Search results (tags) for: "statistics"

Etsy Statistics: October's Fall and Rise

2008-11-06T11:13:00Z

We're definitely keeping our eye on the economic conditions here at Etsy, but despite the turmoil, we still had another record setting month in October.

Here are October’s key numbers, each of which represent the highest total ever:

$8.4 million of goods were sold — a 5.9% increase over September.
That represents 577,398 items sold, a 6% increase from September's stats.
976, 234 new items were listed, up from 911,191 items last month, a 7.1% increase.
102,778, new members joined the Etsy community, including 19,689 new sellers. That’s our first month ever with over 100,000 new members — a 6.5% increase vs. September.
358,000,000 page views were recorded on the site, a slight increase from September.

Thanks to everyone in the Etsy community for all of their hard work in October!

Curious about how other months compare? Check out our past Weather Reports for more statistics.

Etsy Statistics: September, Still Sunny!

2008-10-08T17:03:00Z

I apologize for the delay in publishing these — we're working on revamping the information we send out and were hoping to have these changes in place for this month.

Here are September’s key numbers, all of which represent the highest total ever for their categories:

$7.93 million of goods sold — a 5% increase over August.
That represents 544,157 items sold, a 5.3% increase from August's stats.
911,191 new items were listed, up from 869,000 items last month, a 4.9% increase.
96,473, new members joined the Etsy community, including 18,001 new sellers. Both of these rates of new sellers and new buyers are essentially flat from last month.
344,000,000 page views were recorded on the site, a slight increase from August.

A few things to consider with these numbers: September has one less day than August, which makes a significant difference as we start having $300,000 sales days (that’s right — even in these tough economic times, we set a single day record on Sept 30th: $305,000!).

Thanks to everyone in the Etsy community for all of their hard work in September!

Curious about how other months compare? Check out our past Weather Reports for more statistics.

The Numbers Game: Sales per Day

2008-09-24T11:20:00Z

Dear Sellers,

Let's continue the journey of listening to the stories that the numbers our Etsy shop tell us. As a review, a ratio is the story that two numbers tell when they are together. So far, we have explored a popularity ratio called the heart-to-sale ratio and a couple of inventory ratios. This week, we will explore a ratio concerning your shop's sales.

Sales Per Day Ratio:

The Sales Per Day Ratio tells us historically how many sales your shop has made per day that your shop has been open for business.

How to Calculate:

Sales Per Day Ratio = (Total sales you have made) divided by (The # of days your shop has been open)

You can find the number of sales you have made by looking on the right sidebar of your shop's homepage under other items. You can find how the # of days your shop has been open by first looking at your join date in the info section on the right sidebar of your shop (if you didn't start selling right away, you'll have to try to remember when that date was. Or you can go to your Etsy bill to see when you first listed an item). Go to this website and type in your join date as the start date, today's date as the end date, and then click the "calculate duration" button. The website will then tell you how many days your shop has been open. Find a calculator, and take the first number and divide by the second. The number you calculated is your Sales Per Day ratio.

This number tells you how many sales you make per day. If your number was 3.2, this means that you make about 3 sales per day

Fill your number into these sentences to get your interpretation:

Historically, I have made about _____ sales each day my shop has been open.

During any given day, I will make about _____ sales.

Predicting Your Next Sale:

Sometimes, ratios can attempt to make a forecast or prediction. Let's try to predict when you will get your next sale.

Next Sale Prediction = (One) divided by (Sales Per Day Ratio from above)

This ratio tells you an estimate of how many days you will have to wait until you receive your next sale. (Note: If it is a decimal, you can multiply that decimal by 24 and find out how many hours until your next sale and replace hours for days in the following interpretation).

Fill this number into the following sentences to get your interpretation:

Based on historical trends, I will get my next sale in about _____ days.

As a rough prediction, I will make a sale in about _____ days.

Variables to Consider:

There are quite a few things that could influence the results of your calculations, including the following:

You opened your shop a long time before you actually started selling products.
You have had major rushes on your products and/or extreme sales droughts.
Your sales are very sporadic.
Your sales come in clusters, where one customer buys multiple items.
You may have started or stopped an effective marketing or advertising push.

You can get a more accurate result if you use the date you really got serious about your business. You could also calculate this ratio for only one month at a time to get rid of seasonable variations. There are a host of variables and each shop should interpret their data in light of their shop's exact circumstances.

How to Use This Information:

These ratios can help us evaluate how your shop is doing and help you set goals. I use this ratio as a daily goal for my shop. Currently, I make about 2 sales per day. If I sell nothing or only one item, I know I am behind my average. If I sell two items in a day, I know I am having an average day. If I sell more than two items, I know I am having a pretty good sales day. (Of course, you need to take into consideration how much profit you make on an item and other variables as well). The prediction ratio can give us an estimate about when to expect our next sale. We can also set goals for how long it takes our shop to get our next sale and compare our actual results to our goal.

