Etsy Print On Demand Masterclass for Beginners (7+ Hours)

What would you say to anyone thinking about starting print on a man on Etsy today? >> It's definitely not easy getting started. I had a look back at 2020 when I started on Etsy and in that year I was getting like on average one or two sales a day. But in my second year, I managed to get a six figure sales. And I've tried Shopify for anyone who's also thinking about that. And it's way way more technical. Uh you need a lot more budget to play around on there. So yeah, if I was starting out again, if I can't get into Amazon or if I don't like the Amazon model, I would 100% go with Etsy. >> With the way that print on demand goes um on Etsy or really any platform, the niches and the design styles and trends and aesthetics are constantly changing. So with that constant change, something that was popular even 3 months ago is going to either fizzle out. Um, some of them remain around for a while, but if you are doing your research correctly, you will be able to find constant new trends that are popping up every single month, and that is what you should be hopping on to capitalize on very early as much as possible. Um, because that will give you as much of a head start. Try not to overthink it too much. It is possible and it's happening for people every single day. I have the pleasure of seeing people get their first sale, their hundth sale, their 5,000th sale every single week, and that can absolutely be you. The only thing standing in the way is actually getting started. >> Be careful selling in the most obvious niches that attract the most sellers because you're going to have a tough time standing out as a beginner. My recommendation is find less obvious niches that are still in demand but maybe aren't generating sales on the high end. >> As somebody who's owned a print shop and been in the POD game for over 12 years, this fulfillment model still totally blows my mind. You can run the whole thing remotely without even touching any inventory and you can reach customers all over the planet. I've done over seven figures in revenue on Etsy and multiple six figures in profits selling print on demand products to the US from the comfort of my home in Sweden. And today I'm going to show you exactly how to start, grow, maintain, and scale a print on demand business. I'm now going to list all the things that I'll walk through step by step so you'll have everything you need in one video to be successful with your Etsy print on demand store. And we're going to start off with the foundation which is the first the mindset. Then we're going to walk through step by step on how to actually open an Etsy store and connect it to Printify. And after that, we're going to talk about the systems to actually grow an successful Etsy shop. After that, we're in the execution phase. And the first thing in the execution phase is research. After we done the research, we got to know about trademarks and copyrights. And once we know about that, we're going to focus on design. After we know about design, we got to focus on listing optimization. And after we've done the listing optimization, we we got to tie the knot by focus on pricing. And after this, we're actually in the operations phase. And the first part of the operations phase is order management. Uh after that, we also need to learn about Etsy ad so we can actually scale our shop. And then at step 11, we're going to we're going to talk about customer service and how to automate a lot of that. And then at the final step, step 12, we're going to talk about man, how to manage your CSV for bookkeeping and accounting. And we're also going to touch a bit on VAT. At the end of this video, you will know everything that's taking me years and a lot of hardship to learn. And I promise you that if you're serious about your Etsy print on demand store, then you will not regret it. And I also want to say that in the description, there's a lot of exclusive discounts tied to me. So, for instance, if you use the code Andreas at checkout if you purchase a My Design subscription, you actually get 25% off any plan you choose. And there are several different coupon codes and links like that in the description down below. These are affiliate links, so I get a small commission if you purchase through my link or my coupon code. And it definitely supports the channel if you do that at no extra cost to you. Apart from that too, I also have a paid mentorship that you can join where you get exclusive access to me in an exact road map on how to actually make this Etsy print on demand thing work along with exclusive resources uh that's only available within the mentorship. More information about that is also available in the description down below. But before we head into the video, I also want to thank the sponsors of this video because this has been a major endeavor for me and I could not have done it without the help of Printify and my designs. And my whole thinking with my sponsors is that I get sponsor requests a lot even for a small channel like mine. And 99% of them I just turn away because my whole thinking with when it comes to sponsors has always been that if I don't already use their software and have used them for months and have like garnered a lot of great results with them already, I can't even consider using them. And the great thing about Printify and my designs is that I already use them. I already make most of my designs through my designs when I'm using AI stuff. And Printify is the is the company that I've used for years when it comes to my print on demand journey. I haven't really used any other apart from Printull in the beginning, but I only used that for a small amount of time before I went to Printify. And now Printify and Printull has even merged. So that's why I'm so thankful that they are sponsoring this video because either way, I would still use their software because their software software is great. All right, so now we're going to head right into the course and the first part of the course is mindset. [Music] All right. Right. So now we'll talk about mindset and growth. And mindset is really the thing that carries you through all the different like seasons of your business and especially the hard times. It's really the thing at least in my experience has been like this. It's the thing that carries you through the hard times in your business. So it's really really important. And the first part about mindset is your why. Like why are you even doing this in the first place? And to answer that for myself to give some context on this like I've wanted to do music since I was like 12. And I've pursued that in all different kinds of aspects. Like from when I was 12, I started like learning guitar when I was eight. I then saw a video of Kiss of them performing Detroit Rock City that a friend showed me. And then that just blew my mind and that just let me know in that second that that's what I wanted to spend my life doing. So from that point on, I just focused on music in different aspects. And then focused on a guitar from like 12 to like maybe 15. And at that point, I kind of noticed that if I just if I'm the best guitarist in the world, that will limit me in a lot of ways. So, I got to spread myself. I got to learn more stuff in order to be more comprehensive if I actually want to do this thing. So, I started to learn how to sing in school. I also learned how to play some drums. I also learned how to play bass. Then, I learned at 18, I started I picked up the piano. At 19, I started to um I saved up and bought my first like uh Apple laptop so I could buy Logic with it and uh start to learn how to produce. And then from 19 to 24 I just focused on producing music so I could actually learn how to produce. And then when I actually started to release something like some music I kind of noticed that no one is listening. So I kind of learned that need to learn this whole business game and marketing thing. And that has slowly but steadily led me to doing print on demand. And when I started, my only goal was to have capital cuz I had this con like preconceived conception that I needed to make at least 5k profit with this so I can funnel that right into my artist business because that's the preconceived conception that I had at the time. And that's the reason for why I was doing this. But again, that reason comes all the way goes all the way back from when I was 12 and they actually decided to do this whole music thing in the first place. And I've been pursuing that ever since. And so this whole beauty thing is like a an extension of that. And that's the thing that actually drove me to actually do this in the first place since it was so like embellished in in me to do this. It's a really strong why for me. And you have to find out like why you really want to do something cuz it carries you through the hard times. So you really got to ask yourself why are you doing this? And the stronger your why is, the easier it's going to be to get through the hard times. Like for me at least when I started this I had a small Facebook ad agency and I concluded those relationships to go all in on this and I had no other income source apart from this at the time. So I had to make it work like I had a huge financial obligation to make it work. So and I really didn't go want to go back to a job that I had on the side like a part-time job that I had that I had that actually like gave me a sufficient income so I can actually like h pursue the other things that I wanted. I really didn't want to go to back to that job. So I had already let that go. So, I had I really wanted had to make this work because I had a financial obligation to be able to pay my bills because I had no other income. And that was really really really strong. Why I had like this big fear that I didn't want to go back to. Didn't want this other job and I didn't want to do the Facebook ad agency thing that I did before. So, I went all in on this which made it really really strong in me to make it work. And you got to find that within yourself. Ask yourself why are you doing this? A big reason for a lot of people if you have a family for instance is to be able to spend more time with your family so you're not that constrained with having to be at a job at a certain time and a certain hour and so forth. That's a huge motivator for a lot of people if you have a family or if you're like me you're strapped for cash and you would go all in on this and you have no other income source then that's a insanely strong why to also do this. But you got to find why you're doing this cuz it carries you through the hard times. And when it comes to this whole thing, Simson has this really great concept in a book on on what he calls the infinite game cuz you can play finite games and infinite games. And finite games have like clear goals or like clear like end point so to speak. Like if two people here run along the same lines, like the first one to hit the goal here wins and then it's done. That's a finite goal. Like an infinite game doesn't really have that those kinds of like set boundaries and set set goals. The goal in and of itself is to continuously be able to play the game. So the most important thing about the infinite game here is that in order to be able to make this to make a business thrive for the long term because again some people will be ahead of you sometimes. Some people will be behind you sometimes. It doesn't even matter. like he has a great example of this too in either like a podcast that he did or in his book where like an Apple employee got like asked on like a taxi taxi ride how this Apple person felt that Microsoft was beating them all over the place cuz he didn't really care cuz he knew that sometimes again you're behind some people and sometimes you're ahead of people. It doesn't really matter because that's not the reason why you do it and you got to have the reason because it's the thing that carries you through. They just want to create great products. As long as they do that and serve the customer, they have won. So it doesn't even matter what what anyone else does, the only thing that matter is is learning and get getting better at the thing that you want to do the most. So yeah, because like again success in all aspects when it comes to like business from what I've learned is to have longevity and adaptation and growth because those three things together like longevity like having a frame of mind that you're doing this for the long haul. You're doing this to to help people and adapting to circumstances whenever like issues happen that will lead you to be able to grow and that will in eventually after due time it will let you be able to be successful at the thing that you're trying to pursue which is Etsy in this case and print on demand. So focus on continuing to play focus on the daily systems which we'll get into a sec not winning cuz if you just hit the the daily goals and you're just continuing to get better and better the daily goal has still been won. You got to play the infinite game, not a finite game. And this also like something that comes with the infinite game is that we always got to feel like this is a quote from Tony Robbins, but he says that the ultimate failure in life is a success without fulfillment. That kind of makes sense. Think of it like you're super successful with something. You have no fulfillment with the thing. It's like it gives you no purpose on why you even want to do it. It's like the ultimate failure. That's how he he he phrases it. Something like that. And it really resonates with me because like momentum that you build when you're doing stuff that you really want to do, it comes with progression. And that that progression feeling when you're actually getting better, you're making, you're getting better, you are slowly but steadily like putting one feet in front of the other. You're seeing that something's work, something doesn't work. that builds momentum and that just drives you forward and that also gives you that fulfilling feeling because the whole thing with any business endeavor and especially Etsy print on demand is that you you'll fall and then you'll rise further and you'll get a little bit further along than than you were before and then you'll fall again and then you'll get a little bit further than you were before and then you'll fall again and then that will just keep on happening all the time because there's no like way to do anything really. And the key thing is just to like fall and then get back up and then try again. Fall, get back up and try again cuz that will happen time and time again. And the faster you just do this process, the faster you will feel the momentum and the progression going. Now I talked about like having something that you're kind of afraid of that you don't want to have happen like um on your back so to speak. So I really didn't want to go to the back to the job that I had. I was dead set to make this Etsy thing work. And when I started this, I didn't have any other income than this. And that external pressure pushed me forward. Now that fear is a great motivator, but as long as it's channelneled constructively, as long as like pushes you forward, like on the flip side of that, you have the golden handcuffs. I think we've all heard about this is when you have a really comfy job, everything kind of works and it's not the thing that you want to do, but it still like pays the bills like handsomely, but you're not that fulfilled. It doesn't like you you have this inner feeling that you want to do something else but you earn so much with this job that you have that it kind of feels good so you kind of stick with it like being in that situation is worse in my opinion than not having anything like anything to fear on your back because then you have nothing that drives you forward. You can so easily quit in those cases because you have the gold handcuffs. So again, I just want to let you know that that if you if you're too comfortable, that's a dangerous place to be in. Like when I started this, I needed to make it work. And that was a major driving force that actually forced me to make it work. But if I had too much of a comfy job to do this, I wouldn't feel the need to do the necessary work to make it work because again, I had would have the golden handcuffs in that case. And to give you some perspective on my own journey, this is where my own mindset was tested. So this is back in 2022 and this is my early days. I was making about 5K in revenue, 6K in revenue here, 3K in revenue, and like 20% here was my net margin, which was really like not that good. So, just so you get some actual perspective on this, if I make like 5K a month, and 20% of that is the um profit, I made about $1,000 in profit if I earn 5K. But sometimes I actually made 3K in revenue. So, $3,000 time 0.2, that's $600 in profit. And generally doing the my value of this period that I was in, I was earning about $500 to $1,000 a month. And again, I lived off of this. Times were really, really, really hard. And at one point, I even remember having $500 left in my bank account. Like I really like to save so I have some backup and stuff like that. But again, like times were really hard, but I really wanted to make this work. So here you can see that I earn about five $5,000. Again, this is in Swedish croner, but this is the equivalent of about $5,000 in revenue. And I made about probably around $1,000 profit. $500 to $1,000 profit somewhere around there. About $6,000 in revenue, 3,000, 4,000, 4.5, 2,000. Like in June, I had a really slow June here. So in June, I made somewhere close to four about four maybe $400 in profit. So yeah, times were hard. Then I actually joined Cassy's mentorship when she had one here in what was it? July of 2022. So I started to implement some new stuff here to make it better. Which is why we can see a big bump here. But again, it doesn't happen overnight. I can only learn one thing at a time. I'm just like you on the other end. I was not the designer. I was just really struggling with this. But I had to make it work. That was the the only thing that I really had was the dedication to make this work. So join the mentorship here that she had, a really small mentorship that she had at the time. I slowly got some more some more sales here and a lot better here. So again, I was doing about 5K a month, but I saw some really good results here. So in September, I did a lot more in revenue and then a lot more in profit. And it comes from being able to have it being in a group of like-minded peers. We were all dedicated to learning to grow our own Etsy shops. And we're all like in the same kind of spot. And we have an expert in the field guiding us. So that was huge for me at that time. Was able to get over 10K in revenue and then over 10K in revenue here. And that's the reason for that growth. And then during the Q4 here, I was doing like 25K in revenue in November and like 28K in December. So overall, I saw some really great like growth. But during this whole year, it was my foundational year that the year where I just I did this every single day. I just lived and breathe at C. I was struggling a lot. I tested out a lot of different things. I learned I read a lot of books. A big important book that I learned at this time was the $100 million offers book that Alexi had. And through that I implemented the guarantee which really spiked up my conversion rate here in August. But yeah, so many different things I tested during this whole phase and it did a lot. Again, since this Q4 you have a big spike, but then it just went plummeting down. I did 10k in revenue in January, 6K in February and I was like, okay, things are not working. I need to scale this up a bit more. I have my foundation now, but I need to make this work to get it where I want to, which is 5K in profit a month at minimum. I need to do something else. And again, 5K in profit a month, I think that's like at least if with 20% margins, which I think I had at the time, that's at least 25K in revenue. So, in January, February, I actually found a new person on YouTube on an interview between Ryan Hog and Steven Chen where he talked about launch strategies and using break even pricing when you actually list something. It just blew my mind. I talked to some friends within the mentorship and we just went back and forth. And through all of that and just learning about this whole new test, like this whole new strategy, I tested out so many different things. And again, it doesn't work exactly like he said in the video, but the whole core principles of using break even pricing when you list something made a huge deal for my own store and especially like launching your listings with that. So, I tried a lot of that stuff here in March at like the end of March, middle to end of March in 2023. And then I just saw a major spike because again, it wasn't just a strategy during this whole process. I was listing new designs. So, so I listed some new designs at this time, too. And I paired that with a new strategy. And once I did that, cuz this was a winning design together with a winning strategy. And that just bumped everything up to crazy levels. So, I was doing like 35K in revenue here, 47K in May, and then 30 34K in June, 48K in July, 44K. Again, this is revenue. So generally around 400k in revenue which is probably around between like 8k profit to 10k profit a month because I was doing close to 50k. Yeah basically between 8 to 10k a month in profit these months here and then during the Q4 things just went ham. I did over 100k in revenue in November in 2023 100k in December in 2023. A lot of things broke during this time because it was really stressful. But d that whole growth period and those growing pains was still awesome because like I learned so much about this business and I could just see that it started to really really work. Like I went above I I even doubled the initial goal that I had. Again that 2022 to 2023 that whole year was just a foundational year that I had to put in to get to the results that I wanted here. And I did this every single day. And then it kind of scaled up from there when I had a new design paired with some new extra strategies plus the foundation. It just skyrocketed the whole business. And now from that in 2024, I started to talk more here on YouTube. And I didn't really list that much here cuz I wanted to focus on YouTube to learn that game and spend at least a year doing that. So I just cruised on the listings that I already had up. So I still was making about 30K in revenue with again a 20% profit margin. HD in 60k here and then in in 60k here and then about 27k in revenue, 27k here, 26k in revenue, 20k in revenue, 22k in revenue, and then in November of 2024 about like 55k in revenue, and then about 400k in revenue in December of 2024. And now in 2025, I don't even use ads because of a lot of ads changes, which we'll talk about later in this whole long course video. But I'm doing about 12K a month in revenue with 35% net margins. So super good, super happy with that. But that's basically the whole journey itself. But this year, 2022, 2023, that's where a lot of people quit and focus on another thing. It's really easy to do that when you're in like the big dip. But if you get pushed through that, you can also get results just like me that I did here. So, and and one important thing that really helped immensely with my own success on Etsy was because I had my first guitar teacher that I had like when I was 8 years old, I think it was up until I started the Swedish version of high school from like when I was 8 to like 15 years old. His name was Tommy. But he taught me one thing that really stuck with me even to this day. And that is that you don't need to do everything in one day. You should just practice a little bit. Like this was for guitar, but you should practice a little bit each day. preferably just half an hour and that's all you need to do. But you need to do that every single day. But that's all you need. You don't need to do everything in one day. You do a little bit at a time. And honestly, I was really bad at this when I when I was a kid. But it has really stuck in my brain. And with this whole business thing, it really really really really like it's so so applies because doing a little bit each and every day builds consistency. And that consistency compounds on top of each other. So doing a little bit and getting better each and every day, it compounds exponentially really. So you think that like if you get better like 1% each day, at the end of a year you'll have gotten 365% better. But it's not like that. At least not in my experience because the way you start is not the same. Like if you start like at zero and you have no information, then you get a little bit little bit better and then you get a little bit better. But once I was a like a year in, it's not like the information that I had already gathered still applied. So that it was like added on on top of the stuff that I already had. So just some more knowledge on top of the stuff that I already had made me explode exponentially. And that's why you can see this huge huge revenue spike here. So like getting 1% better won't like make me just go from like 6K in revenue and 10K in revenue to just 20K in revenue. It may push me from doing like around 10K in revenue to doing about 40K in revenue instead. So about three to four times more. So it goes exponentially. That's really because like the things that you understand, the thing that you get like that that you get better at, they don't go away. They just compound on top of the next thing and then the next thing and the next thing. And that just when you stack those things together is that it's not like 1 + 1 equals 2. It's that 1 plus one the foundation that you already had equals five because that foundation that you already have applies to everything else too. But the key thing to this whole thing is still the lesson that Tommy taught me and that's that you do got to do a little bit each and every day because Rome wasn't built in a day. It was built brick by brick one at a time daily. A really important thing too that I really want to touch on in this mindset part is that when we create designs we always got to base it on research. More about that in a sec too. But we can't get attached to design the designs itself. We just got to create the designs and let the customers judge them like themselves. You got to understand that you are the creator. Like we the sellers are the creators. We're not the judges of our designs. We got to let the market vote and they vote with their dollars if something is good or not. If you want to use my method and create a business out of this, you got to use the data, not your emotions to guide your decisions. And because again like you have like personal biases in when it comes to this like you like this more than this, but it has no bearing if it will work or not. So even if you like this one, like this design better than this design, put both up and let the customers decide because it doesn't really matter what you think. It