Is it time to have a Sale?

A question you may find yourself asking is "when should I have a sale?" "is now the right time for a sale?"

Well first of all, what are your most popular days? If you're not sure and don't have the time to do the statistics yourself, as I mentioned in the last post: Sundays & Mondays. But if you do have the time to figure that out (refer to the last post for the how-to). So try to have your sale on your popular days, days you know people are already buying and may buy 2 things instead of 1 if you're having a sale. So maybe you're having a really slow month and could use a few extra sales; try to make sure you plan your sale for your most popular days, or a full 3 day weekend. Try to have a sale for at least 3 days to give people time to find out about the sale and pick out the things they want. 

Secondly: Holidays. Holidays are a really great excuse to have a sale. Seasonal sales work as well for example "Fall Sale". Shopping Holidays are the most important of those of course including "boxing day" and "back to school". If you don't know when all of the holidays are, look it up and mark it on your calendar to set up the sale at the appropriate time. 

Having a shop sale or even a sale on select items is a great way of selling off some old stock, while also making some money. It's also a good way to bring in new buyers that may have been a little too nervous to buy when it was priced at x amount but now that they bought it on sale and trust your product they might spend the real money next time.

But remember: Don't have too many sales. If you find yourself having 1-2 sales a month, people will notice and start only shopping during your sales. So remember to space out your sales appropriately so that people will continue buying on regular days and just be excited when they luck out it's on sale. 

It may also be interesting to pay attention and see if something only sells when it's on sale. In the scenario, maybe re-price that item a little lower than before and it may start selling when not on sale. 

How much should you discount on your sale? Well that's really up to you. Only you know how much it cost you for those items and how much profit you are making. Just make sure you are still making enough profit that you are satisfied and happy when they sale is over. 

Have you thought about having a "Sale" or "Clearance" section in your shop as well? So instead of having continuous shop sales, you can also have a few marked down items in a sale / clearance section for the items you are trying to clear out. For example: Last season's collection, a product that didn't do very well but have lots left over, items your just sick of looking at, and so on. 

Keep your stock moving. People love seeing new things, and they also love getting a good deal. Keep that all in mind when pricing. Next we will chat about pricing items. 

(notice how there are out of season cards in their sale section)

Shop Stats

Since the last few posts seem to be very statistic oriented, I thought I'd also show you how to navigate some of the easy statistics to find.

Etsy has a section called "Shop Stats" in the drop down menu from "Your Shop". 

Here you won't find out when all of your attention is, but you can easier find out when your sales happen and what time. You can choose "today" or upwards of "one year". 

If you'd like to know the time of your sales choose "today". If you hover your mouse over the sale in the graph it will let you know within what hour the sale was made. 

There are many other things you can discover with the stats given to you by etsy. You can find out how many views you've had within a month, a day, a week, or even the whole year. You can also compare this to how many favourites you've had, and how many sales that has turned up. 

Here are some other important pieces of information it gives you and how this information can help you:

1) Traffic Sources & Traffic Sources on Etsy

What does that mean? This tells you from which websites, links, blogs, etc people are finding your shop. Or, how they found your shop through etsy. 

How this helps you: Find out which sources are the highest and try to focus more on things like advertisements on those sites, or for example: Some people are finding me through "pinterest" so I should probably focus on posting even more to that site because it's helpful. 

Also "direct traffic" is someone typing in your website directly; which could tell you your business cards are working, or maybe they are finding your link through instagram and check it on their computer.  

2. Key Words

What does that mean? Key words are the words that people used to find your shop or listings in search engines. 

How this helps you: When you are tagging your listings and you are unsure which tags are helping and which are being wasted, this lets you know which tags are being helpful. This way you know which tags to always use in your listings. 

3. Pages Viewed

What does that mean? Pages viewed are the pages viewed within your shop. Meaning your main front page, or individual items. 

How this helps you: This lets you know how many people search your main page, and how many people are searching individual items. It also lets you know which items are most popularly viewed. Once you know which items are hot, you can take a look at aspects like how you've worded things, what tags you used and so on to find out if you can add that information to not-so-popular listings.  

4. Listing Favourites 

What does that mean? This lets you know which items in your shop are getting the most admirers.

How this helps you: With this information, especially for those of you with hand made goods, will let you know which items are most popular. You might find that your most viewed items are not your most admired items. So try to find out why those items are getting to many admirers. If you are selling hand made goods, then you know that those are likely the things you should be focused on.

Update

So as I've mentioned, I've started recording the activity of shoppers to my etsy store. By doing so I hope to discover the best days and precise hours to post new listings, or renew old ones. So far I've completed three weeks of data that I would like to quickly share. I plan to continue this for a full year with continuous updates throughout the months. I also plan to start posting during the "heightened" activity periods and see if this results in more activity and most importantly more sales. This I will also record and continue to share. 

Discoveries so far:

(these hours are in PST)

Days with most activity: Mondays & Sundays

Days with most sales: Mondays & Sundays 

Hours with most activity: 10:00AM - 11:00AM, 12:00PM - 1:00PM, 5:00PM - 7:00PM

Hours with most sales: between 10:00AM - 3:00PM, and between 5:00PM - 9:00PM 

Slowest activity times: between 11:00PM - 5:00AM  

Now chances are these numbers will start to change ever so slightly as I continue this study due to situations shifting from month to month. 

An interesting discovery that might be helpful to those who have very little time; Mondays from 10:00AM - 1:00PM would likely be a good time to post as well as Sundays from 12:00PM - 3:00PM. I say this because if you can at least set aside an hour on Monday and /or Sunday to post a few things during those hours, it might be helpful!

Also, if you have the time and are interested, you can do this study for yourself. 

First step: print this sheet or create your own variation.

Remember to write / type the date as well so you don't lose track of which sheet is for which month.

From here you can reference back to this post:

http://anewstartonline.blogspot.ca/2013/09/when-to-post.html which will tell you how to find out when people are liking your stuff. Remember that these stats are not completely accurate because some people have their settings set to "private" which means they will not show up as some one who admired something. These stats only show customers with open profiles. 

Another important thing is to check every few hours because once it reaches a certain point it will just say "1 day ago" and you will not longer know which hours they are from. 

More tips and tricks coming soon!

:)