Final Thoughts:

Everyone loves getting a sale! It is fun and worthy of a happy dance. Next time you get a sale, remember—there is a numerical story behind that transaction. Until next time, keep crunching numbers!

For more how-tos about selling, see the Seller Handbook.

Etsy Statistics: Summer Storms in August?

2008-09-09T11:00:00Z

...We avoided them last month! August was another month of good stats, and August 15th was the biggest day we’ve ever had: 18,484 items sold for a total of $287,000!

Here are August’s key numbers, all of which represent the highest total ever for their categories:

$7.55 million of goods sold — a 6.5% increase over July.
That represents 516,600 items sold, a 6.1% increase from July's stats.
869,000 new items were listed, up from 813,000 items last month, a 6.9% increase.
96,100 new members joined the Etsy community, including 18,300 new sellers, both increases in sellers and buyers from last month.
340,000,000 page views were recorded on the site — a 4.9% increase.

Thanks to everyone in the Etsy community for all of their hard work in August!

Curious about how other months compare? Check out our past Weather Reports for more statistics.

Etsy in the Press: Good Morning America

2008-08-08T11:40:00Z

UPDATE: Here is the link to the video.

Tory Johnson, founder of Women For Hire, was on Good Morning America on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008, presenting Etsy as a great place to open a home-based business. Johnson recently authored a new book, Will Work From Home: Earn the Cash Without the Commute. Chanel Kennebrew from junkprints was highlighted as a successful seller who makes a living working from home. To see more of Chanel, check out her Handmade Video Portrait.

We experienced a record number of page views as a result of the GMA spot—our first 12 million page view day. We also had a record number of new buyers (nearly 4000!) sign up for the site.

The video featuring Johnson is not yet available on the web, but we will post it as soon as it is live.

For more Etsy Press coverage, go here!

Etsy Statistics: Dog Days of July?

2008-08-04T15:00:00Z

...Not at Etsy! We had a fantastic July, even with the July 4th holiday slowing everyone down a bit. July 31st was the biggest day we’ve ever had: 18,291 items sold for a total of $267,195!

Here are July’s key numbers, all of which represent the highest total ever for their categories:

    * $7.0 million of goods sold — a 9.8% increase over June.
    * That represents 487,000 items sold, a 10% increase from June's stats.
    * 813,000 new items were listed, up from 742,000 items last month, a 9.5% increase.
    * 87,000 new members joined the Etsy community, including 16,000 new sellers, both increases from last month.
    * 324,000,000 page views were recorded on the site — a 7.6% increase.

Thanks to everyone in the Etsy community for all of their hard work in July!

Curious about how other months compare? Check out our past Weather Reports for more statistics.

Etsy Statistics: June Numbers Heating Up?

2008-07-02T13:40:00Z

Here's an update on how we did during the month of June here at Etsy. We broke one major milestone record with 301,850,000 page views, up from last month’s 298,000,000 — our first 300,000,000 page view month ever!

Here are the rest of June’s key numbers:

$6.5 million of goods sold - roughly the same as May.
That represented 442,000 items sold, a slight drop from May’s number.
742,000 new items were listed, up from 730,000 items last month.
80,000 new members joined the Etsy community, including 15,000 new sellers, both slight increases from last month.

Thanks to everyone in the Etsy community for all of their hard work in June!

See our previous months' coverage.

100 Videos on Youtube

2008-06-25T13:27:00Z

Etsy has been making videos for just a smidge over a year. We upload to a few video sharing sites and we've been uploading to blip.tv for longer, but with the latest video about Betty Turbo, we've hit 100 videos on our Youtube channel!

Here's the first one uploaded to Youtube.

Check them all out and make sure to hit Youtube's yellow subscribe button!

If you want to get all our videos in iTunes, you can subscribe in iTunes and get them all downloaded instamagically there too!

P.S.
All of the related items below have a Youtube url in their items descriptions and you can copy and paste into your browser.

Tech Update: View Tally System Upgrade

2008-06-18T15:55:00Z

To the delight of our engineers and (hopefully) our sellers also, we are very pleased to let you know that view tallies should be functioning properly once again.

As many of our sellers know, we've experienced a recurring problem for the past several months that caused listing view tallies to sporadically reset. This forced the affected view counts to drop to "1".

