Craft Market Research – Utilizing Etsy.com

Cindy Lietz, from the website Beads and Beading, shared her blog post “Another Bird Necklace Pendant | Etsy Tips For Your Jewelry Business” with HandmadeMarketing.org.  The article outlines why Etsy.com can be used by handmade sellers as a web resource for marketing ideas.

Although Cindy is not selling on Etsy.com right now, she told us she uses the site frequently for conducting market research.  “There’s only so many hours in a day, and right now everything is focused on building my own websites for direct selling my video based polymer clay tutorials,” she tells HandmadeMarketing.org.

“I would like to talk more about how to use Etsy to conduct online research for your handmade jewelery making business,” Cindy writes in her blog article.  “I have been speaking quite a bit about Etsy.com lately because I feel it is an excellent research tool for the jewelry artist. Perhaps you have looked at Etsy in this way before.”

“Sure you can buy and sell handmade jewelery, beads, pendants and other artistic goods on Etsy,” she tells readers, “but I’m not sure how many jewelry artisans have thought to use it as a research tool for their jewelry business. Even if you never plan to sell online, the information you can gather there is very useful!”

For example, Cindy recommends that artisans reference Etsy to learn more about how to grow their craft business.  “You can also discover funky trends or find out if you should consider adding polymer clay beads and pendants to your already successful jewelry business, like many artisans have done already!” she writes.

But what kind of handmade market information can a seller get from the Etsy.com site? And how can this information be used to grow your off-Etsy business?

First, Cindy explains that Etsy.com offers sellers an opportunity to conduct online market research for jewelery businesses. 

“In the past, this type of research was much harder to do because everything was offline,” Cindy writes.  “You had to attend a lot of craft fairs, take lots of notes, and do lots of guessing.”

Second, the options for research using Etsy are endless.  Etsy.com allows handmade sellers to research everything from the amount of competition for a particular product and typical pricing, to current craft trends appearing on Etsy’s front page.

“I find it to be a very valuable resource for collecting information about selling handmade goods online,” Cindy tells HandmadeMarketing.org.  “The real time stats such as pricing, actual solds, descriptions, trends, store design, starting dates, store names, etc. would be impossible to track on “private” web sites. With information gathered at Etsy, you can do realistic business forecasting based on the successes and failures of other independent artists selling their goods. Never before has there been such an easy and accurate way to get this kind of valuable information, specific to handmade niches.”

Thank you for the great tips Cindy!  Cindy also outlines how she utilizes Etsy.com to learn about the power of craft pricing online in another HandmadeMarketing.org article.

Have you used Etsy.com as a web resource for your handmade business?  What have you learned?  What other sites do you visit to learn about how to market your handmade crafts more effectively?

HandmadeMarketing.org readers can share their tips for selling handmade online by clicking our “Join” tab at the top of the website.  If our editors publish you ideas in an article, we’ll link to your shop, blog, or website as the source of the wonderful information!