There's this one mistake so many handmade sellers make in the way they organize
their product listings when offering different variations of the same product -
like color options for example,
or personalization - that's costing them - and maybe you - a lot of sales.
So if you're trying to get more of your shop views to turn into actual sales,
this is going to be a really helpful video as I'm going to explain to you what
the problem is, walk you through an example of it,
offer you a super effective solution for it and an added bonus boost for your
shop that will come from implementing this solution. Let's dive in.
Bonjour! My name is Deb and I'm the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners.
Today I want to talk to you about simplifying your listings so that you can make
more sales from them.
This is helpful if you're selling on your own website or on Etsy.
It's something that I see everywhere and that comes up quite often when I do
Etsy shop reviews or handmade shop reviews within the Tizzit HQ community so I
thought it was time to record a video about it in hopes that it will help the
community at large and help more of you turn more views into sales more often
than not while still offering people different variations of your products and
also options for personalization of those products. So here's the problem:
your product listings are too complex.
You're giving people too many options.
I know this comes from a place of service,
like "I want people to be happy and I want them to have exactly what they want.
I want them to be able to get their perfect pillow", for example.
And then there's this other part as well that's like,
"well I can make this in blue or in yellow or in red.
I know how to make it and I have the supplies for it".
So naturally you're thinking, why not offer it?
The overall idea is that the more options you give them,
the more likely they are to find exactly what they need and so you're more
likely to make more sales. Sadly, that's not how the human brain works. In fact,
it's quite the opposite. Without getting into the details of it,
Barry Schwartz in his book, "The paradox of choice.
Why more is less" (and I think there's actually a great Ted talk on this too if
you don't want to read the book, but you do want to learn more.
It's actually quite an entertaining Ted talk) has done a lot of research on
consumer behavior, psychology studies,
happiness surveys around the decisions that we as consumers have to make and the
choices that we're being offered when shopping.
And it turns out that more is less.
The more decisions someone has to make to finalize a purchase,
the more stressed out and unhappy they feel,
the more likely they are to freeze and to get into analysis paralysis and to
make no decision at all, meaning that you're not getting a sale.
So you really want to reduce the amount of options that you're giving people
when ordering your products. It might feel counterintuitive at first,
but I promise you this is how you finally start making sales or more sales from
those listings.
Let's take a pillow listing as an example to illustrate my point,
but of course this applies to you even if you don't sell pillows.
As long as you offer variations and personalization options for your products,
this still applies. So we have a pillow.
The first thing you might want to offer is different sizes: length, width,
square shape, rectangles, circular, extra large... Then maybe a choice of color:
is the pillow going to be red, blue, orange, burnt orange, turquoise,
ivory, black? You get my point.
Then you might want to offer an option for the pillow and an insert or the
pillow cover only. If your design allows for a second color,
you might want to ask for that second color as well.
And often a font choice is also offered,
so what font do they want for the text on the pillow? And finally,
what should that text actually say?
What's the custom or personalized message that they want written on that pillow?
See, that's really starting to be a lot.
And of course I exaggerate here and it's rare to see that many options offered,
but you'd really be surprised because often it's not far at all with listings
commonly offering four options like color, size, insert or not,
and then a custom message.
And then comes a second layer of indecision because within each option there are
too many sub options, so 15 colors to choose from, 12 font options...
That's way too many decisions that your customer has to make and what you're
really doing here is asking them to design their own custom pillow.
That's cool, but that's not a listing. That's a custom order.
And you can mention it in your listing that if they want more options,
they can contact you for a custom order, that's cool.
But you don't want to make them design a pillow if they don't necessarily want a
custom order because what you're asking them to do then is to be a designer and
they don't want that. That's why they're paying you for.
They're paying you to pick the best fonts,
they're paying you to pick the best colors that are on trend at the moment.
It's your job as the designer to make those decisions and to offer a very
curated list of options for them. So what's the solution here? Well, as a rule,
you don't want to give people more than two options.
And I know that on Etsy you're theoretically not able to,
but many sellers do a little work around where they use one drop down for two
options like this, where effectively it's only one drop down,
but you're really asking two things:
what size and do you want an insert or not.
So when I'm saying two options,
I mean two decisions not to drop downs.
So for example,
it could be color and size or size and insert or not.
That's rule number one. Rule number two is that within those two options,
you don't want to give them six different sizes of pillows.
Don't give them 15 different color choices or 10 different fonts to choose from.
Less truly, truly is more. And to be honest,
to someone that is not a graphic designer or designer at all,
looking at all these fonts,
they all kind of look the same after five or six options. And again,
they just want you to pick what font is best so that it's easy to read and it's
on trend. Now,
the bonus boost you'll get from using this strategy that I mentioned at the
beginning of this video is that you will now have more listings in your shop.
Because I'm not telling you not to offer all of these colors or all of these
options. I'm just saying to make them into separate listings.
So you want to ask yourself, what's most important here?
Are people mostly interested in the color, the size, or something else?
If it's the color, for example,
and you have five different color variations at the moment,
then create five separate listings: one for the blue pillow,
one for the gray pillow, one for the black pillow, et cetera.
And why is it great to have more listings? Three things. One,
your shop looks more full. Two, when someone searches for, say,
a blue pillow, they will see in your featured thumbnail,
that little image that shows up,
that is the blue pillow and so they're much more likely to click on it that if
the thumbnail showed a gray pillow,
even though you had a variation for a blue option within that listing.
So really better click through rate is what we're going for here.
And then finally, if you sell on Etsy,
more listings also means more opportunities to show up in search results as you
get to use and experiment with different keywords and titles for your SEO.
So it's a win all around. Next up,
I'd love to recommend you watch a video I created about the seven Etsy mistakes
I see a lot of sellers make, because if you enjoyed this video,
you're going to love that one too. Thanks for watching. And until next time,
au revoir!