We've developed a new, more reliable view tally system. As a result, most sellers will see a shift in their item view counts today. In addition to keeping accurate counts going forward, we were able to restore all view count data since January 1, 2008, even if a listing's view count was reset during this time. Unfortunately, we were unable to retain data prior to January 1, 2008, so some listings may experience a decease in views if they were on the site prior to the start of the calendar year. Think of it as a fresh start for the new year, with (most importantly) accurate information.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused by this problem, and we thank all our members for your patience as we worked on a solution. We are hopeful that this new tally system is a solid solution that will provide reliable info. Giving credit where it's due, we'd like to give big thanks to Etsy engineers, Jorge and CB aka longhaul who solved this challenging problem.

We've tested this system thoroughly, but there is always a chance that an issue may arise once we have it running on the live site. If there is an issue, we'll be sure to alert you through the Storque and the Etsy News Alerts email list. If you continue to experience problems or just have questions, please let us know in the forum thread.

Here is a brief Q & A about the new system:

Q. Some of my listings lost views counts AGAIN! What's going on?
A. We've been able to restore all view counts that occurred between the dates of January 1, 2008 and June 17, 2008. If your listings' views occurred outside of that range, they were not able to be included in the new count.

Q. My view counts jumped up! Why did that happen?
A. Your listings now reflect all of the view activity between January 1, 2008 and June 17, 2008. If your view counts have jumped, it's because they were reset in the past and have now been restored.

Ms. One Million: dorothywyn

2008-06-13T15:00:00Z

On June 10th, 2008, Etsy had its 1 millionth registration. Needless to say, this milestone has symbolic value to us and we're so excited about it! But it led admin and the community alike to wonder about the person behind that big, round number. Who is she?

We are happy to welcome dorothywyn to the Etsy community. She is a seller based in Hong Kong, and she makes cute, quilted cellphone coozies, as well as crocheted items.

dorothywyn initially found Etsy through a Google search, when she was looking for Japanese fabrics. In fact, if you search "Japanese fabrics" in quotes today, Tokyo-based supplies seller Matatabi.etsy.com comes up on the first page of results, a search engine optimization feat that makes Eric aka likeomg very, very happy. (Eric is our Etsy admin who works on SEO. Read more about SEO and Etsy here.)

When I asked her what drew her to Etsy, dorothywyn said that it's "a great place for handmade lovers. Interface is good and users friendly." Her favorite site feature so far is Time Machine. And perhaps most importantly, she seems excited to be part of a community that "encourages creativity and personal style." Here here!

And while dorothywyn is just one in a million registrations,* I think it's interesting to consider how her profile reflects what's going on at Etsy more generally. Etsy is attracting more and more international members like dorothywyn. We have begun thinking longer-term about how to create a truly international marketplace to serve makers and buyers. At some stage, we hope to call upon our "early-adopters” outside the U.S. for their input. If you have thoughts or ideas on internationalizing Etsy, please share them in the comments.

And, another aspect to consider: dorothywyn found Etsy through a search for supplies. (We have recently changed the way search works to make it easier to parse searches through the drop-down menu in Etsy's main navigation bar). The Supplies Category continues to be important to the growth of our marketplace. In this case, the supply was "Japanese fabric" — which I think points to the continuing cultural flow in our global marketplace. Increasingly, trends, fashion, and creative impulses do not heed national boundaries. This may have always been the case, but technology allows these global connections to be made very rapidly through grassroots, user-generated sharing of information and content.

Etsy is striving to bring more meaning to commerce by connecting makers and buyers globally. Thank you to dorothywyn and the other 999,999 other Etsy registrations for helping Etsy get closer to its vision.

*(That number includes multiple accounts from one member as well as accounts that may have been closed. In other words, members have gone completely through the registration process 1 million times.)

Please join us in giving our Ms. 1 Million a warm welcome in the comments below!

Etsy Statistics: May Flowers Indeed!

2008-06-02T17:49:00Z

Thanks to all of the terrific members of the Etsy community who made May 2008 another record month with all-time highs in both amount of goods sold, new listings and page views.

The numbers for May:
•   $6.5 million sold here on Etsy last month — 8.3% more than April.
•   449,000 items were sold to make up that sales figure.
•   A tiny bit over 730,000 new items were listed.
•   65,200 new buyers and 14,400 new sellers joined the community.

We were very close to 300,000,000 page views for the month (we came in at 298,000,000) and we had our highest traffic day ever: 10,500,000 this past Wednesday, May 28th.

Keep up the good work and I'll be back with an update next month!

See past posts on Statistics.

Etsy Statistics: April $howers

2008-05-02T13:05:00Z

Frankly, we were a little worried about April’s numbers at the start of the month: Easter, a big shopping holiday, was in March this year, and April has one less day than March.

Overall, our fears were unfounded — while our growth wasn’t quite as robust as March, we did hit some terrific milestones.
The numbers:

295,797,972 pageviews, up 4% compared to March.
There were 710,000 new items listed, up 1%.
427,000 items sold, up 6% from March’s number.
We added over 65,000 new buyers, essentially flat vs. March, but an impressive number, nonetheless.

