Are you getting a lot of Etsy favorites, but no sales? Or very few sales? If so, this is the article for you.
This is a question that actually I get asked all the time, and I see it asked everywhere online as well — I’m actually surprised I haven’t done an article about this yet. So here I am!
If this is a problem that you are having, I’m going to share with you four things that you need to do that will maximize sales from shoppers who favorite your products.
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
It’s a great feeling when someone favorites your product, and it gets you excited thinking “Woohoo someone is going to buy my product!” But, as you will see in the first tip, that’s not always the case.
So the first tip I want to talk about today is adjusting your expectations.
This one is quite important, and also very, very common. I know that when a person favorites your item, but they don’t buy it, it’s frustrating, right? Because you’re like – this person clearly likes my product, so why didn’t they buy it?
When this happens several times then you start growing really frustrated, and worried that you’re missing something big.
But the reality is that favoriting on Etsy, is a very, very common behavior that shoppers are going to have – and it’s not necessarily a step toward a sale. It can lead to a sale, but sometimes people are just browsing, looking for ideas, similar to how they use Pinterest to create collections of ideas that they like.
For example, someone may be looking on Etsy for nursery ideas, and so they’re going to start favoriting a lot of items that are nursery ideas that appeal to them. But here’s the thing: you don’t even know if they’re pregnant at this point, they might just be starting to try to get pregnant. And so they might still be far away time-wise from buying those products, but they’re starting to get ideas together in the same way that you would on Pinterest.
And in that case, that’s not going to lead to a sale directly. And that’s okay – it’s neither bad or good, it’s just what it is. And you can see some people do that a lot more than others.
Let’s look at a quick example.
Here is an Etsy customer who uses favorites in this way:
If you look here, you see that this Etsy shopper has favorited over 1000 items just on their own. And then she also has three collections: Jewelry, Plants, and Home Goods. So for this person, favoriting products on Etsy doesn’t mean she is ready to purchase them, she is instead using favorites to save ideas and styles that she likes.
This can be good research for you to do to develop a better understanding of the people who are browsing and favoriting your products.
There are other ways people use favorites as well. Some people may use favorites to bookmark products that they like and want to come back to later. Others might want to compare products, so they will favorite a bunch of things then go to their favorites page to compare them.
This doesn’t mean they’re going to buy right now, I’m the perfect example of this.
Someday, I’d like to learn embroidery. So when I’m on Etsy, and I see a cool embroidery kit, I will favorite it thinking “Someday when I teach myself how to do embroidery, I’m going to purchase this product!” because I know that I will want to do that in the future. I have no time for it at the moment because I just had a kid and I have no time to do anything but take care of this baby and work, but yet I will bookmark a DIY embroidery item I like because I know down the road I might want it.
In short if you sell embroidery kits I am your worst nightmare right now when it comes to favoriting but not buying 😂
These scenarios are actually the most common uses of favorites, and why you want to get out of the mindset that every favorite will lead to a sale.
Remind yourself that It’s completely normal to have a lot of favorites that don’t necessarily turn into sales — and favorites that don’t turn into sales don’t necessarily mean that something is broken.
But . . . it also doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything to improve that ratio, or that you don’t want to troubleshoot and make sure that something isn’t indeed broken.
So that’s what we’re going to dive into next, let’s start with marketing features and campaigns that target people who favorite your products.
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One way to increase sales from people who favorite your products is to use marketing features and campaigns to increase sales.
If you look under the Etsy shop manager> Marketing > Sales and Discounts, there’s an option you can use to automatically send an email to someone who favorited one of your products saying “Hey! You favorited this item, how about you come back and buy it?”
The caveat to that is that not everyone who favorited your products will receive it, because buyers on Etsy can change their settings to opt out of receiving those emails (as you can see in this screenshot), but since the default setting is to receive promotions, the majority of people will receive it.
Let’s take a quick look at what the marketing campaign setup looks like inside of the shop manager:
Here is the box you will see when you set up a targeted offer. In the discount amount box, you can choose either a percentage or a fixed dollar amount off for their purchase, or you can send them a promo code for free standard shipping.
Then click “create offer” and from that point on anyone who favorites one of your products but doesn’t purchase it will receive this offer!
I have an article that dives into more detail about using marketing campaign features that you can read if you want to learn more about them.
Another thing you can do to create sales from favorites is putting the product on sale.
On Etsy, when you run a promotion, Etsy sends notifications to people who have favorited your items.
Now…, you’re not going to set up a sale every time you get a favorite. But if there is a product that has accumulated a fair few favorites or that gets favorited regularly, you might want to consider running a promotion for that specific product, a specific collection, or even for your entire shop.
You can decide, for example, to run a 10% sale on an item that you know has been favorited a lot, which will send out a notice to anyone that favorited that specific product (again unless they have opted out of receiving coupons and promotions) saying, “Hey, this item that you favorited is on sale now!”
Here is an example, it’s an actual email that I received for a product that I had favorited because I think it looks freaking awesome, and I know that the day I’m ready to start learning embroidery I will want to purchase something like this because I think it’s really cool.
So this product went on sale, and because I had favorited it I received an email saying “Deborah, new for you this week . . . now on sale ❤️” with a picture of this product that I had favorited.
So these promotion emails can act as a reminder. Even though I didn’t purchase because, as I said, I need to get out of the baby stage before I can even think of having time to learn embroidery, there are other cases where that email might catch someone at the right time and make them think “Wow, I’m actually going to purchase that because I’m definitely interested in it and want to take advantage of this sale!”
So now we’ve looked at adjusting expectations as well as what you can do to actually increase the ratio of favorites to sales.
The last thing I want to talk about is troubleshooting, which involves looking at every factor that might influence someone’s decision to buy your item.
Because even though it’s not going to be one favorite equals one sale, you can still look to see if you are doing everything you can – inside of your shop and at the listing level – to convince more people to buy the product instead of just favoriting it.
So let’s go over what really happens when someone favorites one of your items.
First, they found your item on the platform: most likely they saw it in a search result and clicked on it. And then they most likely looked at your listing in more detail.
So if we think this through: because they’ve clicked on your listing, you know that the first photo – like your main photo on the thumbnail – probably isn’t the problem. Same with the first few words of your listing here because in search results you will see the first segment of the title right before it’s truncated – in this example they will see the words “Ergobaby Omni 360” (which is the name of a baby carrier if you’re like ‘what is that thing Deb?!’ 😂) and then obviously they’ll see the price.
So in general, even if these aren’t perfect, someone has already clicked on it which means that they’re happy with what they saw here.
What you want to do now is go to the next step. You know they’ve clicked and are on the main listing, and now they’re going to look at the rest of the photos, your description, and essentially all the details involved in something Etsy calls your Listing Quality Score.
Which LUCKY YOU I wrote an article all about that just last week!
Here, what you want to do is make sure that you’re actually doing your very best to communicate the right information to the shopper; that you’re not missing something that leaves them thinking “I love this item but I have a question that isn’t answered in the listing” — perhaps it’s something that’s not shown in the picture, or there is something in the product description that doesn’t make sense or that is missing, and they need to know that before they feel comfortable making a purchase decision.
If you are ready to do this troubleshooting on your listings, you will want to read last week’s article about how to increase the Etsy listing quality score for your handmade products, because it is ALL about finding and fixing the issues that can make someone hesitate before purchasing your listing.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, aurevoir!
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