matters what the customer thinks, not you. Again, you are the creators, not the judges if something is good or not. Let the market decide. It's also important to know that when you think that something is better than the other, like I thought in the beginning, for instance, that I needed like other mockups than any other shops had so I can stand out in search. that made sense in my head in the beginning. But it had it had no bearing in like what works or not on the platform because I didn't really know what would work on the platform or not. So when you're new, your intuition is wrong. You don't really know what will work because you haven't had the experience or like the sales to prove that like your research is more important than your gut feelings. In that case, you got to follow the data until your intuition earns its place. So you got to have like data to know that okay, I've done over seven figures. Like for instance, in my case, my intuition feels kind of strong with this. But before that, my intuition led me to do this and this and this and all of those different side routes that I went to was all wrong until I learned from someone who actually knew what they were doing and just guided me into the right direction. So trust the data. Another important part about this whole process too is that pain plus reflection equals progress. This comes from Ray Dalio's book, Principles, which I highly recommend to anyone. And the main thing that I took from that book was that whole thing that pain plus reflection equals progress. And what I mean by that is that when you like list something and you test new strategies and stuff like that, you put in the rep so to speak, you try a lot of stuff. But with that, you also like you have like I don't know five sales. If you put up a thousand listings and have five sales, then you missed a crucial part about this and that's to do with the reflection part. Because without reflecting, you don't know what to do better. And as an example here, like in the beginning here, I did basically that uh I put up 500 listings a month, but I did the same mistakes over and over again. It was only when I started to learn from someone who actually knew what they were doing that I was actually able to scale my whole shop. So don't just do the same thing. You got to reflect on it and then iterate on the progress. So you you reflect, you review, and you seek feedback because this is the whole loop that you want to be in. You do adacious goals, you fail so you can learn. You can learn the principles and that you need to do and then from that you can then improve. But you got to learn when you fail. You don't want to repeat this thing here because again the thing that I did in the beginning was just pain and thought that pain equals uh progress. But that doesn't equate. You need to do the things. You need to reflect on the things to make progress. Now I've mentioned this a lot already but like the mentorship that I was in did a lot for me. It was one of the biggest learnings that I had with this whole business venture that whenever at least I now do new business ventures. I seek out help the first thing I do because I don't really know what to do and I want to fast track the progress so I don't have to learn just by myself because if I learn just by myself it comes with a big detriment. So you really want to support you want to at least I really recommend that you surround yourself with experts and peers and that's honestly why creative creative seller mentorship in the beginning at all basically because it was was such a pivotal and important thing that really led me to my success on Etsy because when you're in a group of like-minded peers that all pay to be in the group which is the key thing you all pay which means you're dedicated because you're paying money to be there. You're able to like learn from everyone else's mistakes and wins because you're all actually doing the work. You're not just chilling and just doing the this whole Etsy POD thing just whenever you want to. You're paying to be there. You have some like skin in the game and you're all able to learn from each other's mistakes and wins. It's one of the most exponential things that you can do to grow your business faster because because like as an example, Jack is actually not really called Jack, but let's call him Jack in this case, but Jack has a big has a really important story. So Jack did really well on Etsy his first year. Oh, sorry, not not his first year, but he he did really well in a year on Etsy. So, I followed his shop and it just was really inspiring to see. But then I heard that he got a lot of copyright infringements and he even got an email from Etsy. Like this is generally doesn't happen, but he even got an email from Etsy where they said that you got one more chance at this. If you get one more copyright infringement, you will have to take down your shop. And that was after he got four copyright infringements. He then got the last one and that took his whole shop down. And the crazy part was that like there was another seller that was seemed kind of jealous at at his sales and he had a design that looked really really similar to Jack's and that's why the person actually reported Jack's listing. But then Jack even could prove that he actually put up his listing before the the guy who put up the claim. And the guy who put put up the claim saw that okay, yeah, he's right. He put up his listing before mine. So I'll take down my claim. But even with that, he couldn't get his shop back. Now, one thing that I learned like when I was in a group of like-minded peers who were all like striving to be there together like in in the mentorship that I was in, I learned that with copyright infringement, you can actually fight those. You can't do that with trademark infringement. If Jack was in like had learned this preemptively, he would be able to fight that and say that no, mine is actually posted before and I did this before yours. And if he if he wouldn't wouldn't be able to back up his claim with actual documents of his of his copyright claim, then he his claim would be dropped and he could have really saved his whole shop if he if he did this. So if he just had the support and knowledge that could have saved him entirely and that kind of information protects your business like you can get fined for the things that you don't know. I think that gives like a good perspective on like you can you can even like lose your shop if you don't know the ins and outs of Etsy and being able to be in a group where you all like learn together and you all have different struggles and you can all learn and just piggyback off each other and it's piggyback off each off of off each other and it's the one of the main things that actually like within the mentorship that I found most valuable if not the most valuable. Now another important thing with mindset is to have a clear goal. Let's say for instance that you want to do like I did in my first year $100,000 in a year. That will let you know that how much you need in revenue like roughly per month. And that also leads to you to know how much in revenue you roughly need to do per day. If you do a certain amount of revenue per day, that also lets you know that and we'll talk more about this in the systems part of this, but that also lets you know the things that you actually need to do each and every day to to be able to achieve that goal. Because if you don't do these different tasks that's set out each and every day that's derived from the yearly goal, you will most likely not actually hit the revenue goal that you have. But if you have a clear goal, you'll be able to know what to do each and every single day. And if you hold yourself accountable, you'll know that okay, if I just do the actual daily work, you'll be on track to hit the yearly goal. So again, the systems, just to explain what they are, they are just daily actions that align with your whole vision. like the whole vision in and of itself. Now, when you're having these daily actions, the key thing is to understand that if you just focus on the daily actions, you have a great day. If you've successfully done the work that day, then you're good because I mentioned the valley. So, this is called the like the Dunning Krueger effect, but Seth Coding has a great book that's called the dip, which is more like it's a better term for the thing. But like my dip here was 2022. I did. It was really really hard this this year because I lived off of the revenue that from my Etsy shop and I did not make much which made it really hard but every journey has this long point and every like business endeavor especially has this low point. But it's really important to know that all good things comes after the dip. So you got to master this part here the dip in order to actually get to the thing that you want. Because again in the beginning we we think that okay this is seems like a great opportunity this whole POD thing and then you get more into it and you kind of learn that okay there's a lot of things to do here but I can probably do it and after that you're in the dip where nothing works every strategy that you try or at least you feel that every strategy that you try doesn't work and and again that was consistent for about a year for me but once that year went up and I worked on this every single day for a year and through that I was able to hit this upward inspire here and that can be you too as long as you master and get through the dip. It's also important to know cuz when I talk to a lot of other people that's in currently in the job climate space, they really equate time for like like that you should get paid for the time that you actually put into Etsy. And that's not at all how this works. You get paid for the value that you actually create because again in 2024 I really didn't put put up any listings at all really. But I was still I think I earned around 5 to 6K in revenue every single month. But I didn't really put it. I just maintained my whole shop. And that's because I I I had still had a lot of value in my shop and I get paid for that. I don't get paid for just putting more hours into my shop. And in order to like have like a lot of value in your shop to get good at this, you got to focus on the daily systems that I mentioned, not the hours worked. Because again, you can put in a ungodly amount of hours and get nothing done. But if you follow the progress of pain plus reflection equals progress, then you'll be able to make progress with your whole business endeavor on Etsy. It's also important to know that when you are failing because like you got to reframe it and know that failure is opportunity. Failure isn't final. It's just a signal that something isn't working. And if you can fix and tweak your whole business, that means that that you can actually make this work because it's just a signal. You learn and then you adjust and through that you move forward. But again, pain plus reflection equals progress. As long as you follow that whole thinking, then you'll be able to make the progress that you want. Another important part about this too is that like you got to understand that your perspective shapes your reality. So the story you tell yourself about yourself when you're by yourself is the world that you live in. And if you just make a like a perspective shift, you can actually change your results from that. So one thing that I've had a problem with during my journey is that I can really like talk down myself. I can be really harsh, but I've gone a a lot better on that and be a I've become a lot more forgiving and understanding of my myself when I've done this. So, like if there's a day where you're like sick, for instance, I think it's important to do as much as you can. But again, you should always be forgiving and understanding with yourself because like if you are sick, it doesn't help to have you yourself talk down on yourself that okay, yeah, you suck. You you don't work when you're sick like when you're bedridden. Like that doesn't make sense. Like you gota be able to pull yourself up and knock talk down yourself. Like it's a lot better to say that, okay, I'm sick today, but I'll make sure to take care of myself so I can get better tomorrow and be all in tomorrow. The key thing about this is to not talk down to yourself and to understand that the story you tell yourself about yourself when you're by yourself is the world you live in. And you want to make that world that you inhabit a great world to be in. Because otherwise we got to remember that if you're successful and the world that you make sucks, it's like the ultimate failure. We got to have a perspective that we like that we want to have and we can only do so by understanding that our perspective shapes our reality. So don't talk down to yourself. Just understand that if you're in the like in the valley of despair like the dip. Just understand that you're in there and that it's okay. You just got to get better each and every day so that you can get to the desired outcome. you don't have to talk down to yourself because it's re it makes it really hard to do this whole business because again the story you tell about yourself uh when you're by yourself it's the world that you live in and you want to make that world a great world to be in. And another part that also comes from that is that your habits and like your daily routines they really create your outcomes. And again, we'll talk about this specifically more in the systems part of this, but yeah, your your habits create your outcomes. And you you want to stack small actions daily for compounding success because those small habits that we do, they generally are coming from our subconscious because like our subconscious habits drive 90% of our like daily actions. So if we are really like thorough that we want like if that we want to do one thing each and every day at a certain point it becomes unconscious to do that. And it's just really important to know that most of our habits are unconscious. And if we just keep wanting to do another thing, we got to like force ourel to do one thing like do the thing that we actually wanted to do that we said that we needed to do this day. And once we force yourself enough to do that, after a while it becomes really organic to do that it doesn't feel forced because it it will become a subconscious habit that will just replace the old habit that you'd had. And a really good thing that I learned from the book atomic habits, highly recommend that book too. And that's that like you want to design your environment so that that it's actually easy to do the thing that you want to do. So like for instance when you buy a computer if you buy a computer and you only do Etsy and work on that computer you will associate immediately like work and Etsy with that computer. But if you do everything if you like play games or if you have like do entertainment and stuff like that on that computer too and in that specific space that you have the computer it will not be as easy to do the work required. So having like a space designated for work just work is makes it really easy to actually do the things that you need to do each day because that habit will subconsciously be associated with the thing that you need to do which is the work. Now some final thoughts on this. I think it's important to keep playing the infinite game not a finite game. So you want to be able to do this for the long haul. Like the goal of doing Etsy should be to do Etsy and to like generate income and keep that sustainable not to like make one set amount of revenue and then be done with it. Uh the key thing is to have this as a long-term game and a long-term cash flow game and a long-term business game. And it makes it also really easy to have the correct perspective to get through the dip. And the only way that we can actually make this work and actually also get through the dip is to take one step every day. And a great way when we're actually doing that is to surround ourselves with support. So we can actually reflect together with them. Whether that's in the mentorship or together with friends who are all like doing it together. that can also work too. But just surround yourself with peers who are all about like on the same level as you. So you and you're all dedicated to grow together because you grow exponentially faster doing it that way. Okay. So now we're going to go through how to open an Etsy shop with a stepbystep guide. But before you even start an Etsy shop, I think it's important to have the infrastructure already set from the get- go. So to either have an LLC like the your country's equivalent version of an LLC, I'm not talking about US LLC like here in Sweden is called Axia Balog, but your country's equivalent version of an LLC or a sole proprietorship or like and the equivalent of that in the country that you live in. And the reason that it's easier to have this in set from the get- go is because you want to have for instance your VAT ID registered if you live in the EU like me. But apart from that too, the key thing to know when it comes to that the infrastructure of your business is that you will have to like do accounting and stuff like that once you get sales and once you get moving and it's just easier to have everything set like the actual business entity like whether it's a sle proprietorship or a LLC set before you even start. And a key thing to know too is that you can actually transfer the shop to someone else or to another entity once you've actually set once you've actually got it going. So, because the key thing to know is that Etsy doesn't allow transfers of accounts, which it says right here. So, if you start on LLC or so sle proprietorship, the key thing to know is that once you have that registered in your account, you won't be able to change that later on. And honestly, when I started my whole journey, I registered my own sole proprietorship with this. And it's so much easier to start with that as having like the Swedish equivalent of an LLC here is really expensive to start with. I don't think any like a lot of people have that kind of capital when they start some an endeavor like this. So for 99% of people, I would recommend that you register as sle proprietorship. You get that VAT ID and then once you have that, you start your Etsy shop. But let's say now that we actually have our business structure set. You have your sle proprietorship for instance. Now it's time to like get ready for launch. And the first thing that we got to do is create a dedicated email solely used for our Etsy stores. So we got to create that. Once we have that, we need to open a brand new Etsy account. So, we go to Etsy and then we press the sign in button here and then we get this popup and then we click register right here. Then we enter the dedicated email address that we want want to use for Etsy stores and then the our first name and then the password and then we click register. Once you've done that, it will look something like this. And don't forget to verify the account with the email that you get. Then we'll get to this part. So now we actually have our Etsy account set. What we now do after we have our Etsy account set is that we press your account then we press sell on Etsy and then you get this this popup and like dependent on like how like this can definitely like like the nuances or like small things like how it looks can change but this is the gist of how you actually create a shop on Etsy but yeah then you press get started and then the key thing to know here is that as you open your shop there's a small setup fee so it's currently $19 it's been $29.99 it's been $15 now it's $19 $17 excluding VAT. The key thing to know here is that you pay a onetime setup fee and this is because they have have had a lot of issues with like fraudulent shops and stuff like that. So fraudulent sellers. So now you basically pay a setup fee so that they they can minimize the fraudulent people. The key thing to know though with Etsy is that there's no monthly fee for standard shop. It's just this one setup fee. Then as you list stuff, you pay only pay 20 cents per listing. a really small fee to actually list something on Etsy and test your designs out. And then as you get sales, you'll pay transaction fees and processing fees, which usually amount to around like 10 10 to 13% of your revenue. But that's only as you get sales. Apart from that, you only pay a 20% listing fee and a onetime setup fee, which now as I'm doing this is $19. So really small fees, and honestly, Etsy is the best place to start your print on demand journey because it's so costefficient. Now, if I press here, let's do this. We got to answer these questions. What brings you to Etsy will help guide you to success whether you're a pro or brand new to selling. Let's and again, I think this is mainly for their own statistics, which is why we can even skip this question, but let's just say that I'm just starting to sell for the first time ever because a lot of us, this is our first business endeavor. Then we click next. And then is there anything that you need help with? Then you can just choose if any of these applies to you, but you can also skip it like I'll do here in this case. And now we're going to get to the fun part which is to actually start the shop. So we press start shop. Now the shop language which here should be like in English. The key thing to know here is that like I live in Sweden. I'm a Swedish seller and my business and stuff like that is all in Sweden. So the shop country has to be the one that you actually live in. So ensure that this is the country that you actually live in. And if if you're focused like me on US buyers, you can set the shop region, which is a separate thing from this to the US even if you live abroad, but you do that later on as you have actually like created the store. The key thing is that your shop country at this stage needs to be the one that you live and operate in. And then the shop currency needs to be you like the currency that you have in your bank. For me, that's Swedish kroner or Swedish kroner, which is why it's set here because if the currency doesn't match match your bank account, you will incur a 2.5% conversion fee, which is really, really high. So, ensure that the shop currency is the one that you actually have in your bank account for this. So, once we have this set, so English Sweden, and I have my own shop currency that's in my bank account, we press save and continue. And then we go to the shop name here. So, when it comes to the shop name, we got to keep it, we need to keep it simple. We don't have to overthink it that much because the key thing is that you can actually change this I think one time later on. Again, people generally how they actually browse Etsy is that they don't really look at your shop. They generally just look at everything in search. So this doesn't really matter much. So don't give it too much thought. Let's just for instance take over and above shop. Maybe over and above shop. Perfect. Because again you it doesn't really matter what your name is in all the honesty. So don't overthink it. Just pick something and go from there. So, now we're at a stage where we're actually going to add our first fake listing. The key thing with this is that we got to keep it simple. We should add some placeholder markups and placeholder SEO because we're actually going to delete this listing later on. This is only to create the shop itself. So, we do here for the category, we're going to sell t-shirts. So, I search for t-shirts. Then, we press this one. Then, we're going to sell physical items. So, we press So, this one is already pressed. We do do this. This is really important because otherwise you can actually like infringe on their or like go against their handmade policy. So make sure that you press this one correct correctly. Since we do POD that means that as we get sales on Etsy we connect the order to someone else which is in this case is Prrenify and a production partner on Printify will then print and ship the items for us. This means that who made this one is another company or person and they also made a finished product. When did they make it? They make these as we get our sales which means that they are made to order which is why we press this. Now this is really important. We got to add a production partners for for our listings here. So I press add production partner. The key thing to know with Printify like if I go into for instance a t-shirts here and we main like a big seller of mine has always been the Bella Canvas 3001. So let's just choose that. Then we go to choose manually like the fulfillment options. All of these are different companies that's actually just tied to Printify but they're separate companies overall. That's all over the US and they all have print like production partners apart from the US too but there's a lot more to choose from when it comes to the US as that's the biggest market. Anyhow, what I mean to say here is that there are different companies that you can choose from from this one here. And when it comes to t-shirts for instance and apparel, I think Monster Digital and Swift POD are the most solid ones. So this means that our production partner in this case is Monster Digital. It's not Printify as it can easily seem to be. But Printify is just the site that connects us to the actual production partner. So it's Monster Digital that we got to use here. And to find out all of this info, we first off we just write Monster Digital up here. Then we can have this one off so that like our competitors don't know which production partners we use. Then we can just have our descriptive title say like a printing partner. Maybe do it like this instead. Something like that. And then about our production partner. Again, they print and ship our items while we just focus on design. So, we just write that. So, we focus on designing while they print and ship the items for us. Easy peasy. Now, to find out where they actually are located, we go to Google. We just Google Monster Digital. We find their first like their homepage here. We then just scroll down to the bottom to find that okay, they're actually in Miami in Miami Gardens. So, we'll copy this Miami Gardens. And there we go. Done. And again, this is always on the production partners site which you where you can find their contact info and stuff like that. So we just write Miami Gardens. And why are we working with this partner is because we don't have the technical ability or equipment to make it entirely by by ourselves because again we can't create this ourselves like the actual product. The role in the design process is I design everything myself because again I think they have a rule Etsy that you have to make your own designs in order to be compliant with their house rules. So you choose I design everything myself since that's what we're going to do. And then what is this partner's role in the production process pro process they do everything for me because in the production partner in the production process they literally