Wow, I just have to post this video. Heather Wells explains why she decided to close her Etsy store and it was an eye opener. She closed her store in the middle of 2015 and goes through the numbers for us. She had made over $56,000 dollars in the five years she was open and when she closed her Etsy shop she was in the top 3rd of the top 1% of Etsy sellers. That sounds impressive but think about those numbers. Most years she made around or under $11,000 a year. $40,000 a year is considered poverty level in the U.S. She sold charms which averaged $8 a sale but she averaged everything out and she made roughly $24 a day in the five years she was on the site. She admits that if she had tried harder she could have sold more in 2013 and 2014 but she got upset at some changes made to the site and stopped trying for a while. If you look at the numbers, she looks like a success and she says that she is proud of what she did but could you live off less than $1000 a month? I'm in college and can support myself on roughly that each month but I rent a small apartment and that is after taxes and with no tuition costs or car problems. I can't imagine supporting a family or life emergencies on that income. Luckily there are other ways to make money online with your craft now a days, such as selling tutorials or blog advertising, and you should also sell at craft fairs and some crafts can be sold at consignment shops. It is possible to make a living wage from your crafts but selling online should not be your only line of income unless you are fully established and already making a lot of money from your store before quitting your main job. Heather averaged the numbers on the Etsy website for 2014 and found out that on average an Etsy store made $1,200 that year. I averaged the numbers on the Etsy website today for 2015 and 1.6 million sellers today made $2.39 billion dollars in 2015 that means $1,494 per seller last year. I had my crafts up for maybe six months a few years ago and got no sales. Granted, I put the pictures up, probably had bad descriptions, and only had six items in my store. I didn't add new items of figure out SEO or how to use social media to get viewers who would buy but I'm guessing I'm not the only person who got no sales. That means a lot of people got under $1500 in 2015 and a lot of sellers got over $1500 in 2015. I just want to be sure you understand the realities of selling crafts online. It is possible to make a full-time income on a home craft business but you should not expect to merely put your products on Etsy and expect to suddenly sell them (as I expected all those years ago). You have to work hard to make a full-time income of a craft business and use more than one income stream. She ended her video with some simple but often overlooked tips on how she got over a thousand dollars every year her store was open. One of the ones she mentioned was that an Etsy store needs a lot of items in it to look established. She said that she didn't get regular sales until she had over 200 charms in her store. I'm not sure how that progresses with other larger items, such as necklaces or OOAK figurines, but I have noticed that most stores seem to have more than one page of items. I recommend you take a look at her video for an honest idea of what it takes to be "successful" on Etsy.
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