Hi I'm Tom,
This is probably going to be a very quick video, but I thought it would make for an
interesting one.
Especially if you're just getting started out, seeing what is possible is always inspiring.
Every now and then I like to take a look at how the competition are doing, not necessarily
my direct competitors but the general top selling stores on Etsy, or at least the top
ones that look like POD stores.
This allows me to see what they are doing good that I can then implement in my own business.
This does not mean copying their designs.
This time I was trying to see if there was a correlation with the number of listings
to the amount of sales a store gets, what the general price of a shirt was, how many
offered free shipping, whether they were running a sale or not and few other bits that I'll
get into shortly.
So while I got all this data from a public source and all the stores are public, I don't
think its fair to show you the store names.
Since I know this could cause and influx of copycats.
I know some people will hate this, but hopefully you can understand where I'm coming from.
Incase you are watching this sometime in the future, this data is from the beginning of
Feb 2022.
So lets take a look at the data.
Firstly lets look at the pricing, so without placing order, I can't know what model shirt
they are using, however most of the product images were of the bella canvas 3001 and a
few were using comfort colors shirts.
Either way the pricing per shirt including shipping costs ranged from $14 all the way
up to $29 per shirt.
Giving us an average price of $21.91 - I've priced my shirts between $21-23 depending
on the sale I run.
So going by this data, I seems to fit in the average.
Which is good.
Looking at how many offer free shipping, its just about a 50/50 split.
So I think if you're just setting up your store, and can't decide whether to go with
free shipping or not, then to be honest I don't think it makes that much difference.
Especially on Etsy anyway.
I've experimented with offering free shipping and charging for shipping, and I've not really
seen any changes in order numbers.
However I have stuck with free shipping since I believe Etsy gives free shipping listings
some priority in search rankings.
Moving on to active sales, this is what surprised me the most.
Basically every store was running some sort of sale.
Only 3 of the 31 stores were not actually running a sale.
Now this doesn't mean that they've actually discounted the shirts, this is just a selling
tactic used pretty much everywhere.
You basically raise your prices by 30% and then offer a 30% discount, I defiantly saw
an increase in sales when I started using this tactic.
I would recommend implementing this in your own stores if you haven't already.
The average percent sale seemed to be about 20-30%, I imagine this is the sweet spot.
Having your listing on a 20% usually means your listings get put into the sale section
on Etsy, which then naturally increases views and sales etc...
Moving on to the number of listings each store had, these numbers are rounded down by the
way.
Over half had more than 1000 listings, with the majority of the other stores having very
close to 1000 with only a handful having 500 or less.
The only thing I can take away from this is that the number of listings you have doesn't
necessarily correlate with the number of sales you get.
I think once you get past a few hundred the impact of having more listings is small.
But the more listings you do have the more chance you have of getting found.
So lets take a look at their sales.
The very top store got 2187 orders for the previous 7 days, which works out to be on
average, 312 orders per day, which is insane!
Just for fun, if we take the price they sell shirts for and use the costings for Monster
Digital on Printify, we can work out what profit they are potentially making.
I'm gonna use my own calculator for this, link in description, so this store sells shirts
including shipping for $23.80 and total cost from Printify would be $12.05.
So after Etsy fees thats about $9 profit per shirt.
Of course this is assuming every order is for a shirt, which its probably not.
However if we times $9 by their daily sales of 312, that comes to a daily profit of $2808.
Which is amazing.
Even if we do the same with the bottom store, they get 31 orders per day.
and with their pricing figures, their profit comes to about $9 per shirt again.
Which comes to $279 profit per day, which is still very very good!
The next section is average age, I don't know what I'd get from this really, except the
average age of these stores comes to 3 years.
The next section is what I found the most interesting, out of these top POD stores 22
out of the 31 only ship to the US or Canada!
I don't know if this means we should just be focusing on the US, or maybe this means
that the competition with shipping to other countries is less.
I'm not sure, but its defiantly something to think about and look into more.
Anyway that was just some interesting data points that I found and thought would be helpful
to some of you.
So, thank you for watching, and if you want to learn more about print on demand and selling
online, please consider subscribing if you haven't already.