do everything for you. Then we press save. Perfect. And then we have that one done. And then if you get this like error here like you must select a production partner even though like it's actually selected. Just do this and do this like you just press that and then you're good to go. So save and continue. Perfect. And now we're going to add like the nuances and like some images to our first listing. So to do this easily because again I think Etsy has these bots that actually scans listings in order to see like fraudulent shops and they can actually suspend your shop if they deem your shop to be fraudulent as you create it. So to to actually create this I would recommend to create a you create a listing that seems real as real as it can be without putting way too much effort into it. But this and this is mainly to avoid the risk of getting your shop suspended because I when I started my Etsy store, I got my my Etsy shop suspended. I think I just put put like a black image as the first thing and just like something super simple in the title. So to hopefully avoid that, I would recommend that you actually create a seemingly real fake listing. So to make this simple, I would just go to Canva and then you go to create and then you make custom size here and then press and you have the dimensions 3000 by 3000. You have to make a square thumbnail on Etsy and the minimum is 2,000 x 2,000. So I would recommend 3,000 by 3,000. You create a new design and again these we want to search for mockup. So we we just search for t-shirt here and then we go to photos. Let's take this one for instance. Perfect. Then we just use the background remover. This is mainly if you have Canva Pro. This one look quite bad honestly. So just just take this one instead and actually use the background for this cuz it look really slick. Perfect. There we go. And now I just press T to get a text element and then just write nurse here for instance. So nurse done. And then we press share download. And then we download this as a JPEG and then download. Done. Now we need a couple more just to make it seem as real as possible even though we're going to delete this one later on. So, we press file, create new design, and then custom size 3000 by 3000. Do the same thing. We search for t-shirt. Let's take another color in this in in this case instead. Let's just use this model mockup instead. So, let's use that. Perfect. And then we go back to the pre previous one. We copy this. So, I press command C and then command V. This is on a Mac. And then boom, done. We save it as a JPEG. And then we create a new design. Custom size 3000 by 3000. We search for t-shirt photos. Let's take another mockup instead. Now let's take this one. Sorry, not this one. Let's take this one instead. Since we already copied the previous text here, we can just do the same thing here. And then we'll make the text white instead. Perfect. Then we just download that one as a JPEG. And then we create a new design. create custom size 30,000 by 3000. Let's see if I can find a t-shirt size chart in this case. So, t-shirt size chart. Let's not do that. Let's just grab another t-shirt that I just saw instead. Just a regular t-shirt. Let's take this one, the pink one here. Something like that. And then we take the text from this one. Copy that one. Cop. And then paste it here. And there we go. We download that one as a JPEG. And then done. Again, we mainly do this to to mitigate the the risk of having our shop suspended because that can happen because of the robots. So now we have the photos and then I just take these photos. I go here, I drag and drop, drag and drop, drag and drop and drag and drop. So four images here and then let's let's just write nurse shirt gift for nurse or like and then like registered nurse shirt like t-shirt maybe even here t-shirt something simple. Again, we're going to delete this later on. So, we're going to keep this as simple as possible and just to mitigate the risk of having our shop suspended because of the Etsy bots. So, for the description, I would just go to since we looked at the Bella page here, like the Bella Chemist 3001, and that's the one that we're selling. Let's just copy this and put that into this one here. So, the standard one of the standard descriptions for this shirt. Done. And again, I found that actually on the product page on Printify. So, now here for the pricing and inventory. Again, we don't have to think about this too much. Let's just keep something simple. Let's write, for instance, 250 here. Again, we're going to change a lot when we actually have our store set. This is just to actually create the listing. And this is just for the creation of the shop. So, price is 250. Quantity is $9.99. And then let's just keep it like this. So, yep. Let's keep it like that. So, the same, no variations. When it comes to Etsy, you don't have to think too much about this. For sizing, you can use US letter if you want to. Well, actually, let's just skip that part. Sustainability, you don't have to do that, too. I generally, overall, when I create listings, I never add these attributes, but you have to add some tags. So, let's add for instance nurse shirt and then gift for nurse, nurse appreciation, and then maybe nurse gift and the nurse t-shirt, something like that. Materials, this one is generally made out of 100% heirloom, comb, and ringspun cotton. So let's see here. Let's go to the back here. So let's just write 100% heirloom comb and ringspun cotton. 100 heirloom and ring spun cotton. Done. Again, we're mainly going to sell to the US. So we are not going to touch this part here. So again, this is just to create the shirt itself. We do not want to sell to any EU countries because of the difficulties that come with that. So let's see here. Let's have that the same. Then what we do is that we have we have the category set. This a physical item processing and delivery. For the processing profile here it's made to order and the processing time is custom range. I recommend 1 to five days and then you apply that. Delivery option is create create one and then countries are dispatched from not Sweden. They're actually dispatched from the US. So, we choose the US here. And again, they're mainly dispatched from these production partners that we have, which means that the origin zip code is Monster Digital. So, if we go back to their site, we can see that their zip code is 33014. So, we add that as the origin zip code because the products are going to come from that place. Now, here we delete Sweden and everywhere else cuz we're only going to target the US. And delivery service, let's just pick USPS first class. And just to make it easy, we'll choose free shipping for this one just to make it easy. And there we go. So, apply that one. And as you can see here now, like the the the pricing for the actual shipping actually went away because I chose free delivery. And since I'm only targeting the US now, the GPSR don't like affect us unless we're actually selling to an EU country. So, we don't have to think about that custom option. And then done. And then for this one, let's just actually change policy. Let's for instance do like create policy. And then let's for instance take 14 days instead. Maybe something like that. Done. Subractions. none. You don't have to think about that. And then renewal options. So when it comes to re renewal options, when you list something for 20 cents, you pay for a listing to be added onto the Etsy marketplace for 4 months. I think three or four months. Then once that time is up, you need to renew it if you want to keep it up. And since a lot of our listings actually never sell, I would strongly recommend to keep all your listings at a manual renewal because a lot of listings that you do won't work. You don't want to pay for listings to be reinstated as a lot of them will just expire by themsel because they're not actually selling. and we don't want to keep them on if they're not selling. Okay, so now we're actually going to click save and continue from this part here. Perfect. And we got our first listing set. Again, we're going to delete this one later on. It's just to actually like stock the shop so we can actually create our our shop itself. So, we don't want to add more listings. We do this later on. So, I press do this later. Now, we're going to set up like how to actually get paid on Etsy. Now, again, this is really really important that you that you actually set the actual like country that you live in. And this is because so that you actually don't incur a 2.5% conversion fee. So ensure that this is the country that you live in and operate in. And as they say here, once saved, your bank country can't be changed. You will need to provide a valid billing method to complete Etsy payment signup. So just like once you set this infra like this info, this is also why I think it's really important to have all of your information set before like the sle proprietorship set or the LLC set before you even start this whole thing. So you have all of that infrastructure set set before you go because just as it says here like the specific bank country can't be changed but a lot of things can like can't be changed once you actually go through with this whole process. So make sure that you have all like the sole proprietorship or the LLC set before you even start this. As I live in Sweden I mine is set to Sweden here. Now for tax purposes what type of seller are you? As I mentioned we should already have this set from the get- go which to make things easier and for 99% of people I would recommend to have a sole proprietorship. So you would choose this one or this one dependent like if you have an LLC like a legal entity or a sole proprietorship. Most of us are like newbies when it comes to business and to POD and stuff like that when we start our Etsy journeys. So for most of us the individual or sle proprietorship will be the one that actually affects us. Now we got to give them our info here. So I live in Sweden. Then you just write off all of your info here that you have on your on yourself. And then after this stage you add your billing info and then you shop security. So the key thing as I mentioned before when you connect your bank and stuff like that is that you must match your chosen currency. So you don't incur like 2% conversion fee because you will actually deposit your earnings directly into your bank. And as I mentioned after this stage that I can't show because I'm not actually creating a new shop. You just add your billing info like to verify your identity. You show them your government. You can send a photo of your government issued ID and then like a selfie photo verification even like that. like a selfie photo verification just to ensure that they match and then after that I would strongly recommend to enable two factor authentication to protect your account and you do that at your shop security stage here. So strongly recommend to enable two factor authentication once you're at the stage but again you add your billing info you verify your identity with your government issued ID and I think they might even like ask for a selfie/photo verification too. So you just provide everything that they ask for and then you make sure to enable two factor authentication to protect your account because honestly Etsy has had a lot of issues with fraudulent sellers and there's also a lot of people that is honestly trying to scam a lot of new Etsy sellers. So just to ensure that you're safe so that your account is good just ensure to enable two factor authentication to enable your account. But another important thing to know too is that once you actually have set your shop up and once you actually get the first sale, Etsy usually holds they actually just put a payment reserve on your account which typically is around 30% for 90 days. So 30% of your revenue is typically held by Etsy for up to 90 days. Uh and this is mainly again just to combat these fraudulent sellers. But as your sales history grows and your trust builds after 90 days, they let that payment reserve go for all the new accounts and then you get all of the revenue that you actually made through your through your sales. It's usually just based temporary if you're a new shop just to combat fraudulent sellers. Just key to know that there will be a payment reserve because I think anyone that's ever sell on Etsy has has always got them when they have a new shop. So usually it's 30% of your total revenue for 90 days. Once those 90 days are up, they take the payment reserve off and they pay out the payment reserve to you. Okay, so congrats. Now you actually have your shop set. And a lot of people don't even get to this stage because usually a lot of people just think about starting an Etsy shop, not actually like taking the steps to actually go here. So congratulations, you've actually created your shop. Big step. Well, the first thing that we want to do is actually delete the fake listing that we made. To do that, we go here, we press our listings, and then we press this little button here. So, we actually mark the listing itself, and then we press delete. That's all you need to do to delete the fake listing. This is so you can start fresh with the real product. Now, the second thing that you actually want to do is set up some basic shop info. You want to add a shop logo. Again, you don't have to overthink it that much. Just add some something something simple. And honestly, like I've thought about this a lot, but like I don't even think you really need a banner at all. Just set up a simple shop logo. You can even skip the about section, but if you want to do something in the about section, keep it really minimal. Don't make this whole big story and stuff like that because it doesn't really matter. Everything on Etsy happens in search. So, every someone searches for something and then they actually purchase from that. And then, as I mentioned earlier, like if you live abroad like me, you can just set your shop region to to to the US if that's the primary market that you actually sell in. But if you're unsure about that, you can just leave it blank for the time being. The the after we've done some basic shop setup, we want to actually set up our Printify account. So we go to printify.com and then we create an account with the same email. Once we actually have this account set up, your account will be look something like this. So what we have here is that you there's a lot of things to choose from and in the catalog here you have all the things that they actually sell and we're going to mainly going to focus on t-shirts in this. So we go to t-shirts and I think the main one that that like the most popular one at the moment is the comfort color 1717. That's a great shirt to sell at the moment. But a true tried and trueue seller has always been the Bellacas 3001. Just the key thing to know with Printify is that like you press a product here and then you can choose which production partner tied to Printify you want to actually fulfill the S items. So if I choose Monster Digital here, I can then add my designs into their product creator here. So for I'll take this. Then I can choose which colors I want to want to have here. So I can choose them all here. But as you see here, like black on black doesn't really work. So what we do to fix this is that we can we can press make a specific design for black. We can take this off and then we can choose the white version instead and put that on that because that doesn't change the these. It only like changes the specific one that you marked here and then you can save the product and then you can save the selection here and then for the time being you can save this as a draft. So that's generally how you create a template and again there's more things that you can do with it. You namely want to you also want to name this properly as you go. But as a starting point, this is how you do the basics really basic stuff with Printify. An important thing to al to also know at this stage is that I would recommend in your store settings here and then your order settings to have the Printify choice off. So you can actually because otherwise they will route your production to a production partner according to Printify choice and then you actually don't see which print production partner that you actually get to use for your listings. So, for the time being, I would like I I've had an honestly personally a great experience using this, but for the time being, if you're a new seller, I would recommend to have this off. So, you can choose the production partners that you want to use. And for t-shirts and like apparel, I would strongly recommend to use Swift POD or Monster Digital and just use those. But the most important thing is that for the auto submission here, you want this to be manual for the time being so you can check the orders so that so that everything is correct once you get your first sales. So, have this one set to manual as in the beginning. Then as you go, as we'll talk about in the order management section of this whole thing, as you scale, you want to have this one set to automatically at a set time, but we'll touch on that later on. To start off, just have it on manual. Okay, so these now we're actually going to connect Printify to Etsy. And so how do we how do we do that? Well, again, if we start off from the dashboard here, what we do here is that we press my new store and then we press add a new store. And then we scroll down to Etsy and we and we press connect to Etsy. So I'll do that. So you you get this pop-up once you press that and then you just press grant access and then those two are connected. So with just a few few clicks, Printfy will be connected to your Etsy account. Super simple stuff. Uh so all that you do again is that you go to my store, add a new store, press connect to Etsy, and then you press grant access. Super simple. Then once you've done that, they those two will be connected, which means when you get a sale on Etsy, you that sale will actually pop up in your orders tab here. So either on other orders if you have no SKS linked to the to the Etsy order or here if you have SKS linked to your Etsy order. Now to add some final tweaks to your Etsy store so that it will be fully set. We want to add all the production partners needed so that we actually have those just like I showed you. You would actually go to settings and then partners you work with. That's how you do it. And then you add every production partner that you work with. So, Swift PD and Monster Digital using the exact same process that I outlined in the setup process. But some settings that I would strongly recommend that you actually take away is like if I go into here into the settings and then the options, you want some of these settings uh to be to be off and you just want to ensure to have some of these settings according to what I'm saying here. So, the first thing is that we got to turn off the gift wrapping because we can offer gift wrapping when we do POD. So, gift wrapping here, we have that one as disabled. really important. Then at the very bottom here is that we want to have ensure that this one here that says sold listings want shoppers to be able to see these. No, you want to hide them. So hide the sales count. That's just because so that other sellers can go into your shop, press like your recent sales and see exactly what's sold for your shop. And then if you want to, you can also double check so that your shop and your bank currencies match. But usually since I was if you've been really thorough in the setup process, you can usually skip this part because this is hard to get wrong. But if you want to be super certain, you can just double check that your shop and your bank currencies match. And yeah, after this part, you're ready to launch. So big congratulations. Now you've done all the tweaks and everything that you need to do to actually like get started with this whole thing. So you're taking the biggest leap to actually start your Pentel man journey. So big congratulations on that part. That's huge because now you're actually officially open. You can also add some realistics now to your shop to add to add it. But before you even do that, I would strongly recommend to watch the next section of this which will be systems to grow shop just to get your foundations fully set before you head into your own Etsy journey. And as I mentioned earlier, Etsy can mistakenly suspend new shops because of glitches in their systems. If this has happened to you, reach out to their Etsy support and they will reinstate it. This happened to me as well as many others. Don't panic. just reach out to Etsy support and they can be slow at times. Reach out to them cuz you know that you haven't done anything wrong and you will get your Etsy shop back. And hopefully with the steps that we took, like the precautions that we actually took by adding some great mockups into our like some basic simple mockups into our Etsy shop setup, this won't happen to you. But again, if it does, reach out to this report and then they will reinstate it for you. Okay, so now we'll talk about systems to grow an Etsy shop. This will be a stepbystep framework to hit your income goals. So the core principle with this whole thing is that focus is really everything. We got to focus on the task at hand because everything else is a distraction. And yeah, it's just so important to only work on the thing that actually truly moves the business forward because it's so easy to just do do the thing that we actually want to do, which in most cases for us for instance is to like design stuff. But that's not what we should do. We should only do the thing that moves the us. So we always got to identify the bottleneck of the business. We got to fix it and then we got to repeat that process. We got to do the boring work. So, one thing that I like a lot that helped me a lot when I started my Etsy business was goalbased planning. And we got to backtrack because it's so easy to know what to do if we backtrack it from our goal. So, as an example, we have a person called Sarah. She wants to take home $1,000 extra income a month. So, that's in profit within one year. And approximately, if you want to do $1,000 in profit a month, that's approximately 150 orders a month, like if you sell like t-shirts and sweatshirts. And that's approximately $6,000 in revenue a month, which is roughly five orders a day, somewhere around those lines. And with one to three hours of work each day, this is absolutely doable if you just follow a focused system. And I'll show you exactly what you actually need to do in a week to be able to achieve that. And later on in the video, I'll even show you exactly what to do in each step as well. So basically, there's no questions unanswered. So the first thing again is to define the actions from the goal. So you have the goal and then you define the actions from that. You got to break the goal down into daily logical steps. Like if I do all of these steps, then it would be unfathomable that I would not hit the goal that I wanted to hit. So you work backwards from $1,000 a month in profit to to say what do I need to do today in order to achieve that? And again, the key thing about this whole thing is that you want to do one thing each day, which I'll get more into a sec. But yeah, if if each day just moves you forward, hitting the goal will become inevitable because daily actions are just so so important. Again, you can't do everything in one day. We just got to do one high lever task per day, which means that we also really got to batch the work in order in order to be efficient. So for instance, if we have a research day, the only thing we should do that day is research. If we have a design day, the only thing that we should do in that day is design. And if we have listing day, the only thing that we should do in that day is list is listing. Whether or not you want to do something or not, that doesn't matter. You only do the thing that drives the business forward. And a great way to like also like know what to do in the week is to like plan it on every like every Sunday. I did that years ago. Nowadays, I actually do it just the day before or during the morning of the same day. But you got to go into a day knowing what to do. Otherwise, you're kind of rambling all over the place. So either the day before either like weekly like I did years ago like on a Sunday you say okay this is what I need to do in the week. So Monday I will focus on listing month Tuesday on research and so forth or you do it the day before. So okay tomorrow I need to do research and then you only focus on the research part or you can also do it like in every morning. So what do I actually need to do today? What needs to be done today? Today I need to list stuff because yesterday I did designs and then you do that thing that day and focus only on that. But the key thing is just to focus on one high lever task per day. And once you've actually done that a couple times over, I'm gonna outline an example so you so you make this really hit home later on. But once you actually done these steps, it's key to understand that pain plus reflection equals progress. In the beginning when I started, I just put up a lot of listings and did the same mistakes over and over again. And that did not drive the business forward forward at all. I was just putting listings up and nothing really happened. And that was because I missed the reflection part here. So you got to know that once you've actually put up like a lot of listings, you got to reflect on it in order to make progress. And in order to reflect on it, you need to ask for feedback. You got to show your listing to someone else, preferably an expert in the field and they you got to show your shop to them and your ideas just so that they can redirect you because usually have you had these wrong preconceived conceptions in the beginning. And once you actually know what to do, like the feedback that you got, it's so so important that when you actually get advice, implement it right away or like the day after because otherwise you haven't really learned anything. It's only when you learn it and iterate on the progress that that you can actually make progress. And again, one thing that I mentioned there in a whim was that you have a lot of like false preconceived conceptions as you start because you don't really know how Etsy and stuff like that works. You only know that if you have the experience to back it up. So never assume. If you're unsure, always ask, but never assume stuff. Always just f follow a like a system until you have the experience to back up your claims because otherwise there's a high probability that you'll be wrong. At least that was my experience. And I talked about this in the mindset part of this, but growth comes from an an action plus feedback loop. You got to do stuff, get feedback, and through that you're iterating and growing. And as I mentioned there, you got to you should not trust your intuition yet. Like early stage intuition is often wrong. It's based on an experience. You