The purpose of this article is to introduce us to what a store’s Conversion Rate (CR) is, how it is calculated, and what impact it has on the overall performance of the shop and its products. In the topics below we will point out examples of “good” and “bad” CR depending on the niche and how can we increase it and what causes a drop.
First of all
What is a Conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your shop that make an order. The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for growing your business and can be affected by many variables such as photo quality, price, client reviews, listing titles and descriptions, and shipping & return policies.
Where on Etsy do I find my shop Conversion rate?
Go to Shop Manager, select Stats from the side menu, and then specify a time frame. You can view data for any given time period – per year, month, week, yesterday’s or you can select a custom range of your choice.
How to calculate the Conversion rate?
Conversion Rate = Number of Orders / Number of Visits.
We are taking the above example and we can calculate the CR for the last 30 days by dividing Orders (88) by Visits (7783) and the solution is 1.1% in the percentages or 0.01130.
How many Visits do you need for an Order? Just divide Visits (7783) by Orders (88) = 88 visits for an order.
Looks easy doesn’t it? But which values are good, bad or average?
What is the average Conversion rate on Etsy?
The average conversion rate is about 1-3% on Etsy In recent years, the conversion rate on Etsy has decreased because of more sellers joining the platform. Competitive niches like jewelry and clothing see a wide range of conversion rates among sellers.
This is an example of average conversion rates on different Etsy categories:
- Clothing - 0.73%
- Lingerie - 0.21%
- Furniture - 0.20%
- Home & Living - 0.33%
- Jewelry - 1.10%
- Matching - 0.47%
- Stickers & Decals - 2.13%
- Signs - 1.18%
Why Conversion rate is important?
Simply, because it has an impact on revenue
If you can increase conversion even by a small value, you increase the revenue and you get for the same amount of work you do to attract visitors to your shop. Therefore, if conversion rates for Etsy shops range from 1-5%, there will be a huge difference in revenue. Here is a simplified example for you to better understand the CR. It’s quite exaggerated to demonstrate how impactful conversion is on revenue.
Let’s say there are five Etsy shops. Every product there is priced at $1000. Each customer buys one item per visit. For every 100 visits to each shop:
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The shop with the highest conversion rate (Shop E) makes five times the revenue as the shop with the lowest conversion rate (Shop A). Now, we all know that a lot of time, effort, and money goes into driving traffic to your shop. So, you’d need to factor in that investment. But this illustrates how improving your conversion rate by what sounds like a small amount (e.g., 1%) can have quite a significant impact on your revenue.
Can Conversions helps you to gain a better quality score?
New shops and listings start with a neutral quality score. When a new listing is created, it gets a small, temporary boost in search results so Etsy search can quickly learn more about how shoppers interact with it. To determine a listing’s quality score, we look at things like clicks, favorites, and purchases. Etsy search looks at things like past shopper behavior to predict how likely shoppers are to purchase listings from your shop in the future. So if you sell vintage or one-of-a-kind items and are frequently creating new listings, Etsy search looks at how popular listings from your shop have been in the past to predict how popular they might be with buyers in the future.
Optimizing your listings with conversion in mind is one step you can take to improve your search ranking and your shop’s visibility
The goal of Etsy’s search engine is to find the most authoritative, most relevant sources to match the shopper’s query. Each time you make a sale with a given keyword, it signals to Etsy’s algorithm your listing is “good” for that keyword. Your listing gains a Quality score. While you might not be able to rank high for a broad keyword due to too much competition (e.g., pet art), you might be able to find a niche and dominate that keyword (e.g., personalized pet ferret art).
What is the Pareto Principle? 80/20 rule?
Its basically 20% of your listings are bringing in 80% of your Revenue!
Your shop is not hurt by having listings that haven’t converted yet. In most Etsy shops, the bulk of sales come from a small percentage of listings. That said if your listing hasn’t generated sales, over time it will rank lower and lower in search results. Therefore, if your listing renews once or twice without selling, you might want to look at making a change for instance in photos, keywords, prices etc.
You might have a listing that has lots of visits but no conversions. This might indicate there’s something that needs to be revised. Or it might mean customers are landing on that listing but buying something else in your shop.
