So you see these stores getting featured on Etsy and you wonder if that transforms your store into a roaring success? I've wondered the same thing, I presume anyone who gets big exposure on Etsy through one of their promotions must be killing it from all the attention. Then I became one of those stores and have seen things from the other side. I thought I'd share my adventure for other sellers who assume it's champagne and caviar dreams after Etsy features your store.
First, I should specify that my store was not profiled as one of these sellers who get a big spread on the site with details about my process and glossy photos of my loft-style workspace. They did interview me for a possible feature like that but ultimately didn't move forward with my store. I presume my story wasn't interesting enough or my house wasn't photogenic enough, I never got a follow-up on that idea.
However, my store was selected to be featured in a nationally televised commercial campaign for the Holiday 2019 shopping season. In my mind this should be even more lucrative than a write-up on the Etsy site. They are buying ad space on prime time television and my store's name will be splashed across the screen hundreds or thousands of times. Surely this will translate to mega sales right?
The whole thing started back in July. We sold two of our vintage travel bars in two different Etsy stores. Shortly after that we got a message from one of the buyers that our item would be featured in a commercial for the holiday season. They messaged occasionally to give us additional information, asked for head shots and other stuff like that. In early November they sent us a link to the ad and told us it would start running soon.
We actually saw one of the ads on television, but what I learned later is they made 3 different ads and they were all in shared rotation. So my ad was only playing maybe 30% of the times that an Etsy spot was aired. Also, the ad runs about 20 seconds and my product was in maybe 5 seconds of the ad. My picture and store name is up for 3 of those 5 seconds. So it's a pretty small part of the overall advertising campaign.
We were told that we would see a possible 150% spike in traffic to our store. We never noticed any traffic increase we could attribute to the ads. Obviously holiday traffic did increase between Black Friday and mid December but nothing we could clearly tie to the ad itself. We were told that our store would also be included in posts on the Etsy site but we never found a link nor did we see anything in the traffic logs to indicate an Etsy link to our store. For the most part our traffic is quite similar to what we saw last holiday season. Perhaps an increase of 10-20% but certainly nothing like 150%.
The only real change we could see is that people were buying the travel bar from the ad. They told me to stock up so I scoured for 6 months and managed to get 7 of them in advance of Christmas (a minor miracle for any single vintage item). I recycled the same listing that Etsy told me they were pointing to and each time that travel bar would sell in a day or two. I had a backup travel bar in another listing and that one did not sell quickly but eventually a smart shopper searched my shop and found it. The main win from this campaign was people buying the travel bars I had stockpiled. But I didn't see any meaningful uptick in overall sales to my store.
Now that it's over, I can't really quantify what this exposure got me. In past seasons I've had "hot" items in my store and I would easily sell 1-2 per week during the holiday shopping window, which is equivalent to the 7 travel bar sales we got. I can't say with any certainly that I wouldn't have sold those travel bars without Etsy's help because travel bars sell well anytime I have one in the store. Even if I attribute those sales to the campaign, it definitely wasn't the spike they suggested our store would experience.
For a hand-crafted store I could see this being a meaningful boost if you're in a position to crank out hundreds of the featured product leading into the holidays. For a vintage store, we just can't source that many of any single item to leverage the exposure. I'm lucky if I have 2-3 of the same item in my store at the same time. I actually felt bad for the other vintage seller in the campaign, I'm pretty sure the product they featured for her was not something she could get more of. The take-away is that getting a product featured in an Etsy commercial will get you a boost in sales for that product. Shoppers do not seem to browse through other great items in your store or purchase anything else.
I hope this information helps temper expectations for future Etsy sellers who do not know what might happen during an ad campaign. I'm not sure what I could have done differently in terms of prepping, but I would have liked to know just to manage my stress if nothing else.
Feel free to share you own experiences in the comments!