got to trust the proven systems, the mentorship and the data and the data. But after you've actually hit like the milestone that you want to hit, like let's say it's a 10,000 orders, then you can trust your gut more because you have the data to back it up. But before that, usually, at least that was my experience, the gut feeling that you have or like the intuition that you have about the platform is usually wrong. So trust the systems until you hit the point and the milestones that you actually need to hit. Now, as an example to all of this highlevel stuff that I talked about, so you just get into the nitty-gritty of it all. If you basically have a brand new shop, you just open the shop, h the first thing that we need to do is to find 10 shops that match our goals and preferably they need to be have been started in less than 3 years ago with the amount of sales that you want within a year. I go through exactly how to do this and the research section of this whole thing. So, if you're at that stage, just watch that and do that thing. So you find the 10 shops that match your goals and that's the only thing that you got to do that day. The key thing is to be really thorough about finding the shops because otherwise you have to redo the whole process again. So don't rush this process. Be really thorough about which shops you actually choose from. And then on the next day after, for instance, once you've actually find these shops, you've done you have had a successful day. So Tuesday, the day after that, what you would need to do in order to hit the $1,000 a month when profit, like extra profit a month within one year, then you would want to analyze the top 50 design styles and note the recurring visual/design elements from all of these listings. So usually, for instance, there are common denominators within the designs itself. That just shows you that okay, like 20 of these listings that are top selling from these shops, from our master list, they are all using a cursive element. So that's definitely like an element that you would want to implement within your design and you do that consistently and again I go through how to do this exactly in the research section of this whole thing. But you do only do that you only analyze the design like the listings on the two on Tuesday on Wednesday. The third thing that you need to do would be to analyze the top 50 offers. So you take the same listings and then you understand okay all of these listings have and shops they have these variables within the offer in common. So, I should probably do that. But then you also ask yourself, how can I make the offer better? Once you've done that in a day, you've had a successful day. The key thing is to just do this one thing, this one day, not to spread ourselves too thin. If we did that that day, then we have had a successful day. The fourth thing that you do is that you research proven thumbnails. I talk about this in the listing optimization section of this. So, I'll show you exactly how to find proven thumbnails on the platform. You find at least five plus high performing thumbnails, preferably nine. You got to be really thorough about this. Don't rush this again because then you have to redo it. So you find at least nine proven thumbnails. Sorry, I think it's like seven proven thumbnails. H because one of is is a size chart and one is a color chart and you use that within your listing. But once you've actually found found the re like the proven thumbnails, that is a successful day. And again, I talk about this in the listing optimization section of this. And then on Friday, the fifth thing that you do is that you design listing images using the mockups and the proven markups that you bought. You design a clear offer doing that. And again, I talk about this in the listing optimization section of this. So you can find exactly how to do that in there. So that's the foundation basically the things that you need in order to actually start designing and in order to even list stuff. So that's the foundational piece. Week two. Now on Monday, you can actually start creating some designs based on the bestselling elements list. I talk about exactly how to do this in the design section of this. So if you are on that stage, what you do is just just follow how I do the design in that section of this whole course. And then on the day after on Tuesday, what you do is that you want to list all 10 on Etsy with optimized descriptions and images. And just to make sure that you're doing everything right, I talk about how to exactly do this again in the listing optimization section of this course. So if you're at that stage, you just watch that as you are listing. And then on Wednesday, you make more designs, same niche or expand to another. And if you need to re like re-watch design to just cuz there's a lot of things to just take in, then just re-watch the design part and learn more about from that. And then on Thursday, you list those new designs. And again, to ensure that you're doing it right, watch the listing optimization section of this. And then on Friday, a key thing here again is to like once you have at least 50 listings live because you have to repeat this a lot to to have get some reps in, but once you have 50 listings live, 50 different designs live, ask for detailed field feedback. And once you actually get that detailed feedback, implement it. And again, this is why I even created the creative seller mentorship from the get so that I can give back the thing that I was gotten when I started this Etsy thing because I was in a similar mentorship group when I started. and it's one of the key pivotal things that actually made me made me able to scale my shop. So once you have 50 listings live, ask for detailed feedback and implement them directly once you actually get them so you can actually move forward within your business. Now after you got some orders coming in, it's key to optimize your system. So you got to ask some specific questions like why is my conversion rate under 3%. Why is my review rate under 20%. Why are buyers unhappy with this listing for instance? like why are you getting bad reviews? Like let's say that some someone for instance find that their sizing is way off or like the listing images doesn't match what they actually got. Once you get that kind of feedback like it sucks to get it I know but once you get the feedback fix the specific problems to make your whole shop better cuz again you already got the feedback from someone who who's an expert in the field but once you get feedback from your customers you iterate on your shop too and fix it going forward. But you can only do that really once orders are coming in. So if your orders are not coming in, do like follow the daily plan template here and then keep listening until you get some sales. And then once you get some sales, optimize your system by asking specific questions again. Why is the conversion rate under 3% for instance? And I talk about this a lot in the video too. But like generally I would want to see you at a minimum at of at a 4% conversion rate preferably like mo like a lot of my students between 5 to 6%. And if you have an optimized listings, you should probably be around 5 to 6% in conversion rate. And like if you don't have a good review rate, why is it like if it is under 20% at least, then like follow the steps that I outline in the order management part about like sending shipping not like shipping messages according to the customer service guide that I show there. But if you get feedback that something is wrong, fix them things that that they actually mention are issues with the shop. Fix that going forward. You don't have to optimize the listings. Like if you have a thousand listings, it can it can be kind of hard to fix those issues with all listings, fix the issues with your biggest sellers and then implement those changes going forward. But the key thing is that once you get some in feedback from the customers themselves, iterate going forward to make your whole shop better. Now, as a weekly structured example, like Sunday can be weekly planning plus reflection, just reflecting on what's going well, what's not going well. And again, this is after you have some orders coming in. And then Monday and Wednesday can be like design focusing on only on design. Thursday and Friday is listing optimization and feedback. And again, this is only once you have orders coming in because then you already have the templates. Then you've already found the proven markups. Then you've already done the research. So you've already have this foundational piece set. And this is only once you have orders trickling in. And the key thing is that daily you only focused on one task. No distractions. Because everything apart from the bottleneck of your business is a distraction. So you only do one high leveraged task per day. And some final words on this. If you want the goal, you got to do the work. And the reason for that, like there's a Mel Robbins quote that summarizes that really well. And is that you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. So your systems trumps the motivation. Because again, I talked about this in the mindset part of this uh whole course and that's that most of your habits are unconscious. So if you have systems in place to encourage good habits, those systems will become your habits and those habits will then become unconscious which will make it easy to progress the business itself. So systems trumps motivation and it's so important to this whole whole thing to to get to again execute the right task at the right time. If we want to do design but we need to do list to list stuff then we don't do design we only list like focus on the one high lever task that will drive the business forward because if you do the right things consistently the results will become inevitable that's why the systems are so important to drive you forward and again it doesn't have to be more complex than this in order to drive you forward and again during this whole course I will show you exactly how to do each part of the whole business so that there's basically no stone left unturned on how to do things. So, with this course, you will know exactly what to do and how to do it in order to actually achieve the print on a man and Etsy goals that you have. [Music] So, now we're tackling research. Research is probably one of the most overlooked things, but also one of the most important things to actually make this Etsy business work. For instance, if you make your designs based on nothing, there's a high likelihood that someone else wouldn't want the design that you're actually putting out. The key thing when it comes to research is to focus on demand. We don't want to be in the blind because again, if we focus on this as a business, we need to go where the demand is. That's the like the main perk of being on a platform like Etsy because they have such huge search volume and we need to leverage that in order to actually make our designs, make our offers and so forth. And that's what we're going to talk about today. This part is going to be extensive. So I I highly recommend that you like watch through different parts time and time again. If you find that you're struggling with some parts of this, just watch back different parts of the course, especially this research part, because it's so so so important to just base every decision off of data, not your own judgment. It's key to actually make this Etsy business work. So, first off, the benchmark to the whole research thing is the master list. And when I talk about the master list, what we want to do is that we want to find five to 10 successful Etsy shops on Etsy that we want to learn from. And the key to that whole process is that you don't want to use Etsy shops that has been created in like 10 years ago and been successful in that 10-year time frame. We want to find current shops that are doing really well because generally if they're new created within the last two to three years generally they've done some stuff to really make themselves stand out to make them their own shop successful so to speak and that's what we want to learn from. But a caveat to that too is that sometimes there are some shops that are just crazy outliers. You have some shops that have been like created in the last four years, but they have over a 100,000 sales, maybe like 120,000 sales or something like that, which is insane. So, in those cases, when you find like real big outliers, you can include those two in your shop. But it's key here to be so so thorough about picking the shops. So, one thing that I did wrongly myself when I started when I did my own master list was that I rushed the process. I just chose a couple chops that I thought looked really good and that kind of like met the metrics that I want that that I wanted to hit and I didn't really abide by the rule of that the shops has to be have been created within the last within the last two to three years. So that made the whole thing that I actually did like the all the designs all their offer research that we're going to go into later in this part all that were skewed because the shops were older than 2 to 3 years. So, I implore you, be really thorough. Take a full day and just find the shops cuz that's what I did and that's what actually made it work. Do not rush the process of finding these five to 10 different Etsy shops that have basically have the sales that you want to have within a year. And onto that point, the key thing apart from that, they should be newly created is that they should have about the same amount of sales that you want to have in a year. So, let's see for instance that you want 20 sales in a year. That is if I just count this because I'm not good with head math. So 20,000 sales in a year, that would be uh 1,600 sales a month. Divide that by 30, that's like 55 orders a day. If that's the aim that we want to have and that's the work that we actually want to put in once we have the sales enough to actually get the sales, then it's like shops that do average about 20,000 sales a year. So if it's a shop that's like been created in the last 3 years and they have 60,000 sales, that shops that specific shop meets our metric. But it's key to understand it at this level and to be super specific because again otherwise the whole process later on gets skewed and you have to redo everything again. So be real picky about the shops that you actually pick here and cuz that leads me into the question that I have written down right here. And that is you got to ask yourself, are you willing to do the work required to actually get to the goal, but also when you have the goal to maintain the goal to actually keep that 55 daily orders sales up because if you don't want to like spend all day and every day on it and if you want this as a side income, then you have to like treat it in another way and find other shops with lesser amount of sales. And the key thing for that too is that it matches what you're actually wanting out to get out of the out of the business. You don't want to be overwhelmed by the business. If you if you know don't want to do this full-time, then you shouldn't be like for instance going for a goal that that requires fulltime so to speak. So be really pick about the shops that you choose. And we're also going to go through and find some of those shops ourselves. So I can like really like show you how to do this. So first off, we go to Etsy. And when we do this, we just search for t-shirt as that's the main product we're going to sell. I then go to the filters. I ensure that it says delivery to the US since that's our target market and I live in Sweden. And sometimes it just autofilters to Sweden because I live in Sweden. This could be auto filter to wherever you live dependent on where you are and where where you are looking from. So let's see here. What we do here is that we go to the physical items filter. We go to the star seller filter. We then swap out star for best here in the search bar. What this actually does is that it gives us only the best sellers for this given keyword. So all that I will see here on this page are just best sellers because now I'm indexed for that. Am I basically filtered for that? So key thing that we want to look at at this specific point when we're choosing our shops is that we want to find shops that have really high review counts. So you look at this little small number right here. So let's see if we can find any big ones. This one has a huge amount of sales. What we can do here is to use every just to go here and see if it's a new shop or if it's an old shop. We go to shop details. This one was created 50 51 months ago. And again, I'm not good with head math. So let's just 51 divided by 12. That's 4 4.25 years. Let's see first if this is an outlier shop as I mentioned previously. Like if this one is doing a huge amount of sales within a year, that's the goal that we want to go for to get as much sales as possible within a year and to make this full-time. Then we can see if that actually meets that criteria. So let's see here. 124, 342. Divide that by 52 months I think it was. No, 51 months. That's 2,438 sales for like every single month, which is really really good. And we we divide it by 30, that's like 80 sales a day. And if our goal here is to make it full-time, like I do this full-time, then you what we can do here, cuz this is again, this is an outlier shop. This is there's not that many shops on Etsy that have this amount of sales within this time frame. So, what we can do here is actually go to analy shop. We can press the export button. What this does is that it gives us a CSV file on our email that we can then use for the next step, which is to actually create the master list. But now we got our first shop here for our master list. And again, uh we'll find one more just so I can really hit home with how to do this. Let's look through some more. Let's see here. This one has 17,000 reviews because again, we're looking at this little small number right here. We go into the shop. Let's see here how old this specific shop is. For that we use EverB Chrome extension by just pressing this button here. Okay, so this shop was created 42 months ago. They have 68521 sales. Divide that by 42 that's 1,600 sales per month. And divide that by 30, that's like 54 sales a day, which is also really really good. And 42 months is a bit almost too old. So let's see here. That's like three and a half years. So, a bit above our a bit above our metric here that we So, we might actually not want to use it because we might want to do 80 sales today, not 55 or like 54. But let's keep it just if like if we can't find anything else cuz this is like almost in the range. If we can't find 5 to 10 shops, we can still use that cuz that's almost basically in the range. I still think that it definitely like qualifies if we want to make this a fulltime income. So, let's see if we can find any more shops. And again, we want this these huge review counts like this one for instance. Let's see how old this shop is. This one is 17 75 months old. This one is too old. We will skip that. It's way too old honestly. Let's use this one. Let's see here. How old this shop is. 37 months old. That's basically 3 years. Yeah, basically just 3 years. 64,730 divided by 36 or sorry 37. That's how they make much sales they make in a month. If and then we want to see how much the sales they make in a day. So about 58 sales a day. So this one is good too. H this one is basic one month above three years but it's so close. So I will still use that one. So I go to analyze shop and then press export. And this one did basically 55 sales a day and it's been created within the last three and a half years. Since it's so close I will still use this one too. But as you saw that was 72 months old. So, I did not use that one. I only used the one that actually meet our metrics or it just just like a tad too old to meet our metrics but still has the actual sales goals that we want because the the most important metrics is that they have the sales code that we want in the given since they've started. Basically, it's really important that you are this thorough because if you're not the whole process afterwards will be skewed. So, be really really picky when choosing these shops just like I've done here. So, we basically have our shops. What we then want to do is go to Google Sheets. So, let's I just going to grab new Google Sheets here. You go into Google Sheets. You press blank spreadsheet. You press file and then import and then you press upload. What you then do is that you take these files that you got in your email and you just drag and drop them into the Google Sheets here and then we say import data and then we get something that looks like this. This is how it basically looks like. So, let's see here. The first thing that we want to do is that we want to be able to sort this. So we will do the same thing for every single shop. So we make another one. Import, upload, and then we just take the files that we got from our email, upload those into Google Sheets, and then import data. And then in this case, you just press open now here instead. And then what we want to do now is that we want to press command A or command A again. If you're on a Windows, it's control A and control A again. So you can highlight the whole spreadsheet. H then you go to data create a filter then you go to the estimated total sales sort C to A. So what everybody has given us here with the data is all the projected back in like info about all these all the listings that they have in their shop. So like approximately how much have they sold and they base these numbers out of the reviews, the likes and stuff like that to give us an approximate on how much they actually have sold each listing. And we don't want to include the duds cuz most shops, including my own, like you get like sales on like 20% of the actual listings that you that that you actually list. And then it's my in my opinion, it's been like 4% of those listings that actually carry your store. And it's usually looks like this across the board. Most shops have like a ton of duds and we don't want to include that in our master list. So what we do is that we just scroll down. We sort by estimated total sales. We sort C to A. So basically the highest number to the lowest number. We then scroll down till it says 21 here. Everything under 20 sales, an estimated total of 20 sales, we just remove that. Then we go to the bottom. So I marked the cell like I did here. I press the cell. Let's see here. So I not going too fast. I just press the title here. Go way down to the bottom. And then I go here. I hold in shift and press this button here and just press that cell here. So I mark every single cell in between. And then I just delete that with back with just pressing backspace. After I've done that, I do the same thing for the previous thing as well. So, this is the first one that we got. We press command A and then command A again since I'm on a Mac. We press create a filter. We go to the estimated total sales. Sort Z to A. We go down to where it's less than 20 sales. An estimated total of 20 sales. We press here. We press there. We take away anything under an estimated total of 20 sales. Remove that entirely. Then we go back to this to this one here. The key thing about this whole thing so is to just have everything in one Google sheet file. So I just press this one, go up here. I then hold on down shift, press this cell here. So I basically mark everything in between these cells. Press command C. Uh this is control C if you're on a if you're on a Windows. And then you go to the last cell that you have here. And then you press command commandV or controlV if you're on a Windows. And now you have basically two shops info in one and the same Google sheet file which makes it so much more powerful because if I just go here and then press estimated total sales sort Z to A, it takes the information from both of these shops now and sort by the best selling listings. If we do this with like five to 10 shops, it gives us such valuable information. So you have to do this for like five to 10 shops just like I did here, but you do it for five to 10. Now, I only have two shops in this list here, but you do it for 5 to 10 so that you can have something that looks like this. I have five to 10 shops in this specific list here that that I prepared. And when you sort them by C2A, you're sorting them by the most projected sales. And as I said previously, most shops have just a few outlied like listings that actually carries their store. So, when we doing our research, we can get a grasp on why is like this listing selling so well for this store. Why is this listing selling so well for this store? And it just gives us so much valuable information to actually understand how we can add value to the platform and make a better design and a better offer ourself. This is why we do this so we can fast track the research and really understand how to make our own listings really good. We'll get into this uh right now, but the key thing about this whole thing when we have our master list is to analyze the niches that they're actually in, the product types they actually sell. Again, this is mainly for t-shirts, but generally like which product types are they actually offering within their listings within like within their offer because sometimes they can offer a t-shirt and a sweatshirt within the listing for instance. We really want to understand the design styles that they use. We really want to analyze that and like one of the most important parts too is to understand their pricing and offers to seek like common denominators within these shops. So those are the kind of kinds of things that we want to analyze and that's what we're going to get to in a sec. But to further like clarify the things that we actually need to understand and what we actually want to get like physically get out of this research is we want to get a bestselling design elements list. So that's the first thing that we're going to look at. We're going to analyze what basically are the common denominators within these different top selling if like one listing sells really well here, one listing one listing sells really well here, but why and what are the commonalities between them? even if they're even if they're in like different niches, what are the commonality commonalities within these designs? Because generally you can find commonalities within design to understand why they're actually selling because that type of design element is a bestselling element. So to show here, I've picked out a few bestselling listings from my master list here. So let's see here. So first off, we have this one, this Christian one. And again, this comes from my master list here that I prepared before this uh recording. We also have this one where we can see and learn from these different like these are in wildly different niches but they all have that kind of like the same design outline and they work in every single one of them because