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How to Increase your Conversion Rate on Etsy

How to Increase Your Conversion Rates on Etsy

While conversion rates may seem complicated and redundant, you can use them to analyze your Etsy store and improve sales. Conversion rates represent the number of finalized purchases compared to the total number of visitors on your page.

As with all other numbers, these numbers can fluctuate too. If your conversion rates are low, that means that you aren’t making enough sales. 

That’s nothing to worry about, though. By following our simple guide, you will improve your conversion rates very quickly and efficiently. Before we discuss the actual steps, let’s learn more about Etsy conversion rates.

What is conversion rate on Etsy?

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your Etsy shop that complete a purchase out of the total number of visitors to your store.

If you want to calculate your current conversion rate you have to visit your Etsy Shop Manager page. Here you can find all views, visits, orders and revenue. 

Etsy conversion rate is calculated when the total number of your successful sales is divided with the total number of visits you had for a certain period of time and then multiplied by 100.

For example, if you have made 20 sale in the past 30 days, and the total number of visitors for that period is 850, then your conversion rate would be (20/850)*100= 2,3%.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate for Etsy?

Bear in mind that Etsy conversion rates differ from shop to shop, but also from one product category to another. Moreover, they can be affected by many external factors such as algorithm changes, for example. In general, decent conversion rates should be at least 2-3%, which is the average. If you score more than 4%, your Etsy conversion rates are awesome - keep up the good work!

Average Etsy Conversion Rate

The average conversion rate for any online shop, including Etsy stores, is around 2.61%, according to Monetate. When it comes to the American market exclusively, the average conversion rate is 2-3%. 

Conversion rates are important because they represent your return on investment in a sense. If they’re too low, that means that not enough people are showing interest in your product. However, by tweaking a couple of minor things, you can improve your conversions.

5 Tips for Improving your Etsy Conversion Rates

Many different things can impact your conversion rates. However, these five elements are the most important when it comes to scoring sales and improving customer experience. The more you work on these, the more return on investment you’ll receive. 

Firstly, it’s important to mention that you can either choose to do all the hard work on improving your conversion rates by yourself or you can use an Etsy listing optimization tool that helps you with the process. One such optimization tool is Listing Helper. It analyzes your listings and gives you actionable recommendations based on Etsy’s seller handbook. It will automatically give you recommendations about what and how needs to be improved on your Etsy listings including the quality of your photos, title, tags, attributes and more. 

Now, let’s move on to explain one of the first things that impacts your conversion rate. 

1. Use High-quality Photography

Images are the main selling point of your products. This is what customers judge your product by. We recommend uploading multiple images from different angles, all in high-quality. Each listing has room for 10 photos and the more photos you add, the more information, the more information your buyers have to make their purchase decision. 75% of online shoppers rely on product photos when deciding on a potential purchase, and 22% of returns occur because the product looks different in person. Displaying multiple high-quality photos will increase your conversion rate and reduce returns. Therefore, you should make sure to add at least 6 photos to your listing.

Low-quality images aren’t a good look, and they make you look as though you aren’t making an effort. In fact, 75% of shoppers rely on photos when making purchasing decisions. Hiring a professional product photographer is also another thing to consider. 

The perceived value of your products and the trustworthiness of your Etsy shop is often judged based on the quality of your visual presentation. That means having high-quality, beautiful product photography can go a long way.

Etsy backs this up. In a survey they found that the quality of images was the most important factor in an online sale for 90% of Etsy shoppers.

2. Offer competitive prices

Etsy is a global service and you’ll likely have clients from across the globe. Offering reasonable shipping costs and reasonable prices will open you to a global market.

However, product pricing can be tricky in ecommerce. Some sellers can lower the price of their product to increase sales. But that can have a negative effect on the buyers. The main issue with lowering the prices is how your buyers perceive the product that you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling running shoes, and your buyers know that a pair of quality running shoes is no less than $40, they can think that you’re selling low quality products if you put a price of $30. Who doesn’t think something fishy is going on when they see extremely low prices?

When thinking about pricing your products, you should take into consideration that buyers are always looking for good-quality products. Your pricing should reflect the value of the quality you’re interested in displaying and keeping it affordable at the same time.

On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that you should drastically raise all the prices for every single product in your shop either.

There are two things that you can do to determine the best pricing for your product. First, explore the market for similar products, and see the pricing of other buyers. Establish a price range for each of your listings based on those findings. And secondly, you can do a test in your own shop. Choose one product and increase the price. Keep a record of your conversion rates and profitability from that moment on. If the conversion rates start to go up, it means that the buyers are now less suspicious of the quality of your product and that you have made the right choice.