Example:
The generated Revenue for this year
In this case 3% of the listings are bringing 56% of the total Revenue. The overall Revenue for the top 3 best-selling listings is $6 368. The rest of the products in the store generated the difference up to $11 427
What affects the Conversion rate on Etsy and how to improve it?
Conversion rates on Etsy can be influenced by several factors. Here are the key elements that affect conversion rates and strategies to improve them:
1) In Listings
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The better targeted your keywords and tags are, the more your listing will appear in relevant search results. To improve your aim at your target market, we use search terms Etsy shoppers are currently using.
Conversion and ranking are correlated. You need visits to convert, and in order to get visits, your listing needs to rank high in search results. The more targeted visits you can drive to your shop, the more sales you’ll get.
Targeted keywords will help you get found, and rank. But you need to have other strengths in order to maintain that ranking over time. With more listings, customer interactions, and sales activity, Etsy will better understand your shop and drive more qualified traffic there.
Example of a keyword that may hurt listing conversion rate
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If you need more information about how to improve your shop's SEO, make sure to check our Ultimate Etsy SEO Guide For 2024
2) Listing Titles
Make sure your titles contain your superstar keywords, that are easy for customers to understand, and are free of errors. Look at how your listings appear on different devices because listing titles are truncated on some devices. So lead with your strongest keyword phrases.
Example of a good title - How to be a Mermaid - Pastel Print, Sea Nursery Print, Print for Bathroom, Rainbow Bath Print, Mermaid Wall Decor, Whimsical Baby Girl Gift
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Example of a bad title - Galaxy ornament
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3) Shop’s visual appearance
Storefront, Featured items, banner. To elevate the shopping experience in a store the use of captivating visual design, compelling messaging, and curated product selection helps a lot.
Examples of banners that can be improved
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The visual appearance should be consistent and up-to-date. The storefront page should be arranged according to the season and the top products to be there.
Storefront for the summer season
Featured Items - With Etsy Plus activated the featured section could be seriously improved. It provides the option to play around with the featured items a bit and make some of them bigger. Even whole sections could be included there with custom thumbnails.
This is how it looks:
This approach combines the expertise of graphic design and marketing, which has been proven to positively impact conversion rates.
If you want your shop to have an amazing banners, thumbnails, frontpage and many more features, please make sure to check our services here
4) Product Pictures
Once you appear on the first few pages in a search, your main (thumbnail) photos are the next key traffic driver. If customers don’t click on your listing, it can’t sell. High-quality photos, showing your products are super important and affect the final decision of potential shoppers.
Your first listing image gets you the click, but those that follow help get you the sale.
You can add up to 10 photos to a listing. The number of photos you upload doesn’t directly impact your item’s search placement, but using all 10 listing photos may increase your conversion rate. That’s because each additional image you add gives shoppers more information about your product, how big it is, and how it’s used. For example, if you’re selling art, buyers may want to see a photo of it styled in a room to get a sense of the size and style, while customers shopping for a statement ring may want to see it on a model.
Few examples of high-quality pictures
5) Market saturation
Niches are becoming harder to find on Etsy because of the sheer number of shops. In 2022 the number of active Etsy sellers is 7.5 million. Over 200 000 shops are registered every single month.
All the Etsy sellers are all looking for the holy grail: areas with high search volume and low competition. Yes, you need to assess the competitive landscape when choosing how to invest your time. That said, don’t be afraid to compete.
6) Listing Description
Your listing descriptions can also help convert views to sales. We suggest keeping your descriptions short and informative but still engaging. For example, put essential information at the top, such as sizes, dimensions, colors, or ordering directions, and end on a note that best tells your product’s story, with your brand in mind.
The Etsy search considers keywords and phrases within your listing descriptions when ranking your listings. The keywords you use across your listing titles, descriptions, tags, categories, and attributes are essential when it comes to query matching, the first phase of search ranking, within Etsy’s search algorithm.
Some tips for writing listing descriptions:
- Aim to incorporate relevant keywords in the first few sentences.
- Avoid copying your title verbatim or simply listing your top keywords. Instead, you want to craft a sentence or two that casually incorporates a few of your top keywords in a way that sounds human and written in your brand’s voice.
- Continue to include important information that will help buyers best understand your product.
7) Prices
Pricing your item well affects conversion. Now, pricing well doesn’t mean pricing low. If you are having trouble converting views to sales, pricing is one area you could review. It will show you the top 100 listings found in Etsy search for any keyword you specify. You can see what competitors are charging for comparable products. Then you can experiment with raising or lowering your prices in response.