The milestones? We sold over $6 million for the first time ever, an 8% increase over March! Also, April 30th was Etsy’s biggest day ever, with 16,580 items sold, representing $256,000. Thanks, CNN!

Focusing Our Priorities: Your Top Three Ideas

2008-04-21T15:02:00Z

We're taking a bunch of steps here at Etsy to make sure we're in tune with what you, our members, would like us to change or add to the site.

Last Tuesday, we posted a forum thread in the Ideas Section of the forums asking for your top three ideas as both buyers and sellers on Etsy. We were so happy to follow this thread over the past week and watch it grow to a 60+ page thread with over 600 posts. As each new post came in, we documented and tallied your ideas. We are pleased to share the results with you.

Overall Top Three Buyer Ideas:

Favorites (organizing, searching, privacy, gift registry, etc.)
Advanced Search
Seamless checkout process

Overall Top Three Seller Ideas:

Seller statistics
Ability to move listings within shop (without renewing)
Vacation mode

Here are the full lists:

We greatly appreciate your feedback, ideas, and the time you took to voice them in the thread. From here, we'll use your input (from both the ideas forum and community inbox) to help us prioritize development. You can expect some more forum posts from us as we gather more details about specific features.

Town Hall Meeting: Notes from Friday, April 11th

2008-04-15T18:53:00Z

We had a great discussion this past Friday, and for those of you who couldn't make it, here's a rundown of what was covered. In addition to these notes below, here are the full minutes.

We began by looking at where Etsy is at right now, as we prepare to turn three years old on June 18. It's been quite a ride, and there's a lot to do. The nature of our business means that we conduct our education in public, because on the Web there's no shuttering the shop at 5pm to mop the floors.

It took an incredible group of enthusiastic and driven people to create Etsy: both the site itself and the marketplace. There are 73,478 shops with at least one item for sale, with sellers in over 100 different countries. Our company is 60 people now, and we've just doubled the size of our Support team.

As the complexity of the website grows, as the amount of traffic served every day grows, as the company grows, as the community grows, there are new demands. And meeting these demands requires a bit more process, a bit more structure. We all feel this, and we've just hired someone whose primary role will be to meet and exceed these demands.

I'm happy to announce that Etsy has a Chief Operating Officer (COO)! Her name is Maria Thomas. She brings with her a wealth of experience on how to lead and orchestrate a company, having previously worked at Amazon, the World Bank and most recently NPR.

We just filmed an introductory interview with her, which we'll be posting to the Storque soon. When Maria gets back from her short between-jobs vacation, there will be a chance to follow-up and ask her questions directly as she leads a Town Hall of her own. We're all eager for her to begin.

It's important to all of us that even as we grow and hire people like Maria, that we keep our Etsy-ness. What is this? It stems from a genuine love of what we do, and the personal approach we all take (especially all you sellers) to how we do business. On the other hand, if things are run in too much of an ad-hoc manner, slip-ups occur. We've learned this lesson and our biggest challenge is to learn from the past to better guide our future.

We discussed a handful of new site features:

Currency conversion
Shop stats for sellers
Dynamic Team sections
Multimedia (video) on Etsy
Improved multi-user apps, like the Workshop but tailored more for shopping
An in-house payment system

With each one there were many questions. First and foremost people wanted to know when any of these might launch. This is an especially tough question for a number of reasons. Part of improving our internal operations is to get a better sense of the timeline and prioritization. Once we're more comfortable with this inside Etsy, we'll share info with the community. We'll also hold workshops around each specific feature to get more input from everyone. For now, this was just to give everyone an idea of what's in the air.

We'd also be grateful if you shared your own top ideas for Etsy in this forum thread.

Two Important Announcements

We made these announcements during the Town Hall:

1. Item renewals will work a bit differently.

Currently, when you renew an item, four months is added onto the total listing period. There are some items on Etsy that expire after the year 2100! This is problematic for several reasons, the most important one being that it's unlikely the seller will be alive then, or that the item will be retrievable; yet the item will remain on our site, for sale.

We will shortly (by the end of April) change this to work as follows: when you renew an item, four months will be added to the item listing from the date of renewal. It's up to a seller to decide if they'd like to pay another 20 cents to have their item listing placed back atop the pile, so to speak, in the marketplace. (Search results and categories are currently sorted by default to show the most recently listed items first.)

2. Changes to the category structure and search.

The top-level categories on Etsy have remained almost totally unchanged since our launch. We're amazed they've worked for this long, but there's also big room for improvement. There's some overlap and confusion: for example, if I knit a sweater for my little cousin, it could go into any of these top-level categories: Children's, Clothing, Knitting.

