7 Things that EVERY $1M+ Etsy Shop Knows
"Steal like an Artist" is a book written by Austin Kleon and he writes creativity is not about pulling something original out of thin air, but rather remixing, reusing and building upon the ideas of those who came before you.
Ladies and gentlemen, now that I'm on my way to the $3 million club from just my Etsy shop, I can comfortably say that my success on this platform is almost entirely due to looking at what successful people are already doing and imitating it in my own business.
So in this article I'm going to give you the seven lessons that I learned from seven figure Etsy shops that I've used as a framework that helped me grow my own multimillion dollar business.
7 Secrets to INCREASE Etsy Sales in 2025
Obey Your Niche
I still get emails to this day from people who have signed up using my link, asking me what niche I think they should start a shop in and my answer is always the same. Your product is your niche and you use ideas to target customers. A super easy to understand concept of this is this shop called KDPrint who Allura estimates has done over 1.1 million in sales. They sell map prints for any location that you can think of. They've taken a product, which is a poster in this case, and used the idea of locations to target potential customers.
This is a great example because using the poster niche they could target people who want a Colorado themed product. You can even get more specific and target people who want a specific town or city in Colorado. They could do this for any towns, cities, states, countries, regions that they can think of.
This shop has basically one product template and they use it to sell tens of thousands of print. It's just a map of an area with a name and the coordinates below it. They're not trying to sell pillows and stickers and Maps, just one product.
Now PaperEmporiumCo is a more recently started shop that's at almost $1 million USD and they're doing a similar thing targeting location based interests. Just in my opinion these are more attractive products templates. Their style also allows them to sell digital and physical print on demand versions which can both be pretty passive unless they're selling custom maps.
Now how do you pick a product that can sell well? I can always just sell an already bestseller product. You can find that by looking at the Printify best sellers page to find the best selling print on demand products or just look at what's already working on Etsy, but either way just sell something that's already working really well.
Posters are best selling products for the exact reason that you can target so many different interests with them. But you could sell matte prints on mugs, tumblers, pillows, or a bunch of other products as well.
Just remember, the product is your niche and the designs target the customers. Seven figure shops understand that picking a product and using the ideas and interests to target customers reduces the competition and this is how you build sustainable business.
Product Elements
When it comes to building out a product line, one thing we can always copy from millionaire shops is their product elements. A product element is simply an element of an offering that somebody is already using that you can include in your own business.
Specific product elements might look like this on this shop "MyPorchPrints" that's selling AI and handmade digital downloads they have a lot of unique product elements that help them stand out. They have a very clear vintage aesthetic across all of their products. They have these overlays on top of their product images that helps build a branded look and provides information. And they have these elements like info cards on all of their listings. And whatever they're doing, it's clearly right because they've been quite successful.
If you have one person you're influenced by, everyone will say you're the next whoever. But if you rip off 100 people, everyone will say you're so original. Not only can you get in legal trouble if you're copying someone directly, it's also unethical. However, stealing one element from a dozen different shops, like the product overlays in this example, you can learn how to develop your own style that can actually yield results.
Again, looking for single elements that we can sample from this shop "StrictlyBusinessMugs" selling mugs has all different kinds of elements. If we look closer than a surface level, we could use this red color in some of our own designs. Maybe we like this typewriter font that's left justified. Maybe we like the way that the video is showing off these designs. Or maybe we like the repeating colors or the stocked font style of this design. And we could choose one of those elements to use in our own designs.
I've covered this before in my T Shirt design tutorial and how to use these elements in your design templates. Each little element might not seem significant, but it makes a difference and separates successful shops from the ones that fall on the 50th page of search results.
Seven figure shops understand that you can sample little elements like these from dozens of shops to make up your own style that feels unique from the mockup, the design, the branding, the colors, the titles, the fonts, the aesthetic, the info cards, and the small details.
Look at successful shops and sample elements to come up with your own brand. This is how they've gotten there in the first place. Copying is directly replicating someone's work without any alteration while imitating is mimicking or adopting certain ideas behind someone's work with variations and alterations.
