Tue, 04 Jun 2019

Confession: I haven’t read enough Etsy how-to’s. Etsy’s own site is great for looking up answers but completely overwhelming for learning, and half the bloggers out there who purport to tell you how to do it are selling more blog ads than Etsy goods. So I just dove in and flailed around.

This week’s lesson for me was: listings never really die. See, I decided that Etsy’s option system was just too much: you can vary on two factors (size and color, for the beanie dragons) but you have to select one before it will show you what’s in stock in the other. So I decided to break them out into individual listings. You pay twenty cents a listing but, I figured, it doesn’t matter because the multi-item listings are serial listings. That is, if you list a dozen items in a single listing, you pay twenty cents. You sell one and it insta-lists another, even if someone buys three at a time, so at the end of the day it costs the same to list twelve items in twelve listings or all in one.

But.

Each listing creates a page. (Duh.) But what I just fully registered was: when that item sells out, you get the “sorry, try these other items” screen… which is full of other people’s items. When the multi-listing for beanie dragons ran out, the only other dragon it showed was the gold, and it was the seventh or so.

This explains why the reviews at the bottom of an item aren’t necessarily for previous purchases of that particular item. I assumed it just showed random reviews from that seller, and that may still be the case. But the past-sales page is a snapshot of the listings as they were sold, without regard to the listing page, so you’re free to reuse that listing number.

And so that’s what I’ve done: the multi-listing page is now the green 6″ dragon page, still in made-to-order status, so folks’ bookmarks will still point to a beanie dragon. And now I need to go do final work on those dragons to get pictures and move it to ships-immediately status, and make a couple more art-doll dragons so I can resurrect those links. Hopefully I can keep ahead of those, so I am always ready to renew the listing. (Yes, I just hoped for slow sales…)