How many listings should your Etsy shop have?
50 listings? Maybe 100? Or do you dream big and aim for 1,000?
It depends. Like many aspects in running an Etsy shop, there isn’t a magic number that fits every Etsy shop.
In this article, I’ll give you some guidelines to figure out an ideal number of listings for your shop, whether you’re just starting out, or you want to grow and scale your Etsy shop.
I'll also answer some common questions I get from my students like "How many listings do you need for your first sale on Etsy?" and "Does Etsy have a preferred number of listings?"
Let’s dive in.
Every Etsy shop is unique, and there’s no one-size-fits-all number of listings for your shop. The number of listings you should have depends on many factors like:
That being said, I can offer you some general guidelines based on my experience and observations on Etsy:
Start with: 10-20 listings
Handmade items often come with intricate details, personalised touches and a uniqueness that’s hard to create in bulk.
From my experience, there’s no correlations of how many listings vs how successful a handmade Etsy shop is. But in general, more listings can give your products and shop better visibility of Etsy, especially given the competitiveness on Etsy right now.
Starting with 10-20 items and designs should be relatively manageable, and can give Etsy shoppers a good sense of your brand’s offering.
Start with: 20-50 listings
Digital products include templates and planners, which are highly popular on Etsy. But a lot of the niches for digital products can be competitive.
Given the competition, I’d recommend having 20-50 listings to start with in order to target a good amount of long-tail keywords.
Many successful digital product shops carry over 500-1,000 designs as they are relatively low maintenance, but make sure you don’t sacrifice design quality when you scale up your shop.
Start with: 20-50 listings
Print-on-demand (POD) allows easy product creation without sellers having to worry about inventory and shipping. Because of that, established POD Etsy shops often have over 1,000-3,000 listings.
Don’t let that big number discourage you. Starting with 20-50 quality designs can help you get the initial traction for a successful POD shop.
Start with: 20-50 listings
Craft supplies are the most popular product category on Etsy. 20-50 listings can be a good number to start with, offering a diverse selection of craft materials for your customers.
I’d like to share my experience and strategies for my own shop, Growing Your Craft. Hopefully it can provide you with some insights for your Etsy journey.
My Etsy shop sells editable templates for small business. I launched my shop on April 09, 2020 with around 15-20 designs. These were spread across 3 product categories, like candle labels and business cards, with about 5 designs each.
One thing that’s great for initial growth for a new shop is to add new listings regularly. In the beginning, I add about 10 new listings per week, until I reached about 350 listings. After 1 year of opening my shop, I had about 5,000 sales.
Now that you’ve heard about my experience, let’s look at how you can add new listings to your own Etsy shop, and not get overwhelmed while doing that:
Etsy charges US$0.2 for each new listings. Each listing will expire after 4-months, or last until it’s sold. If you haven’t opened your Etsy shop yet, you can get 40 free listings by following the instructions of this link.
More listings mean more opportunities to use a variety of long-tail keywords. Each listing gives you a new opportunity to rank for new keywords and reach new customers, which help improve your shop’s visibility.
This is important because Etsy search traffic is free and targeted. It’s going to be one of the most important traffic sources for the growth of your shop.
A diverse range of products can keep potential customers engaged for longer, and encourage them to spend more time exploring your shop.
More listings also gives you the opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell. For example, a jewelry shop specialising in sterling silver jewelry can upsell smaller items like silver polishing cloth. This can increase the average order value and bring you higher profit.
More listings also gives you options to offer products across different price points. This can help bring in sales from a wider spectrum of shoppers from budget-conscious ones to those who are looking for quality.
It’s important to add new, high quality listings regularly once you open your Etsy shop. Doing so can help you target more long-tail keywords, keep your shop fresh and encourage customers who’ve favourited your shop to visit again. All of that can improve your chance of making sales.
You probably already know adding new listings regularly would benefit your shop, but you may find that overwhelming and don’t know how to do it regularly.
Here are some ways to do so without getting overwhelmed.
Before making completely new products, it’s good to start with what works. Introduce new colours, patterns, size, etc. of your bestselling products as new listings. You can also make slight adjustments to your bestselling products according to customer feedback or current market trends.
This is a great way to create more listings without having to come up with new product designs.
Make sure your product bundles make sense for your target customers. Think about having bundles of products that are complementary and naturally go together. For example, bundling notebooks with pens.
Bundles with a few of your bestselling products can also work great as a discounted set or a gift set.
Some sellers feel stuck when writing listing descriptions. I recommend using tools like ChatGPT (it’s free!) to help generate ideas and refine what you’ve written. Simply use a prompt like:
Please write a simple product description for (short description of your product). Here are some key product features: (bullet points of product features). My target customer is (your target customer). The product description should focus on benefits for my customers.
Although there isn’t an upper limit to the number of listings you can have, it’s definitely possible to have too many listings.
It’s important to understand that quantity doesn’t bring success on Etsy, quality does.
Balancing is key. If you find that the quality of your listings drop as you add more products, it means you may be spreading yourself too thin. Ultimately, Etsy cares about whether your listings will sell, but not how many there are. So it’s better to have fewer high quality listings than many listings that don’t resonate with your customers.
There’s no magic number. The saying of needing 100 listings before making a sale is a misconception.
Whether you make a sale depends on many factors: the quality of your product, competitiveness of your niche, whether you’re bringing targeted traffic outside Etsy, etc.
So instead of focusing on a specific number of listings, you should focus on creating products that serve your target customers well.
You need at least 1 listing to open an Etsy shop. The saying of needing 5 listings is a myth.
Etsy doesn't have a preferred number of listings, but more listings allow shops use a wider variety of keywords, which can improve the visibility and sales performance of the shop.
With these insights about Etsy insights in mind, the next important step is to make sure the shoppers visiting your shop convert into customers. In other words, improve the conversion rate of your Etsy listings. Read my article Maximizing Your Etsy Conversion Rate here.
