Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Day 3. Who is your role model?

Yesterday, I identified top 20 shops on Etsy and spent quite a lot of time today checking them out. My goal was to find a role model – a shop I would like very much. In my mind, a “role model” also is a business I could use as a benchmark, as my ultimate destination of happiness and completeness…

Instead, I was really surprised to figure out that instead of a role model, I found small pieces, distinct elements that I love. They are spread across many shops, they spark here and there. I noticed, that I started to see them clearly and I started to see what elements, features, sometimes even colors I want to have in my own shop.

I’m so excited about this very new to me process, so I want to share with you a few changes that I made right away.

I noticed that in my listings I usually name exact names of a semi-precious stone I use. For example, purl, amethyst, garnet… However, most of the “top shops” are using more generic names, something like “semi-precious stone”. I started experimenting with search and quickly found out that it is much easier to find a good piece of art using generic terms. Conclusion: I started to add generic terms to my jewelry descriptions.

Another thing I noticed is many successful shops are giving more detailed descriptions to their products. I think it is helpful for search engine – more keywords, relevance or whatever geeks call it. And also it was interesting to read. So I started to add to my descriptions a bit more info about stones I’m using.

I do not know what is the cause and what is the effect, but I can see that shops with more sales usually have more facebook likes as well. Interestingly enough, they do not hesitate to add social media links to the individual item descriptions. To all of them! And you know it does not bother me when I read such descriptions! So, I’m going to think about it as a role model and add links to my facebook page right into product description section.

Here is my first items I have changed: