In the previous articles of our Organize Your Etsy Shop article series we talked about setting up your shop sections as well as organizing your listings visually using featured items and product listing order.
Today I want to take a look inside your product listings, and how you should be thinking about your product variation choices to maximize your sales – and also how to avoid a common product variation mistake I see many handmade sellers make in their listings.
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
Product variations can have a very real impact on your business by boosting your sales and your conversion rate. There are definitely some do’s and don’ts when you set them up – so let’s dive into that.
There are three main reasons why really thinking strategically about what product variations you offer is important, and the first of these is what I call The Paradox of Choice.
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I won’t go too into detail about this today because I have already done an in-depth article that you will want to read about this that is full of great examples which illustrate what happens, but here is a quick summary:
Essentially, the Paradox of Choice is a situation that occurs when you have too many variations in your listing.
Many sellers think that offering as many options as possible is a good thing because the customer can get exactly what they want. But what you need to remember is that when you add too many variations to your listings you actually cause your customers to freeze and not make any buying decisions at all because there are too many choices.
So you will want to read my article called “How to use your product variations to make more sales on Etsy “ so you can avoid the Paradox of Choice and learn how many choices are good to have, how many will be too many and cause the customer to click out of your listing, and what questions to ask yourself to figure out what variations are the best ones to offer to your customers.
Next let’s talk about the second reason to think strategically about your product variations, something I call the “thumbnail match.”
Your thumbnail match is an opportunity to really boost your product clicks and views.
. . . and what you are doing here is setting up your product variations so that your product image doesn’t just show up in product searches and get impressions, but it also is set up to be an image that encourages customers to click to see more.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you make beautiful pillows. And for one of your listings you offer the pillow in blue, yellow, green, purple, and you have the blue pillow as your main thumbnail.
And let’s say someone is looking for a pink pillow, and so they type “pink pillow” in the Etsy search box. Etsy knows you make a pink pillow, so your listing shows up in their search results – but the thumbnail that shows in the search results will be the blue pillow thumbnail you have set for that listing – sure you might have a drop down with the “pink” color variation but the customer doesn’t know that until they click on the thumbnail in the Search results.
So when the customer sees a picture of a blue pillow showing up, they may not click on your listing because they will be thinking “I don’t want a blue pillow, I want a pink pillow!” Chances are they will be more likely to click on another listing that actually shows a pink pillow, right? — because that’s what they want.
So what you want to think about for this is “does my thumbnail VISUALLY match what people will be searching for in the search bar?” If the answer is “not always” … you may want to think about making separate listings.
Now let’s move on to the third thing to think about when setting up your product variations, which is incorporating SEO keywords.
This is all about making sure that you know what keywords people are searching for when looking for your products and that you use them to create your listings accordingly—.
When you do your keyword research using tools like Marmalead or eRrank, you will come up with a list of what the top things are that people are searching for in your product category.
Look at the data to decide if certain product variations need their own listings. Here’s what I mean:
The more listings you have, the more opportunities you have to use more titles and tags and use specific keywords that are in your top searches list.
In our pillow example, you may find that top pillow searches include the terms “pink pillow,” “lace pillow,” and “striped pillow.” This tells you that instead of having one listing for an 18” pillow with variation choices of pink, lace, and striped, you will want to create a separate listing for each of those variations, and include the keywords phrase you are targeting in the title, in the tags, AND so that your main thumbnail for that listing actually LOOKS like what the shoppers just typed in search and are looking for – because of what we explained previously about the “thumbnail match” and encouraging people to CLICK on your listing from search results.
So I think you can see how thinking strategically about your product variations can boost your impressions, clicks, and overall sales.
If you are ready to restructure some of your listings I would absolutely recommend you ALSO read my other product variation article where I dive into how many variations you should have and to decide on what they should be.
Thanks for reading, and until next time – aurevoir!
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