How to Optimize Your Sales Process on Etsy

We all want more sales, right? You’ve probably read articles, listened to podcasts, and watched videos about how to increase your sales, but have you ever stopped to think about your sales process?

If there’s a little voice at the back of your mind that says, “but if I get more sales, I’ll have to do more customer service, and ordering more materials will be more complicated,” then you likely need to pause to get your sales process down before you keep growing.

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Growing fast without the right processes in place can leave you feeling like you’re scrambling to keep up and you may make avoidable mistakes. Here are 3 things you should do now to optimize your sales process:

3 Ways to Optimize Your Sales Process on Etsy

1. Properly Track Your Inventory Needs

It’s so easy to focus only on the sale, but it’s important to remember that inventory comes before that. If you aren’t sure exactly what you’ve got, when you need more materials, how long it takes you to produce your products, and how much your materials cost you, you’re going to feel uncertain about how you can handle more sales.

You may think that it’s not a big deal - after all, you only make a certain number at a time. That’s great if you’ve got a waitlist of customers, but if you’re trying to gain traction, you need to be able to produce consistently so your store can gain momentum on Etsy.

If you don’t have SOPs to follow (standard operating procedures - read our guide on creating SOPs for your business here) and are managing your inventory in an archaic way (looking at you, Excel and Google Spreadsheets), you’re going to struggle to manage your sales when they _do_come. And not to go all psychologist on you, but you’re actually more likely to self-sabotage your success because you don’t feel ready for it if you don’t have processes like this in place.

SOPs aren’t as complicated or time-consuming to create as you may think (again, read our guide here) and inventory software is inexpensive and comes with a wide range of benefits. Craftybase helps you with order management by automatically managing your stock, importing orders, helping you understand your costs, and ensuring you reorder materials at the right time.

1. Review Your Data

If you aren’t looking at key business metrics, you’re much more likely to make the same mistakes over and over - so it’s essential to review your data regularly.

At least quarterly, review:

• Sales numbers
• Returns/cancellations
• Profit
• Revenue
• Conversion rate
• & any other meaningful metrics

This data can be a gold mine, but while big businesses are all about data, craft sellers are usually less than enthused about spending an hour or two reviewing their metrics - especially if the news isn’t good. But this data will help you create benchmarks for your performance and help you set goals for the future.

You’ll also be able to see where you can make improvements. If you know people are viewing your page but not converting adequately, then putting more money into ads won’t change anything - it’s your product page that’s losing the sale. If your conversion rate is high, you know that you’re good to go and can do what you can to increase traffic to your product page.

Learn more about how to increase your craft product conversion rate »

Etsy’s built-in analytics are helpful, but if you want your business to grow fast then you need to have the right systems supporting you. Craftybase provides your business with an extensive range of reports designed for craft sellers that will keep you up to date on how your business is performing at any time. These reports can also be exported so you can give them to your bookkeeper, accountant, or anyone else who needs to see them.

1. Automate & Optimize Your Business

When you are making craft products, your growth is always going to be limited by one thing: your time. It doesn’t matter how many orders you get, if you can only make, package, and ship 10 products a day, you’re going to be limited to that - or have to scramble to try and produce more at late notice.

Since preorders are not allowed on Etsy (though made-to-order is), you can’t set up a launch date ahead of time and make products based on the number of orders you receive, so automation and optimization are going to be key to your growth.

Here are just a few ways you can automate and optimize your Etsy business:

• Use prewritten customer service templates - you can purchase these or write them yourself to copy and paste and tweak
• Learn keyboard shortcuts - little time hacks like this add up
• Stop using Excel/Google spreadsheets - we know you love them and it’s all beautifully color-coded but it’s such a time suck, and you can spend hours tweaking individual numbers and sums, so opt for Craftybase instead
• Try batching - consider what tasks you can batch in one day so you don’t get stuck doing the same small tasks every day
• Delegate - delegating doesn’t mean you have to hire an employee, you can easily hire a professional for just a short time to manage one task for you (such as social media management) or someone to help you do easier production tasks.

It’s easy to get caught up in the desire for more - more customers, more sales, more revenue - but hopefully, you can now see how any strategies you implement to grow your business must be done on a foundation of a strong sales process. When you’ve got the processes in place, you can grow quickly, maintain strong profit margins, and maintain the customer experience your customers expect from you.