We'll be creating filters that can be applied to any top-level category, e.g. Who's It For?. So this means that instead of being a top-level category, Children's will be a filter that can be applied anywhere.

Etsy's search works well. It's fast. It's just looking at data that's too free-form (tags). Our tagging system will remain as it is, but we'll create a more specific set of criteria about an item (codenamed Credentials) that the default search will look at.

This is a huge project, and there will be a lot of discussion around it in the upcoming months. In the meantime, please know that we won't spring any changes on anyone.

Looking Forward

We have Town Hall meetings so we can all share ideas and answer questions. We're quite a big community now, so we'll have more meetings at different times of day, and post notes and minutes from each one. Stay tuned for the next one, and I hope to see you there.

We're all in this together. We see the mountain ahead of us and we're eager to climb it.

Handmade Weddings: The Sales Results, Happily Ever After

2008-04-15T15:00:00Z

We chose handmade weddings as a month-long series for a lot of reasons: There are tons of different aspects of a wedding that can be handmade, the styles are almost infinite, and there are tons of fabulous wedding items on Etsy. That's all great, but we also wanted to see whether or not an in-depth series would be useful for buyers and sellers. Well, the results are in for the wedding series and I must say, we’re suitably impressed: We ran the series for four weeks and business in the wedding category grew 57% vs. the previous four weeks!

A huge thank you goes out to Etsy sellers who decided to give the Weddings Category a shot, as well as the sellers who contributed their stories and expertise, including littlethings1, MagicIsland, solidio, ruralabandon, fubabee, beadifulthings, shoofly, citydirt, sewphisticate, mosey, LadybugSF, PetereneDesign, hobocampcrafts, LoucheLab, maryink, esdesigns, liskidder, gurlygirl, pistachiopress, vintagethisretrothat, RaeGun, creationsbylonni, moontreepress, KisforCalligraphy, Thomasina, confections, onesmallstar, pinklilypress, skyfiregraphics.

We also owe a big thanks to our guest bloggers who drove so much new traffic to the Storque and people's shops (you can find a list of them here).

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the series and we’ll work on more ways to spread the word about buying handmade!

Check out our new Featured Column, Earth Tones, all eco-friendly stuff in honor of Earth Day.

March Numbers: No Foolin'

2008-04-02T14:40:00Z

As tempted as I was to post this yesterday and throw some April Fool’s numbers into this article, March’s numbers were just too good to mess with. You better believe it!

All of the numbers below are the highest Etsy has ever achieved, even more than this past December 2007!

We sold a hair over 400,000 items representing $5.6 million. There were just over 700,000 new items listed.

We added over 66,000 new registered buyers to the site and they contributed to the incredible number of page views in March: 285 million.

Wow, what a month — no foolin’!

Thanks to everyone for such a great month! You can also look at the February Stats and read more statistics-related articles by searching the Storque for the tag "statistics."

Tech Update + How-To: Download your Sales and Billing Data to a Spreadsheet

2008-03-20T09:52:00Z

Sellers who do their own accounting will be excited to hear this: you can now download your sales information to your computer in CSV format ( Here here! for "comma separated values")!

A CSV is a type of file that can be opened by programs such as Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc (a free spreadsheet program). If you go to Your Etsy > Sold (orders) you'll now see a link at the bottom to "Download this sales data as a CSV." By selecting the month and year near the top of the page, you can download sales info from your shop for each month you've been in business.

Did you know CSV files are also available for your monthly Etsy bill? To download a month's worth of billing information, click on the appropriate month in Your Etsy > Your Etsy Bill and click "Download this entire monthly statement as a CSV file."

If you've never used a CSV file before, we'll walk you through downloading it to your computer and opening the file. It's easy!

First, save the file to your hard drive.

Next, open the file with your spreadsheet program. You may need to select "All files" in the list of file types.

It should open up to a list of all your sales for the month. You can use formulas to calculate your total sales for the month, shipping costs, etc. For details on how to set up formulas, see the help documents for your spreadsheet program.

Voila!

Comment below if you have other ideas for fun ways to sort at the data in your new spreadsheets!

Survey Says: The Results Are In

2008-03-06T15:00:00Z

The results are in! We had over 30,000 respondents to the survey, an overwhelming response. After careful data scrubbing to clean out multiple entries and comparing the survey data to our registration and site statistics to review how representative the sample was, we are excited to present the results to you.

We are particularly pleased that we had a significant number of buyers answer the survey; those who are buyers and do not sell on Etsy accounted for 46% of the total respondents.

For a summary of the results, download this file.

Some highlights about who we are:
Predominately female: You might have suspected this... 96% of our users are female.