Now how do you find successful shops you might ask? You can find them manually on Etsy or you can use the tool that I've linked down below called Allura that I've been using a lot in my articles. You can use it to filter the top shops based on any category that you can think of and it'll give you a list of hundreds of seven figure shops. You can also use it to filter out the top listings to find those product elements that we just talked about.
Proven Product Images
Now you can sample all the elements that you want but arguably the most important element to sample from seven figure shops is the proven product images. The product image is what ultimately convinces our customers to order from us. The good thing is that we can learn exactly what type of images convert the best by looking at the shops that are already killing it.
Allura estimates that this shop called IkersonLTD, who I've mentioned on my blog before, has done over $4 million or a little more than a million a year. Now having this much success there are obviously clues that we can learn from. By looking at their product page, we can see that the designs they're selling all look pretty similar.
But remember, they found those successful elements and they're selling all of these designs on just a few mockups. This shop own has discovered that at least for their designs, these mockups convert better than any others. This is the reason that they're able to get over a thousand reviews on a single item. It's absolutely in part due to the design and the colors, but also the mockup and product image.
The thing about this is they're using mockups that anyone can use because they bought them right off of Etsy. And in fact this mockup is only $6. We could buy this same mockup that we already know is one of the highest converting and use it to sell our own products and designs.
This is how you get high converting mockups and images. Look at what seven figure shops are doing and see if there's a reasonable way that you can imitate it without copying.
Again, don't steal their entire design, just steal one element that you like. And in this case it could be the mockup. You can't use the mockup and the fonts and the colors and everything, just one element at a time.
Lots of Listings
And once you've gathered the product elements that you'll be using, it's time to start making a lot of listings. If you were a salesman trying to sell real estate agent services door to door, it would take a lot of attempts before someone finally opened the door ready to do business with you. If you only knocked 50 doors, which would feel like a lot, the chances of one of those 50 people being ready to buy or sell at that time is extremely slim. You might have to talk to 500 people before you get someone who's even somewhat interested. Seven figure shops understand that it takes a lot of listings to be successful.
The way that you find high performing best selling products is simply by making a large quantity of products. Quality comes from quantity just by volume. This shop called NorthPrints, that's done over $2 million in profit over the past few years, has more than 1,000 listings. The shop IkersonLTD that we looked at has close to 7,000 listings. And Allura thinks that this store called PintSizedPremium, has done over 2.25 million and they have over 1500 listings.
Now, one thing to note is that this shop "PintSizedPremium" , for example, sells one design on multiple products. So while it might look like they have 1500 listings, they might actually only have around 700 designs. Either way, this is still a huge number of listings. And by repurposing them on multiple products, they're expanding their target audience.
It's a pretty common hack to use, and you could do the same by offering digital and physical versions or just different items with the same design on them. Even shops that are selling jewelry "CaitlynMinimalist", for example, have figured out a way to get up a lot of listings.
So regardless of what your niche is, there's a way to do it. And this also ties back in with the first lesson that we learned, because if your niche is the type of product that you're selling, it'll be much easier to come up with a lot of listings than if you're only focused on making vegan cutting boards.
Traffic Source
Now, making a lot of listings sounds tedious and like a lot of work, because it is, but it'll dramatically help you with lesson number five, traffic sources. The way that customers find your business is going to determine how much profit you can make on each sale. You're going to have to pay for eyeballs on your store one way or another. On Etsy, you'll pay the 20 cent listing fee and then you can choose whether or not to run Etsy ads to those listings.
Now, I've used ads before, and personally I don't like paying for ads on a platform that's driving millions of monthly visitors to their platform anyway. Etsy ads don't optimize very well, again, at least from my experience and they dig into your profit more than they add to it, unless you're selling something with at least a 50% profit margin. I prefer to rank my products organically using SEO.
