Then, if you've posted a thousand listings, you have a thousand different data sets to make better decisions from.
Like, if you sell shirts and the designs with color in them sell more often, then make more designs with color. You'll start noticing things like specific keywords that you're ranking for that other people aren't. Use those keywords more.
Like, this is how you scale. You put a huge amount of output by making as many listings as you can and use the data from what's getting clicked on and what's being purchased to make better decisions into the future. This is what really separates your business from a similar one. You'll have the data and the sales history and they don't.
Now Let me address the next thing that I know is going to get brought up, which is the cost to post listings and it's 20 cents a listing. Now, with any business, there's a cost to acquire the customer, but Etsy traffic is dirt cheap. You can post a thousand listings for $200 that will live on Etsy for four months. That's basically like running a thousand different ad creatives targeted to your niche audience for $200 for four months. To me, that's unreasonably low for the potential profit that you have, not that they should raise their prices or anything.
Now, with your first thousand listings, a lot of them won't sell, some of them will. But for $200 you get a thousand chances over the course of four months to make a sale. If you make a $10 profit, you only need 20 sales over the course of that four months to pay back your $200. And if you want to run ads that's up to you, I've grown my biggest 7 figure business completely using organic SEO traffic without running or paying for any ads just by posting more and more listings. Better I got at posting products, the more the algorithm likes me.
Okay, so this shop called CoResume, they sell professional resume templates for Word Pages and Google Docs. And with their 34,000 sales, an average price of about 8 bucks, that's $272,000 and they keep almost all of it, since there's no cost of products, it's just a digital download. And they only have 61 resume templates. If you made between one and three resume templates every single day for the next year and you didn't make $100,000 on it, I would be shocked. If you can make a thousand of anything, you'll be successful.
It's just about making each product a tiny bit better than the previous one. This is something anyone can do. If you want to see a tutorial on the resume idea, let me know in the comments section.
And regardless of your niche, your first products probably suck. By consistently putting in time and effort and just making better products, you'll start to see the payoff. The more you play the game, the better you get at playing it.
One of my favorite books called "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, he lays out the 10,000 hour rule. The rule suggests that to achieve true mastery in any given field or skill, it generally requires about 10,000 hours of intense, deliberate focus on learning that skill.
Now, in the second chapter, Gladwell goes over the story of the Hungarian chess teacher and psychologist named Laszlo Polgar. This story is fascinating to me because Laszlo believed that any child with the proper training could become a genius in a particular field. All three of Laszlo's daughters, known as the Polgare sisters, Susan, Judit and Sophia, all went on to become chess grandmasters. Which is like the highest level of chess player that you can achieve. And chess is a pretty difficult game.
Now, the youngest sister, Judith Polgare, achieved the title of grandmaster at just 15 years and 4 months old, at the time, she was the youngest to ever achieve this title. It says in her biography that she was just 11 years old when she defeated another chess grandmaster in a tournament.
What I found even more more interesting is that in this chapter, Malcolm Gladwell doesn't even mention the 10,000 hour rule. And I think it's because we should use that as a benchmark to determine your level of expertise. It doesn't mean that you won't be successful until you hit that mark, but once you hit that mark, you're likely quite successful already. Just like with Judith's story, you can achieve massive and unexpected results a lot sooner than you may expect.
So even now that I've made over 6,000 of my own listings, I couldn't even begin to communicate everything that I've learned from it to you. You only learn the details that make you successful by doing it for yourself. All of these businesses that we've already looked at, you could basically run from just a laptop with no fancy equipment. So really the only excuses that I see is because you don't want to, you don't believe in the process, or you just don't believe in yourself.
That shop I mentioned earlier called MockCityStudio has over 700 listings. All of these take a lot of time to create. She has to make everything look nice and make sure it's centered and usable. And 700 listings in about 300 days, that's 2.3 listings every single day for the last year.
Now, everything that she's posted is going to continue to sell and produce income. She could continue to post new products to increase her earning potential, or she could sit back for a while and keep earning some passive income.
Now, the final reason that I mentioned this shop is because, because she made it into the top 100 sellers for the last 30 days. Her shop over just the last 30 days has made 8,431 sales. That's almost a third of her sales that she would have never gotten if she hadn't consistently posted new listings. If she decided at the 10 month mark that only earning $60,000 wasn't enough, she would have missed out on the $20,000 that was coming the next month.
Step 3: Process
Now finally, I can tell you from growing my own seven figure shop and talking to others and seeing what they do that the glue that holds all of this together and makes everything work is your process. Actionable steps that you can follow every day that are within your control.
Now, for some context, back in about early 2020, I was starting to see a little bit of success by selling things like T shirts and mugs on Etsy. But it really wasn't enough to make a full time income out of it, like maybe $5 a week or something. After I did these steps that I've shared with you in this article, I learned that it was going to take a lot of time and listings to find the kind of success that I was looking for.
I found different shops that had already seen success and the main thing that they all had in common was a lot of good listings. So I set a goal for myself, that I would post 20 listings a day until I hit 2000 listings.
Like, I posted consistently for four months and only on the fifth month did I see any kind of noticeable results. To be able to do this, I had to completely change my mindset and process. I had to reverse engineer each step of the way to make it as efficient as possible so that I could actually hit my goal.
I had to figure out how to go from posting like five products a week to 20 products a day. And I had no idea how I was going to do it. I just committed to doing it. And if I hadn't built up a great process that allowed me to do that, I probably wouldn't have reached the seven figure mark. Each day every batch of 20 listings got better than the previous day. The process was more than just designing the products, I had to build this into my lifestyle and make it an everyday habit.
If you took my example from the CoResume template business, how could you reverse engineer that into something that you could actually do? To post three templates a day, There's a lot more profitable resume shops like GetLanded that's done close to $788,000 in profit. Or this shop called CreativeJamCo that has done close to $625,000 in profit. You would need a great system and process to keep coming up with fresh ideas and new ways to target people. For example, if you manage to get 100 great templates and translated them into 10 different languages, you've got yourself a thousand listings.
There are alternate ways to come up with good product ideas. I think it really comes down to commitment and staying focused. If I had stopped posting at three months, probably at around 700 products, I would have never seen the success that I finally did. But now that I've laid a really large foundation, I'm able to do $100,000 in a single month. And not only that, but I've bought my time back to pursue other opportunities like writing these blog articles that long term can earn even more money on top of the bid business that I've already grown.
See, some of those successful shops that we looked at in the beginning have taken almost a decade to achieve their success. But if you can put in more volume you'll learn the game faster by just playing it more each day. And just develop a process that's strict about your output and not about the amount of sales that are coming in. If you can do this, you'll be more successful than you can imagine.
Now, finally, because this article is a little bit longer, a bonus tip I wanted to share. And this is mostly about competition because I know a lot of you guys are worried about an oversaturated market or it being too competitive on Etsy. If there is a golden opportunity that isn't competitive, you are going to have to be the first person to find it. Because I guarantee as soon as other people find it, it's going to be flooded with competition.
Competition just means that the process already works, so you just have to make the process work for you. So adjust your timeline to allow you to put more volume in and get more practice in and develop a process that allows you to consistently make and upload new great products.
This is the exact formula that I've used to build my seven figure business and I truly believe that you can do the same as well. And I hope this article helps.