Highly educated: Both buyers and sellers are a highly educated group, with 63% graduating from college and 17% still in college. Sellers, 58% graduated from college and 8% are still in college.

Young: Buyers, on average, are 32 years old and sellers are slightly older, averaging 35 years old.

Mainly from the U.S., but our international user base is growing: 82% of buyers and 86% of sellers are from the United States. This is a huge opportunity for us to continue embracing more people from more countries. We are working on tools to do this, such as currency conversion, guides about shipping internationally, and further down the line, language conversion. We have registered users from 172 countries and counting!

Some suggestions based on the results:
Keep blogging: Lots of buyers find out about Etsy through blogs. To be exact, 26% find out about Etsy on blogs and 17% find out about the handmade products they buy on blogs. The good news is 51% of the sellers who responded to the survey participate in blogging. Here are some more tips for sellers: Etsy Team Tips: Etsy Teams Blog Ring, Etsy Community Projects: Etsy Sellers Who Blog / Blog Love, Writing for an Online Audience: How-To, How-tos from the Seller Blogosphere: greenbeanbaby's 10 Steps to a Successful Shop, Shop Makeover Series: Pimp Your Shop for 2008, Tech Updates: New Storque Tools for Readers.

Use Etsy Mini: Almost all people who use Etsy mini (40% of total sellers) find it a valuable tool for promoting their shops. So if you haven’t already, add an Etsy mini to your blog. For instructions check out our tech update on the Etsy mini.

Tell a friend: The most frequent way buyers find out about Etsy is through a friend (33%). So keep spreading the word and use the "email this to a friend" link on item pages and at the bottom of Storque articles.

Update and actively use your social networking profile: 72% of buyers and 78% of sellers have a profile on at least one social networking site. These are huge numbers. This suggests that your Facebook page just may be a great marketing tool for you (see our Storque article about Facebook). You might want to think about trying out some more recently created social networking tools, like Twitter (see our Storque article about using Twitter). From recent anecdotal reports, Twitter is great for strengthening your relationship with current customers, fostering repeat sales.

Consider using category showcases: Buyers found Category Showcases an important feature and frequently use category pages, the second most likely way to search for items on Etsy (read an article about Category Showcases here).

Showcase the uniqueness of your items: Buyers shop on Etsy primarily to find unique items, because they value handmade goods and they want to support independent artists. Buyers, and 80% of all respondents, are also willing to pay more for high quality, well crafted items. (Learn more about the Art of Pricing and tell us Your Handmade Stories.)

More insights:
We also learned more about what features buyers and sellers are interested in. Features that scored high were wish lists (for both buyers and sellers), improved search and seller statistics. We are working this year to get these features out to you.

Advertising was another highly requested suggestion from sellers in the open comments of the survey. This survey helps inform our advertising plans, both for where we plan cooperating advertising as well as on online advertising. An example of this is our upcoming wedding series, where we will be advertising on targeted blogs and websites.

Again, thank you to all that participated in the survey and for all of your suggestions along the way. We plan to do this regularly and I am eager to see how things change as we grow and add new members and features.

Etsy Statistics: Hot in February?!?!?

2008-03-06T09:26:00Z

We’re a little slow on the newscast this month as Bre is flying around the US spreading Etsy video awesomeness. Instead of waiting for his return, we thought it was a good idea to at least give you the Weather Report for February. We track a lot of numbers, but there are five in particular that we pay close attention to and share with the community:

New Items listed: 612,641. In January, there we 575,174 new items listed, so this is a new record and an increase of 7%. In February 2007, 148,422 new items were listed. Wow — 312% more than a year ago!
New Users: February saw 75,458 new users join Etsy, up from 68,013 in January — an 11% increase. In February 2007, 22,392 new users joined — a 236% increase.
Items Sold: We sold 349,092 items in February, an increase of 11% over January and a whopping 273,043 more than February 2007!
$ Sold: We sold $4.8 million worth of goods in February, 13% over January and $3.8 million more than February 2007.
Page Views: We crossed the 250,000,000 page views mark for the first time in February — 7% more than January.

Thanks for all you hard work in making February another record month here at Etsy!

Recent View Reset = Business Opportunity

2008-02-25T18:05:00Z

Dear sellers,
All item views have been reset to zero, due to technical difficulties. Our sincerest apologies! And now here's JJMFinance with a great way to turn this frown upside down.

When life gives you lemons — make lemonade!

The recent site outage and view reset has given Etsy shop owners an unexpected opportunity to gather useful information about how their shop operates.

With every item’s views resetting at one, it is now a lot easier to track how many views you are getting every day and on what items.