Now, this isn't a one size fits all model here, because some successful shops do pay to run Etsy ads, but there's also a ton that don't. This shop "IkersonLTD" that we've already looked at doesn't run any ads to their products. Instead, they list a bunch of products with good SEO that eventually rank on the first page of searches.
Now, this shop "NorthPrints" that we've also talked about selling digital downloads also doesn't run any ads. They're using their title tags and images to rank in search and then just letting the sales commit.
If you're focused Right now, reading this article, you'll remember that I said you can even get more specific and target people who want a specific town or city in Colorado. So the competition for Colorado map print is at around 5,000 other listings. But if you sell a bolder Colorado map print, that's only about 1,000 listings, you can reduce your competition by being more specific with who you're targeting. And you do that by making more listings.
If you pay to run ads and then you stop running them, that listing that was promoted and on the first page of search is going to sink right back down to the bottom of search results. When you're not trying to run ads, you can spend more time and money on making the products you sell better and earning a spot on the first page of search results.
This is where 90% of the sales come in, and once you make your way to the top of a specific search, it's difficult to lose your spot. The million dollar shops understand that maintaining your ranking in search, regardless of whether you're paying for ads or not, is essential to keeping those consistent sales coming in.
Give Up Sales
Big million dollar shops are not afraid to give up a sale. If you're new to selling online or customer service in general. You might not know, but 99% of your customers are great and are never going to have any issues. But that 1% are going to absolutely suck away your time.
I've had my fair share of difficult customers and found a super easy way to deal with them. They're either going to be difficult before or after the sale. They're usually specifically picky about the price, the product or the shipping. And no matter what you do for them, they'll always expect more. If they keep asking for discounts or promise good reviews and repeat business for extra service, it's a major red flag.
The easiest fix is to simply not sell to these people. I'm talking about the customers who reach out, demanding a discount or asking for modifications to a product before they even buy it. I choose to have an abundance mindset where I don't have to work with every annoying customer because I know that I'll have 10 more that are easy to work with. I like having as many sales as I can get, but at this point, if I can sense that a customer is going to be difficult to deal with, I'll get them not to purchase or I'll just cancel their order.
Now if we look at this shop "BoooTees" that's done over $2 million. If we look at their reviews section, you can see that they're really never getting any bad reviews. This is because they're able to handle all of the bad issues and customers before orders ever even come in.
If one person buys your listing, it means hundreds of other people might buy it as well. But if there's a one star review right at the top of that listing, it's going to drive a lot of new customers away. I do everything that I can to prevent taking orders from difficult people or letting them leave a bad review, even if it costs me money. But sometimes things on your end as the seller might get messed up too. And if that's the case, once the customer asks for a refund, I always give it to them.
You must protect your brand. There are countless new shops that end up getting bad reviews because the shop owner is afraid to lose out on that little bit of profit or because the customer was difficult so the shop owner just wants to stick it to them.
Bad Reviews
Seven figure shops can afford to miss a sale or even refund an order, but they can't afford to get bad reviews. They're not scared of losing a tiny amount of money on one sale. They're afraid of missing out on tons of future business.
If we look at shops like this "IkersonLTD", we can see that they're consistently getting five star reviews every single time. But if we look at this listing, you can see that Etsy pushes that negative feedback to the top, making this design look not even worth buying. These aren't even one star reviews, but it's likely enough to drive away most new customers, even if the defects weren't on the new products. I used to think that because I have thousands of reviews, a one star here and there doesn't matter too much.
But in reality, a bad review doesn't hurt your overall shop, but it can absolutely kill a listing. Remember, if a person buys your listing, that means hundreds of others might as well. But if there's a one star review right at the top of that listing, it's going to drive a lot of those customers away.
Buyers want to see the most likely outcome for their purchase, and negative reviews and negative social proof are powerful movers when it comes to getting sales.
If you spend your time studying seven figure shops across multiple niches, learning the way that they think, why they do the things that they do, there's no reason why you can't grow your own seven figure shop as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope this article was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions down below.