again this this one has like 400 reviews. This one has like 385 reviews so a lot of reviews. This one is currently a bestseller and has like 600 reviews. So like this circled outline or like text uh in a circled way. So basically text above, text underneath and text in the middle in a circled fashion works really well. And again you have two circled outlines. So basically one outer circle, one inner circle, one inner circle, text above, text underneath and then and then text in the middle, but you have this circular layout. Same thing here. This one does not have the like the outlines that the other designs had, but it's still kind of the same. You have like one you have text above text underneath and text in the middle with a circular layout. What we can understand from this is that the bestselling element within these designs is the circular layout we can call it. We then write that up on a list so we understand that the circular layout is a popular layout to actually sell. Another two different listings that were like one of the absolute bestselling listings from the shops has almost 2,000 reviews and is almost always a bestseller. It just says never enough plants and the text is in different colored letters. Another super popular listing that also comes from the master list also use different colored sentences. So another listing also uses different colored sentences here, but they also incorporate the brain. But again, the commonality between these two listings that are from two different shops in two wildly different in two wildly different niches, the commonality is that they are using different colored sentences. So what we'll do here then is that we will write that up different colored sentences. Then these different listings are also super super popular. Two bests sellers here, three bests sellers here and one that has like 900 reviews. Super popular listings. And what they have in common is the line art style. So you have this these line art flowers, this line art like gardening images, this line art like plant image with a cat in the middle and this line art style with both flowers and the book. So the commonality between these listings mainly are the line art style. So line art style is a super good design layout within these listings. Some other commonalities within further listings would be this would be here. With these we can see like again they are in wildly different niches. They're from different shops too. At least they're from the two different shops. What we can see here is that the grungy vibe like that distressed grunge vibe is really popular. Like you have this usually like there's a clipping mask with that grunge effect on it. But basically that grungy texture to it. That retro grungy texture is what's popular here. So we'll write that up. So again, what I'm doing here is to take different listings from the master list and then understand what are the commonalities between like the first 50 listings in this list. How can we actually see what commonalities there are between these different listings? And the last one here, if we look at this one, we'll look at this one, we look at this one, we'll look at this one and this one. The commonalities between these again, they are all from a master list. 600 reviews here. This one has 851 reviews. This one is currently a bestseller. This one has over a thousand reviews. So, currently like really good listings, but it's the cursive font that is the main commonality between these different listings because they it's a super popular element to use. Just that type of cursive font. Same thing with this. So, we will write up cursive font. Now, we have some data on what actually sells well on the platform because again, we don't want to go in blind. We don't just want to make a design that we think we ourselves are look good because again if we are focusing on making this a business someone else has to like wanting to purchase it from you and that means that they exchange money to get something for them. That's like we are out of the equation in that part. It's all about what they actually want. And then we just if we give them what they want, they give us what we want, which in this case would be a transaction with money because we are focusing on this as a business. Which is why it's just so important to just focus on data and doing doing it like this. Like we shouldn't base our own design styles on our own intuition because then we're mainly doing it in in an artistic way. And that usually comes from a standpoint of ego and ourselves. And if we're focusing on this as a business, then I highly recommend to just focusing on finding the bestselling elements kind of like we did here. And now combining these in different ways, but we'll touch that on that in the design part of this course, not here. Now, so what we got from these from the first study here from these shops, we got a best-selling design elements list. So that basically guides us on what to actually use in our designs. It's fasttracks the whole design process and makes it easier to understand how to make our designs. Now, a super important part about this too is the actual offer on Etsy compared to like Merch by Amazon that I also sell on. We can actually control the the offer here, which is a really important part to actually make like someone actually buy from us because like think of it like the train rails to sell your designs because if someone actually doesn't like if you don't have any reviews in your shop and price is really really high and the mockups are not that great, then it kind of gives this really strong off feeling for a customer to actually not purchase. But if you have really great markups, really great pricing, you might even use a guarantee for instance, which we will touch on here too, then it makes it so much easier for actually someone to purchase because they feel a lot safer in purchasing so to speak. And what we want to do at this stage is we want to basically list make a list of common denominators within the offer from these from these shops to understand like what are they doing to actually get these sales when it comes to the offer itself. And we're going to look at which variations they offer. Do they offer personalization? What pricing do they use? Do they use any guarantees? How do they structure their mockup images and just like the shipping times and so forth? So, a lot of stuff here. So, that's what the first thing that we'll do. Okay. So, let's see here. If we just look at the first thing and one of the main variables actually like when it comes to the offer is to use proven markups. So, how do they actually like structure the the images here? What are the common denominators within the listings? So, first off, we can see that they basically display the design on different colors here. So, we can see the I think this is the heather olive. This is it probably the darker heather. This is probably the heather peach. This is the heather mauve. This is probably the white one. And this is the maroon. So if we just look at the mockup image further, what do the other shops do when it just comes to these first ones? Well, they do that too. This one does that, too. They display the actual design on different mockups to so that the customer can get a better sense on how the design looks on different colored shirts. This one does it too. This one does not do. This one just has one thumbnail. This one does it too. So most of the shops that we're looking at here does that. What we're then going to write up is um playing design on different colors. Apart from that, someone actually has to understand like the size. So how do they actually like know which size to use? Generally people use size charts like this for that. This one actually use the exact same and it's two different shops. This one uses a color chart. This one has a size cut like here. This one also has a size chart. Yep. So, a size chart. So, a size chart is basically a really important thing to have so so that people can understand how they can actually navigate the sizes to to purchase. So, they understand the sizes. There's one more important image here and that's the color chart. So, people want to get a sense of what like the different colors that they can purchase within the garments. So, like they can get the shirts in in different colors. And here they basically list the different colors. They also have a sweatshirt option here. So, okay. and they kind of do the exact same thing. They also do the kind of the exact same thing, but instead of displaying it just like this, they display it with different models with mockup and images that you can probably find on Etsy. And these guys just display it like this. But generally, a color chart is really important. So, you need a color chart for this. Um, so those are the mockup images here. Now, when it comes to that too, what type of variations do they actually sell in the listings? Like, you can get a t-shirt for sure, but do they actually sell something else? And the size drops on menu. You can usually see that. So if I just press size, you can see that they actually sell t-shirts, sweatshirts, long sleeve, and basically kids clothing. So youth and taller shirts. They also sell t-shirts, sweatshirts, long sleeve, youth, and taller shirts. These guys only sell t-shirts. And this shop too also sells t-shirts, sweatshirts. They also sell V-necks, youth shirts, and taller shirts. Basically, t-shirts, sweatshirts, youth shirts, and toddler shirts would be something that's would be good to have in your listings because there were several shops that actually have that in their like variations. So, selling t-shirts, sweatshirts, what was it? T-shirts, sweatshirts, long sleeves, youth and toddler. Youth shirts, and toddler shirts. So, those are the type of variations that we generally would want to sell within our store when we actually list our items on Etsy. Now, what colors do they actually choose? So, let's see. The these guys offer a variety of colors. So, a lot of colors. They also have several of the same. So, two reds here, two blues, but like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. And this is all if we just look at the shirts just to make it easier. Yeah, there's a lot of colors here. Do these guys also have lot a lot of colors? Also a lot of colors. So three, six, wait, three, six, 9, 10, 12, 13. So a lot of colors and these guys offer also offer a lot of colors. Okay. So basically like 10 plus colors is something that they offer. So basically a variety of colors to choose from when choosing the garment is important to have. That's what the conclusion from that kind of like color research here. Now, if we just scroll down here and look at the delivery and return policies. So, basically, I'm recording this on the 2nd of May. And they can basically get this within like 5 days, 5 to 10 days, 7 to the 12th, 7 to the 12th, 7, 6 to 10th, even faster. 7 6 to 10th also even faster. So we would want to basically sell our designs or basically someone should be able to get it between 5 to 10 5 to 10 days or four 4 to 8 days. Delivery between 4 to 12 days. So approximately around there is where where we actually want to be able to see if we can actually compete with these cuz the delivery time is really really important when it comes to the offer itself. So either 5 to 10 days or like 4 to 8 days from production to delivery. That's something that we want to be able to compete with. Now, they do they offer returns and exchanges? These ones do not. These ones do not. These ones do not. These ones do not. These ones do not. So, no returns and exchanges. What's the cost? Again, I live in Sweden. So, I'm going to look at the cost here in Swedish croner. So, basically $5 in shipping approximately. This one is basically $6 in shipping or maybe like $5.99 could be, but generally between5 to $6 in shipping. And they all do a paid shipping model which all I also can write here. So they don't do free shipping, they do paid shipping. So let's write that down too. Paid shipping model. And again most people actually just don't really read the descriptions here. So I would mainly mainly focus on the parts that we actually covered right now. Now a different thing when it comes to the offer research here is that we need to ask ourselves one important question and that is how can we make our offer better than theirs? because we now understand what they do in common. What can we do better to actually make our own offer better? That's key. So, one thing for that we can do if we just say what can we do better? What can we do better with this? So, for instance, one thing that we can do is like these color charts that they have, you don't really get a sense of how if I want to purchase, I don't know, like the orange shirt here. There's no display here on how the orange shirt looks. I can just see some colors here. But as a customer, you don't you don't get a sense on how that color actually looks without seeing it for yourself within the markup images. So instead of using something like this, I would highly recommend that you use a color chart like this. You use markup images that you purchase from a a store here on Etsy. And then you make a collage just like this. And then you actually place the design on top of each image here. Kind of like I've done here with this here as an example. So if this is a comfort colors example, but this is the general outline is the same. You just display the design on top of the actual garment so people can actually understand that. Okay, on the black one, this butterfly here doesn't even show and on the green green one, it kind of works. So that's what you want to do with this instead. That's how we can make the color chart better. So then we'll just write that down. A color chart with design displayed. One more thing that we can do to apart from this too is that we can actually use Printify insights when it comes to choosing the colors because again what I found when it comes to Etsy and myself is that people want more color options but you don't want to confuse them and if you have two reds or like in this case two blues so like one indigo blue, one navy blue and sorry three blues and one royal blue is like too many blues use one blue. So, what I would use here in this case is just use Prenify Insights and use the data from that because that they show you the top 10 best selling colors to actually choose from and it's current. So, if you have like at least like 20 sales or more, then you can see which colors to actually just directly choose from because they just provide you which colors are actually the current bestselling colors for that specific product. And in this case, it would be the Bellac 3001. So, in order to be as optimized as possible when it comes to like which colors to actually choose, just use those. And if there's two like blue ones, swap out one of those for something else. Maybe for the 11th bestselling color. The key thing is just to have one blue, one white, like one green, and so forth. Don't use multiple. So, that's one thing that that we can optimize. Offer only the bestselling colors. That's one thing we can do better. But and and as I mentioned, display the actual like design on top of like mockup images that you actually bought from Etsy. So they look good, but display it on the actual images so people can get a sense on how they actually look like. Really really important to optimize the listing itself kind of like I done here. So color charge with designs designs displayed that that's one thing. Uh so that's one thing that we can do. And then color choices and better color choices through printify insights. Let's see here. Not 3Ts. And then what else can we actually do better with this? So let's see here. This size charts. We could include more information because again people don't want to read. People just want to buy stuff with their eyes. We could include some guidelines to just show them. Okay. just show them that that for instance this is like the Gillan 18000 is a baggy sweatshirt or like in this case the Bella 30001 is a snug shirt. So just displaying and just explaining to the customer that it's a bit snug in their fit would be a great addition to to the size chart itself. So just then going here and just saying explain sizing better explain sizing more and size charts say that the Bella Bellas are snug and because on Etsy there's usually like these mockups that you can buy that just displays it better and you can usually see comparisons like this one. This is how it looks when it's oversized. This one is how it looks when it's just the fit that that you usually want to go for. So you want to say the bells are snug but unisex and display it with a mockup image of a model something like that would be better to for the size chart itself. Now we tackled the color chart and again when it comes to the amounts to sell on it like the different variations what I would do here is sell kind of the same variations here here as well also selling t-shirts sweatshirts and just matching that that offer basically and again they have 10 plus colors I would basically use max 12 probably 10 but again we do better color choices because we can use printify insight data and that's how we optimize the colors delivery between 4 to 12 days that's something that we have to match as best as we can once we're actually going for it. And again to get to be accur as accurate as possible when it comes to the delivery times, we want to ensure that we like if we have like 10 orders and like I don't know like four of them were delivered in 10 days and then four of them were delivered in eight in like 6 days and then two of them were delivered in 8 days. The average of that would be like 8 days. So that's what we would want to use when we actually like provide our shipping times on Etsy. But we want to match this as good as possible but still be accurate towards the things that we provide because we always have to like be accurate towards the thing that we actually are selling on Etsy. So we want to match this as much as much as possible like we can offer returns and exchanges. We can actually offer returns and exchanges. I will cover that in another part of this video. But again, we can offer returns and exchanges which will make our own our own offer better compared to theirs. I would also recommend to use a paid shipping model for this because it's a lower ticket item and it usually generally works best. So we could offer we can definitely like match that. And another part to this too that none of these actual like different shops are using none of them are using a guarantee. And I for me like now I think that's crazy. So we can also use a guarantee to just offset some risk from the customer and put it back on us sellers. Again I'll cover that later on in the video too. So use a guarantee to make our own offer better. Apart from that too, if someone is like a bit older, it might be a bit hard to understand how to order this. So I would basically just include an image just to state how they actually order the the item. Something in the lines of like something like this, something more like this. Just show them how to actually order. But again, just using proven mockups. So we can use how to order images. How to order images. H better displaying how to order. Apart from that too, there's another thing that I would also recommend to do that none of these shops actually have done, and that's to include some social proof. These ones actually use the actually how to order image I see here. But again, another thing that I would use in our in my markup image is to use a review markup. Something that looks kind of like this. Just taking one of your reviews and just showcasing how like the review that you got. It really helps just to get that just just for social proof. they will see that in the listing itself. But mainly the people are so visual. So having this inside of the inside of the listing definitely helps. So social proof mockup and that's how we can actually make our offer better by doing all of this compared to them doing this. That's how our offer can stand out and actually like have our design sell better in comparison to the competition. Now, that was a lot of information about like the master list and the research, but I would highly recommend to be really thorough about this cuz it gives you the things that you need to actually make this Etsy business work. But when you are kind of tired of like when you are actually like doing your designs and stuff like that, the first thing that I recommend that you do is just go from top to bottom and just pick out the designs that are in here or the listings that are in here based on the research that we made. Make designs and add value to the niches. So, and what I mean by this again, if there's no like listing with like for instance line art and this again, if I just take this one here, if I just search for gardener here, like gardener t-shirts, cuz that's that's the top one in my list here. Again, we want also want to see the ones that actually sell. So, we filter this by star seller. Got to make sure it says delivered to the US physical items filter. And then we saw by star for best in the search bar. Again, this is the bestselling design elements list. We won't touch too much on design here because I don't want to skew it. But again, we know that these are different elements here. Circular layout, different color sentences, line art style, retro grungy, and cursive. There's one like circular here for instance, that's popular. That's a bestseller. Another one here. So, when you use circular in this instance, for instance, the one that we looked at was a line art style. But are there any like for instance retro grungy with different colored sentences? Maybe. Sorry. So, retro grunge that are Let's see here. Are there like any retro? There's one retro grunge here. This one is also in the master list that we have. This one is also using line art. So what if we do in this one for instance like the gardener shirt. The thing that we want to see is how can we actually add value to it. So one thing that we can do is just take the circular outline. We can do that. We can then do line art within that circular outline. Uh this one kind of has it but not entirely. So circular outline and then do line art and then do a grungy vibe. Grungy vibe kind of like this but with line art specifically. That could be something we could also do a circular design with different colored letters plus line art in inside of it. That's also some a way we can stand out in the niche. But again, that's how we have to think about the niche research. And when we actually search our niches and we think of a way to actually design when we actually run out of this list, you can add more shops to the list and just go through it that way. But there's another way to also think about niches and where to put our designs. And how you actually think about that is that you like when you're tired of researching shops, you want to focus on evergreen on evergreen niches with peak sales times. And to make sense of this, like ask yourself like ask yourself and also ask Chachi PT, which should be your assistant h in this whole Etsy business which events occur daily that people often want to celebrate by purchasing items to others or like gift to others. They can be celebratory or like emotional milestones. So they have to happen daily which is the key thing. So a couple of these niches as an example are for instance nurses, they are teachers, they are dads. So what are the commonalities within these niches? Well, first off nurses sell all year round. They also peak in May because of nurse appreciation month and because of like graduation and stuff like that because when people actually want to like graduate to be a nurse they would like so a friend might want to gift them with an item that resembles that that just proves that they've actually achieved the accomplishment of being a nurse. Now another thing that happens all year round is our birthdays for dad but when there's also a huge peak in father's day because you want to buy gift for your dad. So gifts for dads for instance are hu hugely popular and sell all year round because dads have birthdays all year round but they also peak in in June because of Father's Day. And when it comes to teachers they also sell all year round and but they generally peak during August because of back to school. So uh during that rush, people generally want want to buy teacher shirts for the whole team, but they also sell it all year round because people want to be able to celebrate that they either become a teacher or that they are a teacher or they want to gift something to a teacher because of their hard work and stuff and stuff stuff like that. But generally these are niches that happen all year round and have like different peaks during the the year apart from Q4. All of these niches and most things sell really well during Q4. So that's a bonus, but they also like if you like go for teachers then you have a peak in August. If you go for nurses as well, you have a peak in May. If you go for fathers, you also have a peak in May, June. And another thing that all happens all the way around too is are weddings. So weddings are super popular and people gets engaged. They are also like have anniversaries. They can also get divorced. They all happen during the whole year. But weddings for instance and stuff like bachelorette stuff, they happen a lot during the summer. So you'll have a peak during the summer because of the wedding season. That's usually around the summer. But they happen all year round because people are getting married all year round. If people are getting married, they also are having babies almost every single day. So pregnancy announcement stuff are super popular. So this is kind of the thing that you want to have about it. And you can ask Chachi Bet for this too to help you with it. But like pregnancy announcement stuff are super super popular all year round and anniversary gifts are super popular all year round because if people are getting engaged, they're having anniversaries all year round and so forth. The great thing about this is that they are perfect for long-term stability. You get occasional sales spikes here and there because of the peaks that they have, but the key thing is that they generally happen consistently throughout the year. So, this is a great way to actually round out your shop without like listing like a madman like I did in the beginning because you don't need to list like St. Patrick's Day shirt, Fourth of July shirts or and like Thanksgiving shirts because these generally just sell during that specific time of the year. And if you do that, you just have to do a ton of listings. And we don't want to spend our time doing that because time is the like the usually like the biggest constraint for everyone. So if we just actually focus on stuff that sell all year round, but have different peaks throughout the year, they sell really well during Q4, they sell really well during like