Getting Initial Reviews
Reviews are one of the most important things on Etsy. They helps your product listings rank better, but more importantly, they give shoppers confidence to buy.
After you open your shop, tell your friends and family about your new shop, most of the time they will be happy to try your product and give you feedback.
Make sure you follow Etsy’s rule for selling to family and friends. WARNING: Etsy's security bots are highly sensitive to "shilling" (fake reviews). NEVER have a friend or family member buy from your shop if they live in the same house as you, are connected to your Wi-Fi, or have ever logged into their Etsy account from your device. If Etsy detects matching IP addresses, you could risk having your new shop shut down by bots. Only share your link with people outside your physical household, or have them make the purchase and review on another wifi network.
Asking For Customer Reviews
Instead of manually messaging every buyer (which takes up your valuable time and can trigger Etsy's spam filters), you should automate your review requests. You can do this in two places:
- The "Message to Buyers": In your Etsy settings, you can set an automatic message that goes out with every receipt. Use this template: “Thank you for your order! I hope you love your new digital download. If you are happy with the product, I’d be incredibly grateful if you could leave a quick review. It really helps my small business grow!”
- Inside Your Delivery PDF: As we discussed in Chapter 11, if you use a PDF to deliver links, add a friendly "Click here to leave a review" button right inside the document, and include a quick thank you message saying "I appreciate your order and time to leave a positive review. It really helps my small business grow!"
Biggest reason for doing this is to stack up reviews early on so that your shop looks more experienced and reputable. A good amount of 5-star reviews can also protect you from unreasonable or hard to satisfy customers who would leave a negative review no matter what.
Especially for digital products, the competition is high. A shop with no sales/reviews are hard to get that first sale.
The more sales and reviews you get, the more customers will be comfortable buying from you. And the higher your conversion rate will be. That means, the better your shop will rank on Etsy search.
Customer Service
Set up saved replies for commonly asked questions to save yourself time. Even better, turn on Etsy's Auto-Reply feature. Etsy rewards shops that reply to messages within 24 hours with a "Star Seller" badge. By setting up an auto-reply that says, 'Hi! Thanks for reaching out. I usually reply within 24 hours. If you are messaging about how to download your files, please check your email or go to etsy.com/your/purchases,' you instantly stop the 24-hour clock and keep your shop completely passive on the weekends.
Some of the commonly asked questions will be:
- How does it work
- How to edit the design
- Will I get physical products
By default, Etsy's policy states that instant digital downloads are non-refundable. However, in the beginning, if you get a highly unreasonable or unhappy customer, my advice is to just send them a full refund and cancel the order. While it hurts to lose a few dollars, it is absolutely not worth the risk of receiving a 1-star review early on. Consider it a cheap marketing expense to protect your 5-star rating.
Pricing Strategy
There is no right answer in pricing. You can match your competitor’s price, provide a more premium product, or try to compete with a lower price.
My recommendation, and the strategy that worked well for Growing Your Craft, is to set a slightly lower price in the beginning while offering the same high quality products. Good thing about digital product is that there is little to no costs of selling more.
But be careful of putting your price too low. You will of course get some sales, but a lot of shoppers may have the impression that your design is not as high quality.
Also, you can ‘Run a sale’ on your products to convince shoppers that they are getting a good deal.
Here is the strategy I recommend in the beginning:
- Set the original price the similar to your biggest competitors
- Run an 'Opening Shop Sale' with a 30% to 50% discount on your products. Because your profit margins are relatively high, you can afford to do this for a period of time. This discounted price will convince early shoppers to take a chance on a shop with no reviews. Once you hit 10 to 20 consistent sales and have a few 5-star reviews, you can slowly end the sale and increase your prices to normal.
Given that your digital product is high quality, the product photos are eye-catching and the SEO is done correctly, sales should come in quickly - usually within a few days.
This is a good way to quickly get sales and reviews so that customers are comfortable buying from you and Etsy algorithm will push your products up in search results.
You can slowly increase the price once you get more sales or consistent sales.