The amount of views each item has can tell you a lot about your shop:
1. What items are popular — The more views an item has, the more popular it is. Why are they popular? Is it because they are on the first page of your shop? Are they in your featured items? Are they currently featured in a blog? Are they in a showcase? Are your pictures outstanding? Are they in your Etsy mini?

2. What day or time of the day do you get the most views — Most likely, you will notice that certain days of the week your shop receives more traffic (views) than others. What days are really popular? What days are slow? Do people view your items at lunchtime or in the evening after dinner? You can use this information to help decide when you list items, decide when the most efficient day to promote your shop is, and decide on a day to hold a sale.

3. Does product position matter — Do your items on page 1 receive more views than page 5? Does featuring an item in the top 3 featured section really generate more views? Retail stores pay great attention to product placement. Does this same principal apply to your Etsy shop?

I believe there is positive relationship between the views an item receives and its likelihood to sell. Of course, there are always exceptions to this, but even that outlier still tells you useful data about your shop. Does your shop have a consistent average number of views that an item has to receive before it sells?

When we read a story, we are reading words. What we often overlook is that numbers are telling us a story too — we just need to know how to interpret them.

How I Use View Data For Operating My Etsy Shop
I track views on items in my Etsy shop to gather useful data to make business decisions.

After tracking views through the month of February:

— I have found out which products are the most popular for people to view.
— I have decided to relax my promotional efforts on a certain day of the week due to what I perceive to be lower traffic in my shop.
— I have a better understanding of my shop, my products, and my customer’s viewing habits.

There is a season for everything. . .

You could go overboard and track views every 10 minutes of the day, have a wonderful spreadsheet that shows you the trends, but if you don’t let that influence the way you operate your shop. . . it is meaningless!

Conclusion
Now is the perfect time to start listening to what the numbers say about your Etsy shop. Look at your views, make some mental notes — learn from it. Grab a sheet of paper, jot down some view data a day later and compare — interpret the data. Use a spreadsheet to record this data — analyze it and make smart business decisions. Whatever your method, learn from this opportunity! I hope this helps your Etsy shop thrive!

Survey Says: We have Sweepstakes Winners

2008-02-01T13:21:00Z

The moment you have all been waiting for has finally arrived: the announcement of our Survey Sweepstakes Winners! I first want to thank everyone who took the time to participate in our survey. This will help us gain a much more informed view of who our community is.

We had over 30,000 completed surveys, even after we cleaned the data for duplicate entries. We now have the task ahead of us to compile and carefully analyze and visualize the data. As promised, we will be sharing the results with the community — we expect that to be around the end of February. We will keep you updated.

And the winners of a $100 Etsy shopping spree are (drum roll...):

Phoenixkitty

tmdab52292

sliceoflife

EnchantedFoundlings

WillsArt

Congratulations!

See all articles relating to the Etsy Survey.

Etsy Statistics: 8.6 Million Page Views

2008-01-22T16:00:00Z

January 21st, 2008...We're pleased to share with you that yesterday was Etsy's biggest day ever — in terms of site traffic.

8.6 MILLION page views in one day!

Survey Says: Getting to Know You & Getting the Word Out

2008-01-02T18:17:00Z

We are launching our annual Etsy Survey today. Take it! Click here.

We are very excited! Our goal is to get a better understanding of our community and what is important to buyers and sellers. We have developed this survey over the last few months and have also incorporated community suggestions from the forum thread asking for your ideas. As we mentioned in the article asking for input, we could not incorporate all the suggestions, but loved the ones you took the time to share and were able to use many of them. Your feedback is important to us, so please take the time to take the survey and encourage your buyers, friends and other community members to take the survey as well.

We are anxious to analyze the results. What we learn will inform key decisions across Etsy, including site development, where we advertise, and content creation. We also plan to announce the relevant results to the community — something many sellers have been asking for. Survey-takers can rest assured that their personal information and responses won't be made public. Results will only be shared in aggregate.

For an added incentive, we will be awarding a $100 shopping spree on Etsy to five lucky people who fill out the survey. What a great way to start the year: a few great Etsy items on us! Due to some very frustrating laws, we cannot extend the sweepstakes to our community members outside the US, but please don’t let this deter you. We want to serve you as best we can — and we want your voice to be heard.

Sellers, we need your help!

We want to get the word out about the survey and make sure as many buyers take the survey as possible. It is particularly important to reach out to buyers, as they are less likely to discuss their opinions in the forums and we generally know less about them. We will be sharing our findings with the community — so the more people filling out the survey, the better for everyone.

