Meet Chat Regular staceyrebecca

It's just days until her fifth anniversary with Etsy, and that's as good a reason as any to introduce puppet-maker and Chatter staceyrebecca.
No one writes a funnier item description, or child safety warning for that matter (check out Horatio The Bunny).

Shape up #2 - Customer service is always in season

We've all had some wonderful experiences shopping online, but also some that turned out to be not so great. And while the product is certainly a big part of what makes one purchase rock, and another sink like a stone, customer service is something that can make or break a sale, however fabulous the item.

This article from the Seller Handbook lists the writers' Top 10 Customer Service Strategies, and they have some great advice. It's part of a bigger series Service Tips for Sellers with info on everything from communication and complaints to shipping and selling vintage.

In Chat recently there was a discussion about how something as basic as replying to convos is an effective sales and service strategy that can pay off - Team member jmaeson answered an out-of-the-blue convo that lead to a custom order for 60 items!

Please share your customer service stories, good and bad, in the comments.


Images from KatyBitsandPieces and WinsomeTreasures, thanks!

Shape up for 2011

We're just days away from a lot of messages about diet, exercise, and resolutions for the new year, but this won't have you thinking about crunches and salads to get over any excesses in 2010. Rather, it's a few friendly reminders about getting an Etsy shop in tip-top shape for the start of a successful year of selling!

#1 - Don't welcome me to your shop.
Really, don't, at least not right away. Not because you don't want me and other buyers to show up, and to feel welcomed, but because starting with that friendly "Welcome to my shop" is such a waste of the key first characters in your valuable Shop Announcement space!

Don't take my word for it - read this ever-so-helpful Etsy excerpt about Shop Announcements, from the Help section on SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

"The first 160 characters of your Shop Announcement are used to create the meta description for your shop page. The meta description is the text shown under your page title on a search engine results page.

TIPS: Describe your shop and the kinds of items you sell. Use welcoming language that will entice someone to explore your shop further. Use keywords that you think shoppers will search to find your items."

And when was the last time someone searched for "Welcome to my shop!"?

Read the article, here. It's a much-shortened version of the big 25-page SEO Guide. You'll also learn about how to make the shop title, item titles, shop sections and item descriptions work harder for you.

Images from SurrenderDorothy and justmars, thanks!

Finding Team Member Shops

We've all seen it. Someone comes in to Chat and asks if anyone makes custom stickers, or sells beads or baby clothes, sculpture or soap. Or maybe you remember chatting with a Vintage or Supplies seller, but their shop name hasn't lodged in your brain.

Now that our Team members can also be found through the Team page on Etsy, it seems like a good time to transition the list of members on this blog to one that's a little more functional when it comes to finding members by what they sell.

So, there's a simple Google Docs form live now, that all Team members can use to designate their top three categories (based on how Etsy's top-level categories are shown). Please go to the link and choose your top three, and they'll be compiled and listed here on the blog, as well as at the discussion forums on our Etsy Team page.

Thanks!
Judith / jswrites

Images from RetrospectPhoto and fattybird, thanks!

EtsyChatters are live on Twitter!

One of the first threads started on the new Chat Team Forum was called For Twitter Addicts by mentalembellisher, inviting Team members to post their Twitter links to be able to follow each other.

Adding to the businesslike fun, Team member EmilyWiserJewelry suggested that we have a "team twitter that retweets fellow team members' tweets!" Of course she got the task, and has been busy keeping those little messages flowing since last week. 

To add your Twitter URL, just make a Forum post here, then follow back so Emily can retweet your tweets. Our Team Twitter:  EtsyChatters.

Images from mentalembellisher and EmilyWiserJewelry, thanks!

Crafty Kids

Children in Chat?! Well, no (Community features are just for adults), but we're happy to see some of the cool crafty work of young folks in shops supervised by their parents. Here are just two examples showing the talents of the 12 year olds of Chat regulars AllForJasmine and dreamweaver19.

Are there crafty kids in your family? Were you creating handmade things or precociously collecting vintage yourself? Tell us all about it, and share your links in the Comments!

Five Questions for ... TopazTurtle

We had a virtual sit-down with one of our international Chat regulars, Topaz Turtle, to ask her a quintet of questions about creativity, community, and business here on Etsy:

Q.  What are your inspirations? Do trends, themes and seasons (such as those outlined in the monthly Etsy Merchandising Desk blog posts) influence you at all?
A.  Any kind of stimulus can inspire a piece – a line from a song, the colour of scarf spied on a train trip, vegetables and fruits that are in season (my latest muse is the pomegranate so expect to see a lot of rich red ruby hues). I do read the Etsy Merchandising Desk blog posts and it does influence me at some level. There is a very broad range of themes and trends outlined in the blog and I often find a few or more listings that fit into the themes.

The seasonal trends outlined in the blog can be a bit difficult to fit into as the seasons are all the other way round in the southern hemisphere but there are still some happy coincidences.

Q.  Are there any arts or crafts you'd like to learn, or materials and techniques you'd like to try? What appeals to you about them?

A.  I strive to improve my skills with resin and polymer clay and I’m always finding new ways to work with these. My next goal is to earn enough money to buy myself a degasser which removes or reduces bubbles in resin.

A new material called Friendly Plastic caught my attention recently and I’m itching to incorporate these into my resin pieces too.

I also have been doing a lot more work with seed beads in peyote type stitch to create some very satisfying tubular beads. I’m looking forward to creating more of these.

Q.  What has been the most effective promotion strategy for you? The least effective?
A.  Most of my customers find my shop using Etsy Search, so having really good tags, product descriptions and product names is very important. I try to think of what terms people might use to find my items and make sure that they are incorporated into them.

I also find Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Etsy Forums and Chats to be a good way of generating interest in my shop.

I have tried a few advertisements but so far I haven’t had anyone tell me that they found my shop because they saw an ad somewhere. It’s doesn’t seem to be a very effective way of promoting my shop and I think I might be a bit more circumspect about this.

Q.  What have you learned about having an online business here on Etsy? Anything you wish you'd known earlier?
A.  I guess the biggest lesson I learned was that I can’t sit back and wait for customers. You have to get out there and promote.

The other lesson that I have just learned and wish I had known earlier was that your shop’s Google search results ranking is based on the ‘importance‘ of your shop page and you increase the importance of your shop page when other sites link to your page. So the more websites that you have linking back to your shop, the higher up in the search results you appear.

Q.  If you could choose anything sold on Etsy - price no object - what would it be?
A.  This is probably the most difficult question to answer as my most desired item keeps changing. I recently saw a wooden sun lounge chair on Etsy Finds that looked gorgeous. Trying to find the link to it but I deleted the email!

So if anyone still has that Etsy Finds email, let me know.

Ready for the Holidays?

Chat Team members and Chat regulars are ready for the busy sales months ahead, and all those shopping events and occasions lined up between now and the start of 2011.

The Etsy Success Holiday Boot Camp is underway to help supercharge everyone's efforts for the season, and it's packed with tips and homework to make this the best selling season ever.

What are you doing this year? New items? Different ways to promote? A seasonal twist to your photographs? Updating tags to help reach a holiday shopping audience?

Images from hdawnparratt, 2kutekards and staceyyacula, thanks!