occasional sales spikes because of because of the month like nurses in May, like teachers in August, like dads in May, June, and so forth. But it's a great way to actually round out our shop without like listing like a madman. The key thing is that they're not tied to just one calendar holiday and they support like a daily lifestyle, a family life and a community. That's usually like like the a common denominator within all of these niches. So I would highly recommend to do that. Like ask if you ask yourself the right question, you will find the right answers. But you need to ask yourself the right questions in order to actually find the right answers. So ask yourself and ask also Chat GPT to get a better sense of this. Which events happen daily that are like celebratory or emotional milestones in people's lives? Again, pregnancy announcements are super popular. People getting married happen every single day. People are having babies and then people having birthdays are late. People are having birthdays every single day. There's so many parts of this that the list can be almost beless. But if you only focus on the events that happen every single day, it makes it so much easier to tackle this whole business. Now, when you're actually testing out these different niches, there's some important things to know, and that's that you should test out different niches and see how it works. See how your designs actually fair. And the key thing up with that like we looked at the gardening niche for instance. We don't want to do only gardening niches like and just be in every single subniche within the gardening niche. We want to try out like a couple gardening niches like within the evergreen niche space. And we don't want to just do everything. So try one or two and then go to the next because designs perform differently dependent on the niche. So don't go heavy into one until you actually got traction. But once you have traction, double and triple down on the specific niche because you really want to like dominate the niche itself. Because if you have like 10 different listings that's really well in the specific niche, you like depending on which listing they choose, they choose yours and it makes it really easy to actually again gain traction and spend your time on the thing that actually works the best. So if you something is working, focus all your time on the thing that works, which is those niches itself. Another key thing about this too is that when you're actually doing your designs and when you're actually focusing on a specific like uh listing, you don't want to be too broad. It's really important to be not to be too broad because like as an example, when I started this whole Etsy business, I did this Christmas and like these dad shirts and like they were just too broad. Like for any type of dad for instance, it just didn't make sense. You don't when you are actually like doing these designs, it's really important to have one person in mind. As an example, if you do a shirt for a person, you would want to do it for one person. So, for instance, if you do it for a a father, you want to do it for a father or a dad or a daddy or d a d i or like a daddy, so to speak, or like a dada, but you want to do it for one. You might think that they're all the same, but they're really not because when people are buying on Etsy, they are just searching here. These are data shirts, but it really differs from daddy shirts. So when you're actually designing, only like focus on like specific wording that you use. And again, the easiest way in my head to think about this is that daddy and dada are two different people. You only do one design for dada and one design for daddy, so to speak. And this applies to anything. Same thing with mama and mommy or like grandma and Gigi or like a nurse. It's not the same as for instance a cardc nurse or niso nurse. It's key to just have one person in place. So if you do a nurse design, you do a niss nurse design or cardc nurse design. If you do a teacher shirt, you do a first grade teacher shirt, not just someone someone that says teacher. Really important to do that. So, just have one person in mind when you're doing your design. That's key. And another way that also I think is really really good to know, especially nowadays, is like all of these designs that we looked at before when we did this offer research, none of them were actually like personalized. But nowadays in 2025, I would strongly recommend to see if like you can add value through that. So one more element that I would actually write up here in the offer list to make the offer better for the customer is to offer personalization. So offer personalization because generally again what I found in my journey is that personalized orders tend to have higher conversion rates. And again if you're doing personal personalization all you need really is a name and a date. Don't over complicate it. If you like do a whole custom design that's like wavy and like you have to you have to like spend five minutes on actually making the design for the customer each time an order comes in, that's not scalable. The key thing to personalization is to keep it super super simple. In my experience, what I found is that you want a design to at maximum take take you a minute to a minute 30 seconds to make from the point that you actually start the design to when it's actually in printy ready to go to send to production. That the time there should be 1 minute and 30 seconds. And we'll cover this more later down in the video too when it comes to design. But the key part is to keep it simple. Do not over complicate personalization because that will be a nightmare once your store gets traction. You can also personalize this through softwares like Hello Custom for instance. But again, the key thing to actually automate stuff and to make things faster with either automation like Hello Custom or doing it yourself through given and proven templates and systems, which is what I've used, the key thing is to keep it simple. do not over complicate personalization, but just keeping either a name on a date as an added value bonus within a listing usually gives you a higher conversion rates and that's usually all you need in all the honesty. Now, there's a third way to actually do research and I would mainly recommended that you do this once you're going once you have a couple like a couple like design styles that you know are actually selling well in your shop. And what I would do in this case, I call this the speedy research because it goes really fast. So if I can just this is when when I've just searched for shop here in the search bar here. If I just go to this listing here and then I just go here. I basically just enter the shop that I want to look at and then I ensure that this says sort by most recent not by relevance which is relevance is usually the common filter that it selects. So I sort this by most recent because again when something sells on Etsy the listings gets renewed which means that it actually gets put up here. So you can actually get a sense on what actually sells by just looking at these first images here. And this is just to get a sense of what niches are they selling well in. What designs are they using when they're actually selling. This is a re research way that I do to but mainly because it goes so fast. So if you're if you're in the beginning stages, I re recommend to just focus on the master list and then the evergreen list. And then once you're rolling and you have a couple designs that you know are selling, then you can use this research. So let's see here. The rainbows is something here that works really well for these. And the the key thing about this whole thing too is that we can now see like for instance that the this one like the thankful t-shirt this is one is a thanksgiving shirt. So let's not use that. Let's go into another one. And again like usually when you do this kind of research it goes really really fast. So we can just easily go hop into one and just hop hop out of one. So we go here sort by most recent which is which is already is sorted by just to get a sense of what uh styles and niches they are actually in. teachers. Again, we should never do something like this because this refers to f the friends which is a copyrighted and trademarked IP. Never do something like that. Let's see here. Nothing really stands out to me here. Not like a design style or something like that. Let's take this one. This one is better. They have like these colleate fonts, but instead of like one thing that's really popular is the flower one instead of the collegiate letters, but these are ones are doing it with a leopard. Okay, this one is sort of by custom. So, we sort this by most recent. key to understand which ones are actually selling the best and also never obviously this never you never mess with the mouse. So these collegiate fonts seem to do really well and with Father's Day coming up since I'm recording this in June could be something but this this one stands out to me a lot. The leopard font and they've implemented that in the nurse niche too. So that type of design style seems to work really well. Again, we understand that the leopard type of style works really well for them, but also we just want to understand what what niches are they actually selling well in. And we can see several like dad and mom shirts at least one. Yeah. No, this is birthday stuff. A bit all over the place too with this one. Let's just choose one other just to get a sense here. Let's take this one. Sort by most recent. Let's see here. Raccoons. Raccoons. Engineer niches. So again, this goes really fast. What we do here is just search for the first of all like this one this the sarcastic one here. So angry a possum lover shirt awesome lover shirt maybe. And what I would do here in this case is to see if my bestselling design that I already have in this case like if I have a line art style design with a cursive font for instance or maybe like a grungy font. Is there a design like that in this niche? So again we sort by star seller physical items start swap out star for best in the search bar. Like if I have a line art style design with could I implement that within this niche to actually stand out and make it well and make it work. There's not that many bests sellers currently in this niche. So maybe I could add my line art style design and just have it say first of all I'm the light and make the aosum in a line art style instead of all these retro styles. That could be a way I could actually like make my design work in this niche. So that's how I would use the speed research just to like really fastly get a sense of how like the actual like what's working well from the shop. I could find two of the same type of design within the same niche. Go into the niche. If I have a design that I know works. If there's no design like that in the niche, I implement that in the niche. If there's a line art style, for instance, in that niche, I wouldn't implement that in niche and I would just go to the next shop. So this is the speed research. It goes really fast, but mainly use this once you have a couple designs selling in your shop because that's how you can f like quickly know if you want to add value to the niche and if you can add value to the niche because if there are two similar designs like yours in the niche that are selling really well, then you just go to the next because you're not adding too much like that much value to the niche itself. You can only really add value when you're adding new stuff into the niche or basically combining different elements to something new. So, if there's similar ones, but yours is so much better because it contains so many more different elements that are all bestselling, then you can also stand out like that. But if yours you look exactly the same or like a tad different from the other ones, then you're not adding value and thus you should not add that into the niche. The key thing is just to find make designs based on the list that we got here through our research and then then add that where that type of style hasn't been implemented before. And now some final tips to this whole thing is that you should always just when it comes to the research like just focus on consistent listing and testing like do one thing each day. Like if you're finding the shops that you want to have in your master list to take a whole day and just do that. Be really thorough about the ones you pick. If you speed it up you will do it will the same thing that that happened to me will happen to you and you will have to redo it. So be really thorough about the shops that you actually choose here. And the key thing is just just do one thing a day. If you do that, then you will make progress and you don't have to over overwhelm yourself. So you do one thing a day and if you haven't done like the master list, take a full day and just find the shops. Once you've done that, you've had a successful day. Another key thing is that we are all usually like kind of harsh on ourselves. We should not be that. Don't judge the design yourselves. It's really important to not like be tied to the designs that we actually make. Just create the designs using the list that we actually have made. Make it to the best of your abil abilities. Once you've made it using the different elements, put it out. No matter what you think like cuz again we're not doing this for ourselves. We're doing this for the customers. They are the ones purchasing from us not us. Which means that we should not judge it ourselves. We should just provide the value and let the market decide. This is so so important because I come across this all the time now and I did this myself in the beginning. But just don't judge the design yourself. It's so important to not do that. Create the value, provide it, and let the customer decide. A good thing too when it comes to this whole niche and research part is that you you want to watch out for for like trends because they can usually kickstart sharps like the political trends this year now in 2025 is really really popular and it's usually been been popular for for a couple years honestly. So it's probably not just this specific year because it's been popular in different periods and for for years but generally the type of designs that you make are really trendy because it happens currently within in the world. So, I think it's good to have some trendy designs, like in this case, the political niche designs to just kickstart your shop to get it going. But in order to actually make this a sustainable business that sells all throughout the year without like too much highs and lows and the niches you're in, focus on evergreen stuff that we talked about here, like the evergreen list that we want to do with the niches that happen every single day. So, evergreen niches with peak sales times. The caveat to it too is that it's good to use these big trends because they usually have such a surge of volume, especially the polit political niche because it's kind of volatile. It has such a surge of search volume in the beginning. So, in order to kickstart a shop, it can be good to actually like be in those two if you're a new shop. But in order to round out your shop, I would highly recommend to just follow the evergreen niches with the peak sales times and the master list. And as a final note, success is scalable once you have a bestselling design. Once you have a design in a niche, expand it to other niches to see like where it hasn't been implemented before. And that's how you can add value and scale out your business. But you it's always based on like a successful design where in in a in a niche that you dominated. But yeah, this was the research section. There's a lot to uncover in this one. So go back if there's a specific thing that specific thing that you're struggling with, go back to that section, just listen to that and take this in segments because this is a lot to digest, but it's super important, which is why it's so long and so in depth. So make sure to just re-watch this if you're struggling with any single part in this. All right, so in this lesson, we'll talk about trademarks and copyrights. This is arguably one of the most important aspects of an Etsy business because if you don't know about this and if you don't know know how it works, it can be really easy to actually lose your whole shop cuz generally if you get like four to five copyright infringements or trademark infringements, you generally, at least in my experience at least, that's what I've seen people have lost their shops over. So, it's really important to be knowledgeable about trademarks and copyrights. So, just so that you can always be on the safe end of this whole thing. It does not have to be complicated at all. But apart from that too, I will ensure to be really practical about this. And just to preface the whole lesson itself, I do want to say that I'm not a trademark attorney. I'm not like a trademark lawyer or anything like that. This is all just based on my experience on how I've been uh safe during my whole Etsy journey. Knock wood that it keeps on going like that. But generally like this has kept me safe doing these things. Now it's all about how to stay safe, compliant, and creative in this whole process. So let's see here. First off, we'll just have to talk about what trademarks actually are. So as are written here, what they basically do is that they protect brands from brand confusion. So basically, think of it like this. If you start selling a Nike shirt, it would look like it's actually Nike themselves that are actually selling it because it's their own property. Like it's their own logo. It's their own name. So the purpose of a trademark is to not cause brand confusion. So you can actually know that a Nike shirt is comes from Nike, not from like some other person that doesn't own the brand Nike or is affiliated by the brand Nike. Now there are different types of trademarks. Generally there are trademarks and service marks. So this trademark specifically here for the word level is for a service mark. This basically means that like any type of service like consultation services or I don't know if you have a car wash that's called level I don't know you can't use that for a service this one specifically if you want to look exactly what it is is for a solution but apart from that too it's also consultation services in like DSD systems and something like that but generally you can't use it for like this doesn't really apply to us since we are actually putting our designs on goods so but it's important to know that there are service marks and there are trademarks marks just generally for like goods and stuff like that. This is the one that is actually applicable to us. So if it's a service mark, it doesn't really apply to our business which is important to know. Now there are basically different statuses that a trademark have in their whole journey. When you actually file a trademark, it has to go through a lot of processes to actually get trademarked. Uh you have to file it basically with the United States patent and trademark office, the USPTO. And there are different statuses that that has to go through until it's actually like live and active. The first one is basically uh filed, live, and under examination. All of those three are different types of statuses, but generally you can like bulk them under the same status for like for our purposes cuz it usually looks like this for quite a while. So this is another trademark for like the world level again, but for like more like goods that we are doing. And the status for this, it's basically recently been filed since I'm recording this on the 17th of April in 2025. This one was filed on March the 21st, 2025. So, it's a newly filed um trademark that has to go through through the whole process in order to get actually trademarked. Now, when something actually like has like been approved by the board on the USPTO, there's a period where the public can actually oppose a trademark. And if some people have problems with this trademark being filed, that's when it gets this status which is called published for opposition. This means that some someone has actually opposed the specific trademark and the USPTO board has to go through and see if it's actually valid with the person's like like someone has to go through it make a case why it's not valid and then the usually like the person that's filing the trademark has to prove why it's actually a valid trademark that they are doing or that they are wanting wanting to get. That's the wording here. And that's why it's called publish for opposition. Now, when something actually has gone through the whole thing, let's say that it's gone through, there's been no people opposing a trademark. If it's live and active, this is how it actually looks. It has this badge and it says live registration issued and active. Active is the key word here. Now, when you actually file for a trademark, it's important to know that you get like a period where it's actually active. You don't like get it indefinitely. So you pay for a period to have it active. Once like the end of the whole cycle, so to speak, for the trademark is there or is up, you need to renew it. And there are some people that don't renew it. And sometimes like different trademarks can actually get like cancelled for different reasons. If it's actually going to be not like inactive or like the current status is inactive. That's it looks like this. So this is how dead trademarks look. It can be like dead, canceled or invalidated. And that's this is how that kind of trademark looks like. Now these are the different stratuses that are applicable to trademarks. The key thing to know about this whole process here is that from like like if you take this one that was filed in March 21 on March 21st in 2025, it generally takes about 18 to 24 months to actually like get a trademark finalized. It takes a long time to get it finalized. So if it looks like this, it does not mean that they have a like a trademark that's coming going to go through. And usually there's like a big window where you can actually use the wording itself until it's actually like trademarked. Now, as you've seen, I haven't like actually said anything about this yet, but with the way that you generally use trademarks is that you generally search the database from this p from this site here, the U United States Patent and Trademark Office because that's where you find out where all the trademarks are and stuff like that. But their whole system and like their whole how you search up different trademarks and they're like it's called like the test search base system or something like that is really unintuitive and it's really slow and it takes so much time and it's not worth it. The best way to search up trademarks in my opinion is to use flying research because like if I just search for the word mama here for instance, it gives me these different search results all based on what my exact query is. If you use the database on USPTO, you have to go through sites and sites because it's not really sorted by, at least not when I've used it now, might be later on, but not at this specific point in time. It doesn't really sorted by how relevant it is to your query. Because if I search for mama, then you might get like something like this underneath it, and it's all like gibbered. So, it's all like crammed together. You just have to go through it like every single page just to ensure that you're doing your trademark research thoroughly. But with fine research that's all out the window because if you search for mama or like something like cowboy the word you search for search for exactly will pop up in the at the top of the search searches here and underneath those you will see like less relevant queries which basically makes the whole research process for trademarks so much more efficient. So I would highly recommend to use flying research. It doesn't cost anything to use u their trademark search as of now. You basically just make a free account and then you can use the trademark search for free. It's really intuitive and it goes really fast to use it honestly when you use their trademark search. Now when it comes to trademarks there are different categories that you can be in. So let's say for instance that we want to make a trademark for the word I don't know for like this for this word the word cowboy. There are different goods and services that you can actually trademark stuff for. So if you make a trademark, it's not like you have a trademark for every like if if this word cowboy for instance here does not have the word trademarked for every type of goods there are. This one is specifically for work gloves in class 21. Now what I preach mainly here is to just mainly go where the biggest market demand is which is t-shirts and sweatshirts. And the class that's actually the most applicable to us is class 25. So when we search for something like the word cowboy, we can just press command F or control F if you're on a PC and just search for 25. And then you can see which of these trademarks are actually applicable to our store and our strategies and so forth. If we're only targeting t-shirts and sweatshirts, like apparel in and of itself, then it's only 25 that we really really have to worry about. So it's important to be aware that when you file a trademark, it's for a specific thing that you're trademarking it for, whether it's like books, uh jewelry, or whatever. They're in different classes and the one that's actually like really important for us POD sellers if we sell only like clothing it's class 25. Now there are basically different types of marks that you can have and the first one is standard character marks. This is basically a specific phrase or a sentence. An example of that would be for instance be the word wifey. So that's one word that's basically a unique word that's been trademarked by someone. So that's basically a word mark or a standard character mark without like any specific design or so. Then you have design marks. So for instance this the purpose of design marks is to protect like designs and logos and stuff like that. Example of this would be for instance the the Nike logo here. So something like this or the Disney logo like with the castle and everything or something like this. This is trademarked with the spec specific design itself. It's also worth noting that the word Nike and the word Disney are actually like really unique words in in of themselves and they they're most likely I know that Nike is probably trademarked by the company Nike, right? Most likely it is. Let's see here. Yes. And the word Disney is also that most likely because it's not like a common thing that say Exactly. So even the words themselves without the actual design itself is also trademark which is which which is also really worth noting just the actual like mark itself without any design styles attached to it. But apart from that they also have the design which is key to note. So also like this type of design they like