How much does it cost to sell on Etsy?

Etsy is a great online market place for crafty people. The major cost for selling on Etsy including the product inventory and advertising. We discuss the cost of advertising in this post.

Is Etsy ad worth it?

Is it worth it to pay for Etsy advertisement?

How to be successful on Etsy and not spend a ton of money?

Would your Etsy advertising bring you enough sales to cover the cost? if you increase the ads amount would the sales increase? Some people recommend advertising with the top allowable amount - is that a good idea for everyone?

It’s Etsy ad worth it? some say it does, and some say it doesn’t. Here I run an ad campaign experiment in my own shop where I increased the ad spending by ten times. Want to see the results?

If you increase Etsy ad spending, would you get more sales? Here I run an ad campaign experiment in my own shop where I increased the ad spending by ten times. Want to see the results?

I have an Amazon and JD store, and recently joined the Etsy platform as a seller. I need to find out how much to spend on an Etsy ad campaign. Here I run an ad on three items in my shop on a budget of 1 dollar a day. I will then increase the budget to 10 dollars a day and show you day by day difference.

How did it go?

Here is a report of running the Etsy ad for a month. I spent 8 dollars 48 cents on the ad clicks, and got a sales of 19 dollars and 49 cents. It sounds great. If I increase the ad budget, would it increase the sales?

Overall although i gave Etsy the permission to charge up to 1 dollar a day, Etsy only charged a fraction of that budget because it only charges based on clicks, not impression.

What is an impression? if someone types in magnifier, they will get a bunch of suggestions. If your ad item is listed there, it is an impression. Obviously at this moment, it is free. (At other platforms like Amazon, it is not free). When someone clicks on my item and view the details, it counts as a click.

If I type in the word magnifier in Etsy search box, a number of items are listed. I can see that one of my advertised item is ranked fairly high. For another advertised item, the regular appearance happens even before its advertised appearance.

Here is a breakdown of how the three items fared in the Etsy ad campaign. As I started, here is the starting screen.

The first item has 2990 impressions, 20 clicks, and 1 sales. The other two items each has a lot of impressions, but no sales. One has 2750 impressions, no sale from the impressions. The click to impression ratio is roughly 1 to 100. The next had 1059 impressions, and no sales.

Conclusion: In many cases, increasing advertising spending limit has no effect on sales.

Here is a graph of the impressions and clicks as presented by Etsy marketing tools.

As you can see, increased ad spending does not bury you, but does not increase sales.

I can draw three conclusions here.

In most cases, Etsy can not spend your full amount of budget. This is for a lack of impressions (or visitors) and a lack of clicks.

If you increase the ad budget under this circumstance, your impression will increase, and clicks will increase, but not necessarily the sales.

I am convinced if I further increase the ad spending, my items would still not have greater sales.

If you have a lot of items in your store, then perhaps increasing ad spending helps, but not when you don’t have many items and you can not differentiate from your competitors. You must also absolutely make sure your satisfaction rating is high on the store and items.

On a last note, it is entirely possible at one can run a store without any ad spending - ad spending simply doubles the impressions you get on a search term.