Shoppers also compare prices when looking at search results, so your listing price can also affect whether or not a buyer clicks on your listing. Shoppers may have a specific price point in mind before they even start their search. As you expand your inventory over time, be sure to list items across price points to reach shoppers no matter their budget.
8) Discounts (Sale campaigns)
A better way to make an impression for the Etsy's algorithm would be to make a short time sale - just for a day or two and include the products that are important to sell quick. When there is an ongoing sale and the time is very close to its end, Etsy's will push the performance of these listings in their ranking and even in a pop up sell banner to show to the potential customers that this is around its end. Etsy knows customers are more likely to buy something when the sale is close to its end and that's why it will support it and show it in front of the competitions. Still, the products should be classified by Etsy as ones with a higher rate of buying, i.e. there should be some good selling history.
Examples:
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Lets check the conversion rate shall we?
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Lets check now the conversion rate during the sale event?
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We can clearly see that conversion rate have increased significantly during the ongoing sale event.
One more example of how the sale events are affecting the conversions on your store
In this case we have 15% off shop-wide for 10 days period
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In this case the Conversion rate have increased from 0.8% before the sale event to 1.2%
9) Categories
Conversion rates in different categories vary. If you sell vintage furniture or original art at higher price points, it can take more views to get a sale. Conversely, if you list in Craft Supplies, shoppers there are quicker to purchase.
10) Shipping Price
In addition to your item price, shoppers may factor in what you charge for shipping when deciding whether to make a purchase. A shopper who loved your listing when they clicked on it from a search could be turned off by expensive shipping.
In fact, in a 2018 survey, some Etsy shoppers said that they were 50% less likely to buy an item if they thought the price of shipping was even a little bit more expensive than they were used to. Consider adding some of your shipping costs into the item price so you can lower what you charge for shipping and see what your customers respond to.
What Etsy Recommends
Shipping price is also a factor in Etsy search ranking. According to Etsy's official statement, listings that ship for free and shops that offer a United States free shipping guarantee get priority US search placement in the Etsy app where millions of Etsy’s most active shoppers are searching. They say: “We prioritize these items wherever Etsy advertises in the US—in email marketing, social media, and television ads”. Digital download items are also eligible for priority search placement in the Etsy app because they don't have any shipping costs.
What is our benchmark
Free shipping is an attractive option for customers and it gives a small push in the ranking. However, we work closely with a lot of shops that sell successfully on Etsy without free shipping, and in our experience, the lack of it doesn't have a negative effect on results. However, the balance between product price and shipping price is a key factor. If you don’t offer a US free shipping guarantee or free shipping to US shoppers, offering free shipping or lowering your shipping costs for shoppers in your home country or main market destination can improve your search ranking, but is not a 100% solution.
11) Processing time
Shoppers on Etsy are often looking for gifts or may need something for a special event by a certain date, so your processing times may influence a buyer’s purchase decision. Keep shoppers’ expectations in mind when setting your processing time—especially when you have ready-to-ship items in stock—and try to avoid unnecessary padding of your processing time.
You can also offer shipping upgrades so shoppers know they have options if they really need an item urgently.
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12) Reviews
Shoppers can also see your shop’s review star average when browsing search results. A high average will help to build trust and could encourage some buyers to take a closer look at your item.1-3 stars reviews can hurt significantly the conversion rate, because they are acting as boomerang to the new clients that are landing on your shop or listings.
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Example for good review score/status
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Example of a bad review score/status
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13) Expired/deactivated/sold out listings
If your products get expired/deactivated or sold out, this can hurt your CR, especially if these were products that were very popular in the store and had a good quality score and conversion rate. Monitor the availability of your products and prevent the possibility of your product being out of stock, deactivated by Etsy for copyrights/violation of policies, or expiring if you put it on manual renewal.