3. Write clear and informative descriptions

Profile descriptions are important for two main reasons. The first is that they describe your product or service, as well as company goals and mission. Secondly, they’re important for your SEO. If you include relevant keywords into your descriptions and listings, the Google search engine will promote your product to new customers. The search engine uses the first 160 characters from your item description to create a meta description for that listing. This means that these 160 characters and the keywords used in the description determine how your listing page will be displayed on the search engine results page. Think about all the keywords that buyers might use to search for the product that you’re selling and place them at the beginning of your item’s description. How can your conversion rates improve if buyers can’t find you, right?

Another thing that you should keep in mind when writing a description for your listing is the amount of details that you’re going to include. There’s only one rule - the more the better. Remember, these buyers don’t know what they’re buying from you until you tell them. They aren’t in front of you to ask any questions that they might have. All they have to rely on is the description and images. So, make sure to be as detailed as possible, as this can relieve them of any doubt about the quality of the product and you as a trust-worthy seller. 

Additionally, to improve your conversion rates and make more profit, make sure to include the following in your item’s description:

  • Place the most important details at the beginning of your description. This will grab your buyer’s attention and encourage them to keep on reading.
  • Break your text into short paragraphs. The text should be easy to read for the buyers, so avoid long sentences and paragraphs longer than 4 lines. Highlight the key information by using bold, italics or underline formatting.
  • Put URLs to your other products in the description. Etsy allows URLs in an item's description if they lead to another page inside the marketplace. This way the buyer can become interested in another one of your products, which would ultimately increase your conversion rate.

4. Provide fast, free and convenient delivery

To increase your conversion rate, you need to get more sales. And to get more sales, you need to be seen by more buyers. That’s exactly what you can do by adding free delivery to your product listing. 

Listings that offer free delivery are prioritized by Etsy, so they rank higher in the search results page. Even though this only applies to buyers from the US and for orders over $35, it's something you should take into consideration when adding a listing to your shop. 

According to recent research, over 70% of buyers have stated that the main reason they shop online is free shipping. And as much as 77% of people claim that delivery convenience is another important reason to make an online purchase. 


5. Get More Product Reviews

Lastly, product reviews also impact your SEO and conversion rates. Products with more positive reviews will be recognized as ‘’good’’ by the algorithm, hence they’ll be recommended more frequently. Incentivize your customers to leave reviews by sending friendly emails or offering coupons and discounts.

Calculating Your Etsy Listings Conversion Rate

Knowing your conversion rates is important because it shows you where you stand in your business. If it’s too low, you’ll know that it’s high time to change something. If it’s high, you’ll know that you’re on the right track. Finding your shop’s conversion rate is easy, as you can simply navigate to your Etsy stats page and see your conversion rate for any given period

If you’d like to get a better overview of which products perform better or worse than others, it might be a good idea to check their individual conversion rate. Here are two ways to calculate your Etsy listing conversion rate.

Use the Etsy Listing Stats

This is a reliable way to calculate your conversion rates - all you need to do is to play around with the Etsy Shop Manager tab. Some simple math work is required, so prepare your calculators. Here’s what you should do:

  1. Open Etsy Shop Manager and locate the Listings page.
  2. Find the listing you’re interested in
  3. Open up the listing stats page by clicking on the listing options wheel
  4. You will see the following stats for your listing - orders, revenue, visits, and views.
  5. Take note of the total number of visits.
  6. Then, divide the number of orders by the number of visits.
  7. The number you receive is your Etsy listing conversion rate.

Use Alura

If you don’t want to do this manual work, you can use Alura’s listing helper tool. Alura is a suite of tools aimed at Etsy sellers who’d like to improve their marketing efforts. It’s very simple to use:

  1. Visit the official Alura website. 
  2. Connect your shop to Alura.
  3. Alura will analyse your shop stats and calculate your conversion rate. .
  4. Head over to Alura’s Listing Helper and click on the listing you are interested in to find out what the conversion rate of your listing is.Etsy shop. 

Final thoughts

Running a successful Etsy store is a very rewarding job with a lot of hurdles. However, if you crack the system, and learn more about the platform itself and how it works, you’ll know how to take your store to the next level. If you need any help in this process or you don’t want to do everything by yourself, head over to Alura website and use all the potential of their listing helper tool. Don’t be afraid to experiment and look for new ways to promote your Etsy shop and score sales. Good luck!

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