Etsy Business Topics - Building Your Feedback

Feedback is one of the most important factors for success in any line of work. When you are selling online, feedback means credibility, it can mean your customer service rating, the quality of your work, your attention to detail and your promptness in response and shipping.

Good feedback means that your previous customers are happy with their purchase from you. A large amount of positive feedback obviously means that you have many happy customers.

Low feedback can mean a number of things. It can mean that you have low sales, or that you have customers who don't feel strongly enough about their transaction or purchase from you to leave positive feedback. Or, maybe customers just forget to leave feedback, which is more often the case. Lucky for us, there is a quick way to remedy the situation!

A few months ago I began having what I call Feedback drawings. Every month I take all of the feedback I received from the 1st to the last day of the month and assign a number to each individual feedback left. I then choose a number at random, the number picked corresponds to a person who left the winning feedback. I send that customer a message saying that they won the drawing, announce it in my Etsy shop, send out the prize, and that's it!

OK, so how is that really BUILDING feedback? Well, I left out one small detail... When a customer buys something from me, I enclose a small card with their shipment that states the following:

"UrbanBead.com - UrbanBead.Etsy.com
Enter my monthly give-away… Just leave feedback!

Thank You!"

Since I began holding feedback drawings, I have seen my feedback number increase daily!

Everyone loves the idea of getting free stuff! Customers who have just purchased items from you have an opportunity to get a freebie and all they need to do is leave some feedback?

You will be surprised at how much these cards serve as a reminders to busy customers also!
These cards can also replace your regular business cards, just add your shop address to the top of the card, this ensures that your customers visit your shop next time too!

Etsy Business Topics - Intro

After taking some time, I have come up with a list of topics that I want to cover in my weekly blog posts. It's a growing list, as I will add to it as I think of more ideas, or as others email me suggestions.

Here is the list of ETSY Business Topics

- Pictures that are worth 1,000 words or clicks

- Improving your shop: 3 key points to get people shopping

- Item descriptions

- What not to spend money on

- Build your own resources

- To Twitter or not?

- Myspace and facebook

- Google base

- Google analytics

- Should I make my own website shop?

- Turning a one-time buyer into a repeat customer

- Craft sales – in person promotion and sales

- Pricing

- Building Feedback

I think this is a good start. The topics will not be in order, since there are some I want to cover right away, and others that I need more time to continue researching.

Again, I am in no way affiliated with Etsy or Ebay, other than being a seller on both venues. I am blogging about my experiences alone, and do not claim to be some sales or Etsy guru.

What I am is a person who took her hobby of beading and jewelry-making and turned it into a growing small business. It was not overnight, it took and still takes lots of work (more and more every day)! I have an undergrad degree in business administration, and I am working toward an MBA degree, specializing in Entrepreneurship.

I am open to comments and suggestions, I welcome ideas for this blog, this space is really for sharing ideas to help small business grow.

My Etsy Lessons - to share

Starting next week, I plan to write a series of posts that address topics which may be of interest to anyone running an online shop, especially (but not limited to) Etsy. Such topics will be marketing, Etsy shop set up, customer service, newsletters, when is the best time to run a sale, pooling resources, building momentum in your shop, etc.

I plan to have a least one post regarding online sales / business every week during the months of May - August. By the end of the Summer, I hope to have at least 15 - 20 posts that Etsy sellers
will find helpful and hopefully use as a resource. I am using my own valuable experience as an Etsy seller since 2005, with 100% positive feedback, and over 1,200 sales. My small hobby business has grown over the past few years into a non-hobby, part-time small business, which has been a wonderful learning experience!

Some measurable goals I have for this group of postings are:

- gain 15 new followers
- have a least 1 comment on each post
- have one Etsy shop critique on my blog

At the mid point of this, probably end of June, I plan to revisit these goals. I am excited bout this project which I have been meaning to do for some time now. I think this Summer will be the perfect time to begin it!

Craft Sale Madness!

I just wrapped up a four day craft show right here in town at the historic Alpine Women's Club.  The sale was a big success and I was able to meet lots of local folks!  Here is a pic of my table (below)

It was a lot of fun, and I made some extra cash, so my only complaint was that it was soooo cold!

  Above is a pic of my pendants that I was selling.  Best sellers were birds, cats, cowgirl, and keep calm and carry on.  My very cute Easter pendants didn't sell as much as I had hoped, so I will be putting those up for sale on Etsy today.

Sam and I made some stepping stones last month and we tried to sell those as well.  We sold 2 of them for $40.  I am glad they have found a new home!

There is also another craft show coming up in May that I will be at, it is called the Sage and Songbirds Festival.  It is also here in Alpine.  I also learned about an art market that is opening up in Descanso in May, every Saturday.  I might look into that.

A great thing about craft shows is the exposure you get.  I had a woman who has worked as a buyer for Nordstroms for over 15 years come up to me and tell me that I need to raise my prices!  She also said that she was going to be opening up a shop in Alpine and wanted my pendants in there!  Said she was going to showcase local artists.  Cool.  We will see if it pans out.