the swish and like the castle itself is also trademarked. Now this one is a bit tricky to understand at least it took a while for me to understand it. So there are something called combination marks. What combination marks are is that they're often tied to brands or like universities are tied to the name the word Texas for instance. So if I just search for the word Texas here for instance there is a trademark just for the word Texas. But this is a big butt here. If we go into the trademark here we can see that it's basically just this is basically for the like the words Texas it's actually like trademarked. Now, the key thing to know if the if you're unsure about something, the key thing to know here is that you can actually go down here to the current owner's information, you see, okay, this one is actually trademarked by the University of Texas. And the purpose again of a trademark is to not cause brand confusion. Which means that when we actually list a Texas design, like you can't really trademark states, but when we list something with the word Texas, we can't do any type of design that is referencing the University of Texas. This really popular designs that say un that says University of Texas with this collegiate font or like Texas with like an established state or something like that for the university. We can't use that in our listings because they are referencing the the university. So, the key thing to know is to not reference the university when you're doing like state designs like this because that's where the problem occurs. Another example of this would be the trademark for cats. Let me see if I can find that. This one here, the word cat in and of itself is is not something that that can be trademarked. It's really commonly used, but there is a trademark for this. And again, it's a standard character mark. So, just the word itself. And what we do in this case is that we look at the current information like current owners information and we see that it's it's by Caterpillar Inc. And Caterpillar Inc. is a huge company that has these cranes and stuff like that. So if you go to the related properties information, we can actually see here that they have another trademark for this type of design, this one here, which is their typical design style for their whole logo. which means that as long as we're not referencing in any type of way like the cranes and stuff like that in our designs and if we just have a black cat that has no like correlation to this company then we're good. So the easiest way is just to look at the current owner and get like a clue is this by like the university if it's a state or if it's like if it's like cat for instance with the word cat it's related to like the owner's actual property which is like for instance with this is like the cranes and stuff like that that caterpillar ink has which is really common for this type of logo and you can obviously use like a like a black cat shirt and stuff like that because that has nothing to do with this with this brand itself. So those are combination marks. Another type of trademark here is called certification marks. And examples of those are like you can't use for instance the fairy trade logo or like the vegan society logo or stuff like that in your designs. They are basically meant to ensure the quality of the services provided. So if you have a shirt that says like vegan, it might actually not be a vegan shirt, which means that you can you can't use a like that type of design like the vegan logo design. Let's see here. Vegan society. Let's see here. you can't use this type of type of logo here because they actually own the logo and it's a way it is so basically a way for them to ensure that the product itself is certified vegan. So you can't use something like that in your designs because it's a certification. Another type of certification is sometimes professions which is why it's just key to always search for the thing that you're actually like selling on Etsy before you actually list it. A key thing here is like the word BCBA which stand for like behavior analyst and stuff like that. You can actually use the word wording BCBA in a design and sell it on a shirt. If you look here, it's basically let's see if we can find it. Yeah. So, this is certification mark as it says here. It's a way for their their whole like board and stuff like that to ensure that someone that is actually have that title is actually qualified to have that title. So sometimes you have words like that that are not like that is just a profession which seems obvious but that are actually needed to be approved by by their board like the board of behavior analysts before you can actually be call yourself be a BA and so this goes heavily into the things that we can actually sell on Etsy which means since this is a certification itself just like the vegan logo here that we just saw we can't use the wording like either use like in this case we can use the logo and in In this case, we can't actually use the wording BCBA on a shirt. Even though it's just a profession, we might think that we can't use those that's wording because it's related to a certification mark. A similar one to this, for instance, just to give another example when it comes to professions, is the world word realtor. This is not a certification mark per se, but you can't call yourself a realtor unless you've been like approved by the I think the realtor board in the US. And this one is also like trademark for the word itself. And it's mainly because like the people that actually hold the trademark is the National Association of Realtors, which means that you can't sell designs with the world word realtor on them. Again, the realtor is a similar mark, but this would mainly go under the collective marks. To be able to call yourself a CPA and have that like on a shirt and stuff like that, you need to actually be get like approval for that. And the same thing with the world realtor which means that we can't use that on other designs. It's really similar to the BCBA one but that one is technically a certification mark but the the thing just to make it easy is that if we are posting for instance professions it's key to just search for okay I want to post a realtor shirt. Okay there's a lot of like realtor trademarks here. We search for the class 25. And since we mainly focus on the US as our target market, we only look at this one and then we see, okay, we can't use the word realtor because there's actually a trademark for that. Same thing with the behavior analyst profession, you can't do that either because there's a certification mark for it. So as if there's any type of trademark, just stay away from it. Just keep in mind that for some combination marks like the word carrot is obviously okay since it's only in regards to Caterpillar Ink. And same thing with the like with the state Texas. If you do state church, as long as you're not referencing the University of Texas, then you're good. Now, we'll get into this more later on too, like the specifics on copyright, but the key things to know is that you can't use like popular brands and logos. So, like Disney, Mercedes, or Harry Potter is not is definitely off limits. And anything related to those brands. So, an example of this would be like the Harry Potter font, which is really distinguishable as the Harry Potter font or like the Disney font like we saw here. Like you can't use a font like this because it's way too similar to the actual Disney property. So never do anything too alike someone else's intellectual property because again we're focusing on actually building a long sustainable business here and not doing any uh anything shady and stuff like that. So ensure to not not use anything alike anyone else's property. Another thing that we can that we can't really use is celebrities licenses. So, for instance, during the like Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, something that was really really popping on Etsy was shirts with like Johnny Depp's faces on it and quotes from that trial. We can't use that since that's her own likeness. However, like if it's a dead person and it's after 17 years after like they lived, there's a good chance that person's likeness is in the public domain and you can actually use that. So, for instance, like shirts with Jes like with depictions of like Jesus and stuff like that would be okay. Now, an obvious thing too is that in order to stay stay compliant, and we'll get into this more later on with in the copyright section of this is to avoid creating designs that are too similar to other people's designs. What I mean by this, like if I just search for t-shirt here and let me just sort this by physical items so I can just see t-shirts actually. Like let's say I make something like this one here and I just change the cursive font underneath. I've not added any value uh to the whole platform itself. I just copied it and it's way too similar to this design. So, there's a good chance that we can actually get a copyright infringement from this shop if they choose to do that. So, never do anything that's way too similar. Always in sure to follow the steps that I outlined in the research process by combining different best-selling elements from different listings and different niches and combining them into something new and add those into niches so that you're actually adding value to the platform. That's the only way that you can actually make this work in and of itself, too. And as I mentioned, like with the whole stuff that you actually can't use, you can't use fonts associated with intellectual property, for instance, like the Harry Potter font or like the Disney font. Now, there are some exceptions to this and some gray areas that I really want to cover. A big thing for instance is that you can actually sell shirts with like Trump shirts or like uh presidential shirts because when someone actually enters office they wave the right of publicity which means that you can actually post like shirts and designs with the current president. The key thing to know is that once they are out of office that doesn't really apply from my own knowledge at least. So you cannot like for instance now in 2025 Trump is in office so you can use shirts with him because his he waved his right of publicity once he took office. So you can make designs and Trump shirts for instance which is okay but when he's out of office you can't do that. Now an important thing to know here too is that single word trademarks can be confusing honestly and it's really like hard to understand them. The key thing to know is like if we if it's a super common word that that's really often used in the English language. Okay, so this is a great example. Like if this just says kind here, that means that we technically can't use just the word kind on a on a t-shirt. But the easiest way to just avoid this since kind is a really common word. Like I wouldn't use this only on t-shirts. What I would do here is I would use it in a longer sentence like be kind to someone or some some other type of phrase that is popular but it's a longer sentence like single word trademarks. As long as you're using them in a longer sentence or a phrase then it's okay generally as long as as it's a common term. So yeah, I would just avoid to use them like alone and I just just use them in a longer sentence to be safe. The key thing to know is that if you use unique wordings, even though they might be used like a unique name can be like wifey or hubby or stuff like that that's commonly used in like the slang terms, but like it's not the same as wife or husband. Like if you husband and wife is common, whereas wifey and hubby are slang, which means that if you use the word wifey or hubby in a longer sentence, there's still a good chance that you can get a takedown for that because the wording itself is really unique. But it's not the same if the word wife or husband was trademarked and you use those in longer sentences because those are commonly used and have been commonly used for a long while. So those are definitely more okay compared to wife and hubby. And in the case of wife and hubby, I would never even use those words in and of itself because they are too unique and you can get even though you might use them in a longer sentence, you can still get a take for that because someone holds a trademark for it and it's a really unique word. A key thing to know too is that when content itself becomes usable 70 years after the last author has died. For instance, if there's two different authors and the and one dies first, the the other one dies after that, the last one basically of the authors 70 years after their passing, it goes into the public domain, which means that we can actually use it. An example of this would be like the original Mickey Mouse drawing where you have like the black and white version of Mickey Mouse that's currently in the public domain. I would still though be really not even go near anything related to Disney because they're so vigilant about actually like going after people that infringe trademarks. I would like you never mess with the mouse. It's a common saying because they are so harsh about it. So never even do anything close to Disney. That's just an example of something that has actually gone into the public domain 70 years after the last author has died. And as a good rule of thumb here to avoid trademark issues, just make sure that you just search for the phrase itself. If you are planning to do like I don't know like a realtor shirt, search for the world realtor before you even designing it to ensure that you're compliant because this is really really important and it's it just takes like a like 30 seconds with flying research to do this. Goes really really fast. A key thing to know is that when someone gets a trademark infringement on Etsy, there actually has to be someone who actually files a claim or like files a report on your shop. So someone has to actively do that when it comes to Etsy. This also means that there are so many so many trademark infringements listings on Etsy. This means that even if you search for Disney shirts, there are pops up a ton of Disney shirts. This does not make it okay for you to sell Disney shirts as well. And generally people get their whole shops taken down because of this after a while. I've just and I've also like noticed a pattern. Again, this is not certain. This is just something that I noticed myself, but generally like in January, most takedowns happens when it comes to Disney stuff specifically. So, just because someone else has listed it and has gotten success with it, that doesn't make it okay for you to list it as well. And a key thing to know too is that if the owner of a trademark files like a report on your shop, you can't really do anything about it. Like, you can contact that person and see if they want to like work with you. Generally, they don't they don't really want to do that. Sometimes they do if they are like really responsive and stuff like that, but generally not. Generally, you just have to like you can't fight the trademark itself. You just have to take the L and just move on, which is why it's so important to always do the trademark research before you're even designing it. So, you know that you're in the clear. Now, we'll tackle the copyright stuff. So, what is copyright? Well, copyright basically protects original works, graphic, text, and illustrations in our cases here. And the key thing to know is that when you actually create something like a design on Canva and stuff like that, you automatically own the copyright when you are when you just made it. So once you've actually made something on Canva, you automatically hold the copyright to it. The key thing to know to be able to be in the clear when it comes to copyright is to as I mentioned earlier, don't copy designs from others and make like really really small changes like that. You just take a font and change it and then you the design itself is the exact same. Don't do that. Add value to the platform. That's the easiest way to just mitigate all these issues. And like don't replicate exact layouts, fonts or character styles. Like take different bestselling elements from different listings and create something new with the elements that you actually found. That's the key thing. You pick like one bestselling element here, one bestselling element here, and one here. And then you create something new with all those elements combined. That's how you do it because that's how you're adding value to the platform. Now, this is an import an important part. When you actually get a copyright claim from someone, you it's actually another shop that thinks that okay, you stolen their design. You obviously might disagree with this. And the key thing to know with copyright claims compared to trademark claims, you can fight the tra the copyright claims. So you can actually counter it. So ensure that you always do that. There's like a couple days that you can actually do this when it happens. So ensure that you're actually that you actually fight the copyright claim once you get it. Because the key thing is that once you do that, the person that that's actually filed the report has to back their copyright up with some documents. And if the claimant doesn't have the proper paperwork for that, the actual like copyright claim that they made will get dropped. That's the key thing to know here. And as a general rule of thumb, as I wrote here, it's always just safer to create original works based on bestselling elements like I mentioned earlier earlier. and that that the whole research part of this this big course is based on another part to this too that I really don't recommend that you do is just to take an element from Creative Fabrica or that you p purchase on Etsy, list it on product and then just listing it as it is on Etsy because there's so many people that are stealing stuff from each other and then reselling it. And if you purchase something from Creative Fabrica or Etsy that's actually stolen, that means that you don't have the right to actually sell that on a shirt. So ensure to always don't just buy straight like images and stuff like that from Creative Fora or that you purchase like designs from Etsy. Never do that and then just take that and put it up on Etsy. Ensure that you're adding stuff to the to the design itself like add text elements so that you so it actually looks original. And don't just take an element in my opinion and just add a personalized element to it. ensure that you're actually changing the design itself with some text to stay safe when it comes to this because this is not a fun part of Etsy, but it's all over the place. And the key thing to know is that people are copying each other left and right. But in order for us to stay safe to to have a long-term business, we need to add value to the whole platform. And when we just do that, all of these issues goes away. So if you get assets like I always get my asset from Creative Fabria or I use my design for it if I use AI. I always just ensure that if I if I get a specific asset especially from Creative Fabria or Etsy I ensure that I add text and stuff like that to it. So the design itself looks new. You always want to change it around a bit so it's actually a new design. And again, the best way to to go about this is to ensure that you take one bestselling element, one bestselling element from this from this listing here, one bestselling element from this listing here, and another one from this here, and then you combine it into something new. Now, I also want to give some real world examples of like copyright infringement. So, if we just take this Jeep car here, if you make a design with a car that looks just like the Jeep car without the Jeep logo, that means you're still infringing on it because they hold the copyright to this type of design cuz there's a person somewhere that's actually designed this vehicle. Just like previously, as I mentioned with the text and illustrations, when someone actually designed this car, that means that they hold the copyright to it automatically. So ensure to not do anything like this because like you can do a truck but you can't do like that's a general truck outline. But it's key to know that you can't use the Jeep design itself and other cars similar to this. Another example of this which is really rampant on Amazon is like these type of designs where you make dad pregnancy announcement shirts and it says dad level unlocked and like a controller here in the middle. This is blatant. This B basically looks exactly like the PS4 controller and you can never do that because again there's someone who actually designed the PS4 controller like I think and Sony holds the copyright to the design of the controller. So you can't make this because someone else has actually designed the controller itself. So you can't use that in your designs like this. This is not okay. And even though that that they have it up again, it doesn't make it okay for you to list it. That's the key part to know when it comes to this stuff. Another important thing to know too is that sometimes there are product names that are actually copyrighted. An example of that is the word onesie, which is actually trademarked by the company called Gerber. So when we sell onesies, we have to name it something else. So what I'm referring to is this one here, Gerber Children's Wear has trademarked the word onesie, which means that we can't use it in our listing. We can't use it as a variational name in our listing and stuff like that. Can't use the word at all in our listings. When we sell onesies, it's key to understand that we have to instead use the word like baby bodysuit or just bodysuit. We just name it something different compared to the trademark word. And apart from that too, which might seem again like obvious words like the word smiley, the word waifu, the word hubby, these are actually trademarked. And a really common thing that's really again all over Etsy is to use like shirts with smileys on them. So if you just search for smiley shirt here, you'll see a ton of smiley shirts. And this is not okay because there's a there's a corporation called the Smiley Corporation which actually holds the copyright to these types of designs where it looks like this and there are like tons of them. So never ever do anything with the word smiley or like any smiley related stuff on it because that is trademarked by the Smiley Corporation. A key thing to know about this too when it comes to this just the wording like you can't use any trademark stuff in either the design the the titles or the tags or the description. Nowhere in the design can you ever use trademark stuff. So ensure that there's nothing in the tags, the title, the design or the description. Now there are content policy guidelines. So what I found honestly like this with Etsy is that implementing Merch by Amazon's content policy guidelines has kept me safe during my whole journey. So these are actually the content policy guidelines from Merch by Amazon. But ensuring that I'm not doing any designs involving anything like this has always kept me safe. Uh, so I would really recommend that you also do that. So any design that is like hate related or violence or intolerance related or like graphic violence or victims related, I would stay away from that. Uh, and obviously sexual content involving children or like childlike characters. I would ne never do anything like that, but that's probably the most obvious one. Profanity on youth products. Like I mean sometimes these US-based designs are really like raw and stuff like that. Never do anything like that on like youth products. And the the main thing that's all honestly like all over Etsy a lot of times especially like with the LA wildfires and like the um that happened I think was last year and when the Hawaiian wildfires happen and stuff like that you don't like for me at least from a moral standpoint I don't want to profit off human tragedies and this is specifically laid out even in Amazon's guidelines like merch by Amazon's guidelines so I never post anything regarding like 9/11 or like the Hawaiian wildfires or like the um LA wildfires and stuff like that and that's always kept me safe because you never know when stuff like when new policies happen. But just ensuring that I'm just abiding by Merch by Amazon's guidelines on Etsy and Merch by Amazon makes it so much easier because it's kept me safe during the whole time if they start implementing like guidelines just about that too. So I would recommend to avoid that. That's kept me safe. Apart from that like misleading, harmful or illegal content. So like if there's some kind of information for instance that you post that is like widely regarded as like misinformation and stuff like that, putting that on t-shirts could be like a really bad thing. So I would really recommend to not do that on t-shirts. And obviously like sexually obscene or inflammatory content, I would never do something like that. But just basically following not doing stuff that is really out there is stuff that I would just avoid when it comes to Etsy. It's better. And generally honestly what I found when I've done the research part correctly by getting the masters and so forth the top sellers aren't even close to anything like this. They're usually like hobbies and stuff like that different or like events that happen during the year that is nowhere even related to anything of this. So, if you do the research part correctly, all of this, like the whole thing with the content policies and stuff like that, all this just goes out the window because you don't even have to think about it because it's not really in the top selling listings if it's established shops you're looking at. That's been my experience at least. If you just follow the steps that I outlined here, it makes it so much easier because it's important to know about this stuff, but you kind of like you kind of avoid it by doing the right steps, so to speak. Okay. So when it comes to like Etsy SV specific risks, I think it's really important to know that in my experience, I've seen that like Etsy removes shops after like four to five infringements. So it doesn't take a lot to lose your shop, which is why it's so so important to be really vigilant about like when you are going to design something, search for the trademark first before you even design it to ensure that you are compliant because once you've really lost a shop, I have haven't really seen many people that has been able to recover their shops. It's really hard to do that. in generally you can't. So always create your like designs with a mindset of avoiding any conflict regarding IP whether it's copyright or trademarks. Search for the trademarks and ensure that you're adding value to the platform and then you're good. And as a bonus tip too, something that happened like in I think it was 2022 or 2023 was that there was an accident with a purchaser that bought some kids clothing. Uh and the kids clothing included drawstrings and the kid got really