We are reaching out to all our sellers to help promote the survey. Some ways you can do this is in your communities and also directly to your buyers:

Emails to buyers – why not add a link to the survey (as suggested by a number of community members)
Put a link to the survey on your team or group page
Blog about the survey or better yet add one of these badges below to your blog

Copy and Paste This Code:

<a href="http://survey.etsy.com/"><img src="http://www.etsy.com/storque/media/article_images/survey_sidebar_pencil_lesscolorful.jpg"></a>

Copy and Paste This Code:

<a href="http://survey.etsy.com/"><img src="http://www.etsy.com/storque/media/article_images/survey_sidebar_pencil_border.jpg"></a>

Copy and Paste This Code:

<a href="http://survey.etsy.com/"><img src="http://www.etsy.com/storque/media/article_images/survey_little.jpg"></a>

We are doing lots on our end to promote the survey — but every bit of help counts. Our results will be more accurate and more informative with more participation.

You know you want to...take it! Click here.

Thank you in advance and comment below with your ideas for ways to spread the word!

Etsy Statistics: 2 Million Items Sold

2007-12-10T10:03:00Z

On December 8th, 2007, the 2 millionth item on Etsy sold. It was this lovely chicken by BossysFeltworks (send us your address and we'll send you a wee gifty!).

This is cause for celebration over here at the Etsy Labs. But what we're really happy about is the trend: it took two years to sell the first million. After that high water mark, it only took four months to sell the next million items. Who knows what the future holds?

Congrats to all the sellers out there who are making this happen! And thanks to RD for getting me the info ;)

Etsy Statistics: Record Holiday Shopping

2007-11-27T08:39:00Z

We have some exciting site statistics to share with you from yesterday, "Cyber Monday" or as we like to call it "Buy Handmade Online Monday." The theory is that people return to their computers after the long Thanksgiving weekend and get down to business with their online holiday shopping.

Theory proves correct.

Yesterday, Etsy had 8.4 million page views (that's just for Monday). That's huge. In cash sales, we had a 30% increase over our record day.

Record Sales Day!

2007-11-16T11:56:00Z

Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

On November 15, 2007, Etsy had a record sales day, and not just any ol' record: we saw the amount of goods sold jump by 17% over the previous high (from the week before!) to $162K in sales! That's 11,215 items sold in one day: previously, we had never gone over the 10,000 item mark in a single business day.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! (And Chanukkah and Kwanzaa...the list goes on!)

Etsy Statistics: Record-breaking Traffic

2007-11-13T11:29:00Z

We saw Dusten's eyes grow wide as he checked on our site stats today. Dusten, an engineer on Etsy's Sys Ops Team, says Etsy had 6.9 million page views yesterday (Monday, November 12, 2007). This is a record breaking figure for us and it represents a 10% growth over the record set last Thursday.

Etsians, you are blowing our minds!

Etsy Statistics: Etsians through the Ages

2007-11-07T13:47:00Z

An oft asked question in the Forums is, "How old are Etsians?"

Well, in response to that, I began a thread specifically to collect this data from the forum thread. Then I charted the results in Flickr.

After two months of data collection from over a thousand people, the average age of the responding Etsians consistently remains at 34, with the median being 32. Each of the 22 times I've updated the chart, this is the result. The youngest answering is 13, with the oldest being 73. Wow! Etsy is providing the opportunity for so many to sell Handmade!

November Storque Newscast

2007-11-04T16:21:00Z

It's time for another jam-packed newscast from the crew at Etsy Labs. This time we've got another weather report from Chaz aka winenutnyc, interviews with our visiting street teams from Texas and Portland, and lively performances from our artists-in-residence Majestica. HeyMichelle is our newscaster; her wardrobe courtesy of handmadecrafter, tubularist, MrsTsChains (store coming soon), leakarts, and featherwitch. Vanessa interviews Rokali with a special ironing-board chat: we look into the updates to the Showcases.

See all newscasts.

Etsy Statistics: Weather Report from the Storque Newscast

2007-11-01T10:11:00Z

What’s the weather, what’s the weather, what’s the weather like today?

We all want to know how Etsy is doing statistics-wise, and I’m here to tell you, the weather in October was great. Our original October forecast called for lots of newly listed items. The Etsy community delivered, with 376,539 new items, which is an increase of 20% over the number of new items listed in September. We expect to see over 1,000,000 items for sale on Etsy by Dec 1!

We also saw tremendous growth in shopping in October. We keep a close watch on the number of pages viewed on Etsy.com and there were 162,907,375 page views in October, a 23% increase over September. All the new items and all of that traffic generated sales of 218,455 items (20% increase), representing $2,966,160 worth of goods sold for the month (21% increase).

Perhaps most importantly we had almost 40,000 new buyers register in October.

The forecast for November is for even better growth as we lead up to the holiday season. Stay tuned!

Charles aka winenutnyc works for Etsy on the Business Operations Team. He give a regular "weather report" full of Etsy site statistics for the Storque Newscast.