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14) Quantities
Product quantities play an important role in CR because they can cause a customer to make a purchase or not. According to the nature of a product, you can determine what quantities to put into it based on whether the product is ready to ship or made to order. Note that when there is only 1 available item of a certain product, the following message appears next to your products
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In order to maintain a good balance you have to monitor your loading stocks and keep out some variations of the products (if there are present) to become sold out, because this can hurt your conversion rate and lower your results
Examples of top performing products with just 1 quantity
15) Targeted campaigns (abandoned basket, favorite products, thank you)
When you send targeted offers to interested shoppers, you create promo codes that are automatically emailed to shoppers who have shown interest in your items. The buyer can then enter the promo code at checkout.
What kind of offers can I send?
There are 3 types of targeted email offers for shoppers opted-in to receiving marketing email messages:
- Abandoned cart
If a shopper has an item from your shop in their cart for more than 24 hours, they’ll get an email offering them a discount for that item 24 hours after they abandoned it in their cart.
A shopper can receive this type of targeted offer email once every two days. We’ll include up to 12 different discounts per offer email. If a shopper adds an item to their cart and then removes the item within 24 hours, they won’t receive an offer for your shop in a targeted offer email.
- Recently Favorited
If a shopper adds one of your items to their favorites, they’ll receive an offer 48 hours later.
A shopper can receive this type of targeted offer email every 7 days. We’ll include up to 6 different discounts per offer email. If a shopper favorites an item and then removes that item from their favorites within 48 hrs, they won’t receive a favorited item email.
- Post-purchase thank you
After a buyer has purchased from you, they are sent a targeted offer email to encourage them to buy from you again.
This offer email is sent to the buyer after the order is completed.
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How to analyze your shop and traffic sources?
When we want to analyze our conversion rate and how it raises or falls, we want to understand where the difference comes from.
It can be from our main traffic sources:
- Etsy App & Other Etsy Pages;
- Etsy Search;
- Etsy Marketing & SEO;
- Direct & Other Traffic;
- Social Media;
- Etsy Ads;
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Also it can be from a specific listing
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or it could be from a sale event and discounts
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How to understand what is driving traffic in your store
1) Seasonality
Seasonal fluctuations in buyer behavior and shop traffic are normal. Most find their first quarter and summer are quiet, while the fourth quarter is their busiest. If you anticipate and plan for these seasonal ebbs and flows, you won’t panic when lower conversion rates happen.
When you feel like things have been slowing down, you take a peek at your competition. Just track a similar group of shops. They are in the same category as you, have a similar rate of sales, and have comparable pricing/quality. You also track some top sellers. For one of our shops, the top seller pretty consistently sells 10 times more of what we do in a given week. So you watch that ratio as well. Most of the time, when our sales are slow, so are theirs.
2) Social Media
A fair number of shop owners drive their own traffic through social media. In some cases the traffic that comes from social media is “empty” and in other cases, it converts. In most cases, the traffic coming from Pinterest is empty because users are just browsing for ideas, with no intention of ordering, and this can lower our CR. In another case, however, having a post from an influencer from Instagram can cause the CR to increase for a period of time and then, when the initial wave has passed, to drop again. The same goes for Facebook.
3) Returning Buyers
Running targeted campaigns and email marketing can increases purchase intent. That is, the probability that a shopper will buy. And return to buy from your shop specifically. To get customers to come back, make sure your customer service is on point. Have good policies, clear communication, and meet deadlines.
Conclusion
In conclusion, understanding and optimizing your store’s Conversion Rate (CR) is crucial for the success of your Etsy shop. The CR is a key performance indicator that reflects the percentage of visitors who make a purchase, directly impacting your revenue. By monitoring and improving various aspects of your shop, such as SEO, product listings, visual appeal, pricing strategies, and targeted campaigns, you can enhance your CR and overall sales performance.
High-quality product photos, compelling descriptions, competitive pricing, and an engaging storefront design are fundamental elements that attract and convert visitors. Additionally, offering free or reasonably priced shipping, optimizing for relevant keywords, and running short-term sales or targeted email campaigns can further boost your CR.
It's important to note that different categories on Etsy have varying average conversion rates, so setting realistic benchmarks based on your niche is essential. Regularly analyzing your shop’s performance, keeping an eye on seasonal trends, and staying adaptable to changes in the competitive landscape will help you maintain and improve your CR.
Ultimately, even small improvements in your conversion rate can lead to significant increases in revenue, making it worthwhile to invest time and effort into optimizing your shop for conversions. By focusing on these strategies and continually refining your approach, you can create a thriving Etsy shop with strong sales and a loyal customer base.
