2023 Etsy numbers

After a few weeks of looking for the right niche, I opened my Etsy shop end of June 2023. Did I make profit in the first 6 months?
Was it worth my time? Will I get rich out of it?
Discover it here.

1. Listings

I decided to open an Etsy-shop in June 2023 after doing some research what niche I want and how many listings I ideally should have to open an online shop.
The ideal minumum number of listings I should have to start a shop that sells AI generated art should be 50 and I opened my shop with 48 listings on june 28.
The upcoming weeks, I had a schedule of publishing 3 to 4 new items a week because I wanted to get to 100 before the end of the year. But I realised this thight schedule was not doable due to some reasons. The main reason was that I wanted only to publish quality and not quantity. In the beginning it was easy to create content but it was becomming more and more difficult to produce items that met my high qualitative standards. And also somethings happened mid August, which I will explain later.
But at the end of 2023, I managed to publish 96 items which was okay for me.

2. Visitors

You can see an steadily monthly increase in the number of visitors. And then all of sudden, there was a big decline in August/September (see next point). But I was able to recover from this one and did see the amount of visitors grow month by month.
Not extremely spectacul but I like the way it is, it is just a confirmation that I'm am the right way managing my shop.
Also, I did not run any ads for my shop. I want to keep my traffic organic and not boost it via ads. And, the most important reason, the relative cost for running paid ads is too high for what I (try to) sell. The average price of my items is below 5€ and the price per click (via paid ads) is 0.5€. So, for me, it's not worth it.
But I can reconsider this and maybe, in the future, try paid ads and see what profit it brings.

3. What happened in August?

As you have noticed in the previous screenshot, there is a gigantic drop in August, which lasted until mod September.
Mid August, I received a mail from Etsy that my shop was permanently closed due to not following their guidelines. I immediately went checking the admin part of my shop and indeed did see a red banner saying my shop was closed permanently.Big panic!!!
I had no clue what I have done wrong: I filled in all the details they needed, bank accounts were also legit, I had no copyright infringments, ... So I did write them an email explaining my situation and I got an automatic reply back. But nothing happened in the next weeks, no mail from them, exactly the same frightening red banner on my shop, ... and I started to giving up hope.
Until 4 weeks later, I received an email from Etsy saying they looked into my case and re-opened my shop. Thanks to Etsy for doing this (but a little bit more communication would have been highly appreciated). But due to this non-activity, I lost a bit the flow of creating and publishing, so I decided to only publish new articles once or twice a week>
And I was extremely happy that activity went back to normal and visitors were coming back.

4. Orders and Conversation Rate

The amount of orders also shows a nice increase. But these are numbers of visitors who made a purchase, not the amount of items that have been sold.
Here are the numbers of sold items:
July: 7
August: 7
September: 5
October: 37
November: 21
December: 43
As you can see, it takes around 2 to 3 months before your shop really takes off and start getting traction.
All the numbers are in an upward trend but I have no clue why there was a small incline in numbers for November. Maybe because it is inbetween Halloween and Christmas? People have other things on their mind? I have no idea at all, but when I figured it out, I let you know.

5. Revenue

After a slow start and the august debacle, I finally did see a growth in revenue. Not spectacular but a small and steady increse in numbers.
I want to keep it this way and slowly grow (and keep on concentrating on good content for my shop).
279.25€ might not sound bad as an extra income, but this is just the revenue. You still need to deduct all the costs from it.

6. Costs

Here are the costs for my Etsy shop in 2023:
July: 19.45€
August: 11.19€
September: 4.8€
October: 32.75€
November: 24.93€
December: 36.4€
Which totals up to 129,52€ in fees.
This combined with my Midjourney (30€) and eRank (5€) subscription for every month makes the total cost 339,52€

7. total passive income for 2023

Deducting the cost (339.52€) from the revenue (279.25€) gives me a net profit of -60.27€
. Which means I made a small loss in my first 6 months.
But I will not give up as I see an upward trend in visitors and sales. And you also have to keep the August/September dip into consideration. .

8. Conclusion and Expectations

I agree, making a loss isn't nice at all but I am a positive person and I see an uptrend in all statistics, which makes me full of hope.
I am also aware that these numbers can't increase infinately and will flatten out over time. But as long as the are going up, I am a happy person.
The 'closing' of my shop gave me mental hit but I am not to person to give and I will keep on improving my listings and the qualitive of my shop. Because this is, as I think, the secret key to succes: hard work and consistency in quality.
When I see the december numbers, I think it might be possible to generate a passive income stream of 200€ per month.

Name *

Email *

Message