injured from that. And I think there was a lawsuit against Etsy for that. And after that they actually took down like for every listing that had the word kids pajamas in them was taken down because they thought it included the word drawstrings. So any clothing related stuff that is any kids clothing related stuff that has drawstrings is banned from Etsy. You can't sell that on Etsy. So the key thing to know too that if it's wrong, something is wrong with flagged because this happened to my store. Like I had a hoodie listing and it show strings and one of the variations was a kids was like a onesie for this specific listing and they actually took it down and I then just talked to the team. I think I went through the support channel and talked and just were were really persistent like that and just told them that my items does not include drawstrings because again if you look in printify I just provided the photos of the actual one that I'm selling like the rabbit skins 4424 if you just show them pictures of this you can see that that there are no drawstrings in this specific image here and proving it to them and being really persistent made them actually take down for that listing itself because they thought it had drawstrings h because the main listing image had hoodie with the drawstrings on it. But since I proved to them that this specific variation in the listing did not have it, they they removed that whole takedown itself for that specific listing. So if something like that happens, if I if it's wrongly flagged, like it was for me at one point, just be persistent with them. Don't take no for an answer and just be persistent and prove to them that what you're doing is compliant with Etsy as long as you're not like selling stuff, kids stuff with withdraw strings, obviously, but you don't do that because you're following this course here. So, if something is wrong with the flag, be persistent and just explain to them with images that you're not selling kids clothing with drawstrings. And as some final advice, just to sum this whole part of the course up, use tools like flying research to check all your sayings and designs. Flying research is, in my opinion, the easiest way to do it because it goes so fast to actually find the trademark you're looking for instead of having to go through pages and pages of almost like unrelated trademarks compared to your query. So use flying research as you're basically going into the design part because you've found something that you want to design for. Search for the trademark before. Please do that and that if you just do that it takes like 15 to 30 seconds once you have the account then you're good to go. Always go with the market demand is but always ensure to stay original by adding value to the platform. Don't like take something change a font and then the other parts of the design is exactly the same. add value to the platform by combining different bestselling elements from different listings into something new. As we talked about in the research part in the research part of this, if you just follow that, then you're good. Just understand that if you're playing it safe, that's the only way that you can protect yourself for the long term. And if you're unsure about anything regarding like if a different like sometimes cars can be really hard to to like understand if this is if the card that you actually made if you use AI for instance like my designs for that if you use that and you're unsure if there's anything related to trademarks or copyrights in that design. What you can do here you can use use the free chat version like and just upload the the image here like if I just take a design car shirt if I just take a design from this for instance here. Let me just sort sort this again by physical items. And then I take let's just take this one for instance. Then I can just go to chatbt put it in here and just ask it something like this. Is this car related to any copyrighted or trademarked IP? Something like this. Is this car related to any copyrighted or trademarked IP? And this one looks really much like that. This one looks like the Nissan Skyline GTR and the R32, which would would basically like again Nissan then owns the copyright for this model. So, I would definitely not use it. And if you're unsure like I was with this picture, you can just ask Chad GPT about it. And if it says that there's that they can't really find anything or they're unsure and they can't really find anything but they're unsure that you should talk to a trademark lawyer. I've gotten responses like that before. That just gives you better knowledge to understand if you can list it or not. Because if it says something that like that generally like as a general approach to this whole thing, I'm just going to hide and listen and list them because it doesn't look like anything. I can't make the um parallels myself in my head. And in those cases where it's unsure or it says that it can't find anything, I just put it up. But if if it's like this where it's clearly referencing like the Nissan Skyline GTR and the R32 model, I would definitely not put it up myself because this is infringing on that copyright. [Music] So now we're talking about design. My whole approach to this is a researchedbased approach because one of the most fundamental things that we have to ask ourselves which is why is the one of the like earliest parts of the course is why are we even doing this in the first place? Is this because we want to have a creative outlet or is it because we want to make it a business? Like personally, I wanted to make this a business and I really needed to make this a business because of the where I was. Which is why I'm fully like in the right here. I'm all in on just making like focusing on all the designing and everything like that to make it as profitable as possible and just focus on it as a business. On the very left side here, you focus on it with an artistic approach. you make things that are important to you with your own artistic spirit. I am not at all when I'm approaching Etsy approaching it this way because doing it that way in my own experience with music at least usually comes with a big attachment to the outcome. So I just want to preface this whole design part and just say that I'm all in on the right part here to make it a business. And if you are too and you want to really want to make your print on demand business on Etsy a business, then I highly recommend that you still watch this because I'm all in on making this a business, not as a creative outlet. It it's just important to to understand that when you're creating something for other people, we can make it a business when we're creating stuff for ourselves. We can use whatever we want and we can use it as a creative outlet. But in this case, we're only going to focus on making this a business and creating designs for other people. So why does research matter? Well, research matters because designs based on personal taste, they rarely work consistently. But if we understand what the actual market wants, we can provide that to the customer in new and exciting ways. But we always base it on what they want, not what we want ourselves. Because if we do it that way, the likelihood that we that we can actually make the sales are a lot higher compared to just going off of our own taste. And in all due honesty, like a lot of my success, most of my success and if not all my success with this Etsy POD business comes because I make researchbased designs. You don't want to make this a guessing game. You want to focus on where the actual like what actually people want if you want to make this a business. Like if that's the outlook that you have kind of like I did, then it's more important to just focus on research based designs compared to your personal favorites. In my own opinion at least, if you do it from your own personal taste, you have to 10x the volume because you still have to get to the same result. you still have to get to a place where you can actually like make this business work and get consistent sales. The problem with that though if you go off your own personal taste is that it will like most likely take you 10 times the work to actually find a design that sells. So let's say if if you make a 100 designs, 100 individual designs in this case, and you have one that sells, a person that goes purely off of their own taste, they would most likely have to do a thousand of those designs to get to the one design that actually sells. Unless again there you're the exception and you have a taste that matches the actual customer expectation and what they want then it's definitely different. But like I'm not like that. I'm just like you on the other end. I knew nothing about design. I couldn't design for like I couldn't design at all. I I can't even draw. So the only way that I was able to make this work was to make like is focused on research based designs. And that comes from with having no design experience at all and from someone who I can't even draw. So if that's you on the other one too, don't fret. you can also make this work cuz you then you're just like me. But the key thing to this whole part whole first part of the design master class here is to just understand that you want to that you got to treat this as a business not a guessing game. Now we have previously made a master list and it's so so important and it comes really handy when we do this now when we start designing. So the first thing that we're going to do is start with our bestselling elements list. Then we got to mix and match the proven elements to create something new. And this is all based on the research that we made prior to this. Which is why before we even go into the design, we start with research. As an example to this, we found out that the circular layout worked really well. Which is why that's one of the type of layouts that we that we entered in elements list. And what I'm referring to is this kind of style in a design. This one, this one, or this one. A circular layout works really well. You have text above, text underneath, and text in the middle or an icon in the middle. H and it has the circular layout either with two circles. So one outer circle and one inner circle like this one here or you can just look like a circle without the actual like lines. So that's one thing. Then we also for instance we found that the from the master list here we found out that there are other things that we can combine it with because we can have that circular layout but we can also use line art as an icon in the middle because that's a proven design style that we found in other places. So, for instance, with this type of style, like the book here, it's very line art, so to speak. This one also uses line art, but it's in a completely different niche. And this one is also using line art. So, line art itself works in and of itself just separately. But if we use that inside of the circle, so we use that instead of the text here, we know that both of these elements work separately, but when we combine them, we can actually make something new. And the third thing is that we can either we can use either like Retro Grenji or like a cursive font. Like we can either use a font like this because we found that the cursive font works really well overall on Etsy. But we can also use something like this where it has this distressed texture to it either like this or like this or like this. So some something kind of distressed on the actual like text itself in the design. So for a design like this, we would have line art in the middle and then we can have text above and text underneath. And this could be like either retrogy or it can be cursive, whichever works. And that's how we actually combine the things to make something new to the platform by adding value through researchbased designs. And I'll show you this step by step as we go. But that's the whole thinking and that's the whole game. As long as there's nothing like that in the niche, that's when we actually create the design. So, uh the use of the master list in this case is that it just fasttracks the whole research process so we can just understand what to actually make in our designs. But that's the importance of already having the master list before you even design. Now as I mentioned like we got to create value through combinations. So as I mentioned you got to look at the niche and see are these already being used. So if we think of the like circular outline with lard in the middle and then text above text underneath in a retro grungy font is there any design like that? If we for instance take the book niche as an example book shirt sorry not book niche and then we actually want to see which type of designs are actually selling here. So, we sort by physical items. Since I live in Sweden, I always got to make sure that it says delivered to the US since I live in Sweden. If you live in another country than the US, you also got to make sure that it says delivered to the US. Otherwise, the search results are skewed. Then, we press the star seller filter. We swap out star for best here in the search bar. So, we only get the best sellers for this given keyword. Now, let's see here. Are there any designs like that with that circular outline? Let's see here. This one is a bit circular, but not the way that we're intending to do it. Plus, this might be cop like a copyright or trademark infringement because of the topic that they're doing it on. So, I'm not so wouldn't count that. This one is a bit circular, but not in the same way. This also seems that it might be like um copyright infringement because of the throne of glass reference. Again, we're thinking a design, just to remind you, something like this with line art in the middle, text above, text underneath. That's what we're having in mind to create for this niche. But before we even do the design, we got to ensure that we find something that's if there's designs like that. We want to we don't want to add that into the niche because they're already established and working within the niche. So let's see here. This one kind of has it. Let's see here. But this is with Greek references cuz that's Yeah, that's very Greek. Also because Percy Jackson also seems to be copyright infringement. I think at least that it could be like a copyright infringement to something cuz this is Percy Jackson. And again, we're thinking of making something like one more chapter. So something like this and but circled. So let's go even more in depth and just write one more chapter shirt sort by physical items and the star cell filter. And as you saw, I double checked that it says delivered to the US, which it already did. Through this research, I can see that no, there's no design like that in the niche. So what we can do now is add value by adding the circle design layout that we had in mind. So now we'll start designing. And a big tip before we even start that that actually so don't forget is don't combine more than three different elements at once because if you make it too complex like people won't understand it and people got to be able to understand it right as they see it in search. So the first method of design is what I call the manual method. It's the one that I've used the most apart from like starting to use AI a lot now and it's is basically the main design method that I've used to grow my whole store into where I am today. Uh so this is the first method and that's involving using Creative Fabria and Canva together. So if I now need some paperback books so something that looks something like this. So then we just go to Creative Fabria here. We search for line art book. Something like that. Let's see if we can find that. Something like this. Perfect. You can see this one. That one is actually perfect. Let's just take that one. See here. Okay. So, now we got the first image itself from from creatia. Now, we need two different fonts. Either like a retro grungy font kind of like kind of like this or a cursive font, which we also found was really working really well. Let's take a cursive font for this one. Let's take this lucky font. Okay. So, now we got that. Then we just head into Canva here. I press create. And then I always use my dimensions as 4500 by 5400. That's what Amazon uses and it just works really well for Etsy 2. So I just stuck to always using that with what whichever design that I actually do. So go here. Then we just open up here. Now we want let's see we got an SVG. That's perfect. So that's that one. And then we press T to add a text element. We go up here and then we say upload font. We need Canva Pro in order to upload fonts. But I highly recommend to get that to upload fonts because it really really does make a difference. And usually with Canva, you can't find you can actually find like a a like a great amount of fonts. But the only thing with that is it takes a lot of time to actually find those fonts. So let's see here. I guess I got it there. Perfect. So now we even got the uh font itself, the lucky one. Okay. And now we need to make two circular outlines kind of like we saw before. So, what we do here is we go to elements. We go to see all shapes. Let's see here. We only want the border for this. Let me see if I can remember how to do this. Let's see here. Let me just search for circle. Let's see. So, we what we can do here is just search for black circle outline. So, we just take the circle. Sorry, I kind of blanked on how to do this. So, you what we do here as you saw, we go to elements. We go to press for we add a circle like this. And then we choose just a black color for this. And then we go here and choose the no color. And then we add borders to this. So something like this. And there we go. That's how we got this that circle outline. So and then we do something like this. And then we need an inner one as well. So I just copy this by pressing command C and then command V. Since I'm on a Mac, this would be control C and then control + V if you're on a Windows. So let's see here. Let's just do this. There we go. And then we got to go to position to back. So it's at the very back. So I can actually access these. Then we go here and just write one more like this. Then we go to effects. Let's see what they're there. There they are. Curve. It one more. And then we go to the bottom and just write chapter. Something like this. Maybe looks a bit weird with the inner circle there since the age is kind of like cutting it. So let's just make this smaller. See if that works. Doesn't really work. Again, with every design, you kind of have to like fiddle around to make see what works, what doesn't work. Let's do it in like this instead. We have to make it like that. Don't we just make this a little bit smaller? Something like that, maybe. Okay. And then we do this and this here. And usually I want to see how it looks on both. So, it looks good on both black and white. So, I always make the background something like this. Oh, sorry, something like this with a teal color. You can use whichever color you want as long as you can see like how it looks on both black and white. and whoopsy daisy. So I mean border and then whites. And when we use whites, we don't never ever want to use fff. We always want to use f5 f5 f5 or ff. The reason for that is that this is actually a bit has a bit of a gray tint on it. And that means that the production partner has to create an underbase for the print itself. So and the underbase is always in pure white. So this color here. Then on that base they actually print the color itself. If you just use the FFF, they can print the same color on the same thing, which means that you won't have an underbase, which means the print will not look as clear as it can be if you actually use an off-white instead, which is why I recommend using either this color or this color when you're designing. It will make the whites look crisper. Let's see. We can make this This was supposed to be an SVG, right? Let's see if we can make this white here in Canva. If you upload SVGs like I did, you usually should be able to actually change. Yeah, exactly. Something weird happened there. Let's see. So, we go here. Since this an SVG, I can then just change the color to white. That's what I wanted to do. And we want the off-white for this one, too. And there we go. That is our first design. Also, when we make the designs, we want to make it big. Like, we want to make it easy to to just put them on the chart itself. But we can use a phrase like one more chapter here for this. And this is how we actually would add value to the niche because we know that the circular layout, this one looks really, really good. It works really, really well from our bestselling elements list. And then we know that the cursive font works really, really well. And then we know that line art works really, really well. Now, we just combine all three to add value to the niche. And again, I wouldn't buy this myself. This is this is a key thing that I'll get more into later on in this in this part in the design part here. But again, like I'm not the one buying it. And in all the honesty, like most of my designs that I don't like myself has always been the ones that actually sell the best, whereas the ones that I like myself has almost never really sold. So just create at this phase, just create it and be done with it. Don't don't judge it yourself. Just create it like this and then you're done. You create a you create a white version like this, then you want to create a a darker version that will work on lighter garments. So the white one will work on darker garments, but we also need to make sure that it works on lighter garments as well. So we got to make it in black as well. and that we just do that by just changing all the colors to be black instead of white. And there we go. That's how we got our first design using the manual method. Now, the great part about doing it this way is it's worked for me consistently and it's so easy to create like scalable designs like this because let's say the design in and of itself worked really really well. Let's just call this one more chapter. So then we can just have it say I have no shelf control. Let's see here. Because there's another type of design that worked really really well as well in the book that's called where it just says I have no shelf control. I can just show you that in a sec. Go to effects. Fix the curvature here. There we go. This is a really popular design that always have this sold really really well. Let me see if I can find it. It should be here. This one specifically. And as you can see where like I always always filter this so I can actually get the results that I want. So this one is what the one that I'm referring to. It's also in the master list. But I have no shelf control. And the key is if I actually found that this design itself worked really well, I could just change the wording on it fixed. So it's like works within the circle of course. So like the age doesn't cut here. But the whole idea is that you can just take the design, change the wording, and then you have a whole brand new design and you can really scale your shop doing it this way. It's the way that I've scaled my shop primarily. Okay. So that was the first design method, the the manual design method. It's the one that I've primarily used in my own shop. Now we'll get into design method number two which is the AI powered design method. We use reverse prompting with AI to actually like get our uh designs in this case because again I'm not a AI engineer or like AI professional and I don't really know how to make good prompts myself just writing it out. So, it's better to have chat in that case do it for you. And it's the way that I've been able to make sales with designs that I made one day and then once I actually list it, I get the sales the day after. This has happened several times and this is specifically on Amazon merch, but it would definitely like work on Etsy too. Now, the first part that we do is that we got to use chat to describe the prompt for us. We have it describe a design. I'm going to show you show you the step by step in a sec, but we have this the chachi pet like describe a design prompt for us. Then we generate the designs using my designs or AI other AI tools. My preferred method of generating AI designs is my designs because of the like how easy it is to use. You can do everything in one single platform which is really really powerful. H JGT is also great to use nowadays. But my designs is the primary tool that I use for all of my designs. I also have a coupon code that you can use at checkout for my designs. So if you use the code Andreas at checkout, you get 25% off any plan you choose. and it really helps us to support the channel if you do that. But either way, my designs is the primary tool that I use to create my own AI powered designs. But overall, using reverse prompting with AI and getting designs this way, the perks is that it it goes you can make really unique and intricate designs that takes either a long time to make or in my case, since I'm not a designer, make designs that I couldn't even make myself even if I wanted to because they're so intricate and so unique and so hard to do. It goes super super fast to make it. You can make really unique and great designs doing them as long as you're doing them correctly and actually adding value to the platforms. And a great way to do it, which we'll talk about in a sec too, is that we can actually combine different layouts together. Like we can combine the circle layout with like for instance like the retro grungji layout to actually create something new to the whole design itself. And we can use AI to do that fully for us. So I'm going to show you that how to do that now. So we are talking about using again like this is the first design that we made in Canva using the metal method. Now what we can do first here is that we just go here and we just screenshot this. We then go to chatbt. We ask it please or describe this image in detail as a prompt. Highly recommend to use the latest chatbt model model for this. So the 4.0 Oh, and then ask you to say change the wording so it says one more on the text above and then chapter in the text below. Remove the inner text and replace it with a line art book. Have the book look something like this. And what we can do here is just let's see here. Let's find the line art book. We do this. And then we then we got to fix a few things that comes with doing this because the background is a problem here. We want it to be a plain black background. So we got to say make change the prompt so it's on a plain black background and make the prompt good for AI designing if that makes sense. Okay. So it's a bit weird still. Let's let's just try this and see if it works. I mean it's a bit too much text here. Usually I want something really simple and easy when it comes to my let's see here. Let's try this. And then we go to my designs. We go to the dream AI here. And then we just copy this into the actual Dream AI. And then I primarily use two different models here because again you can think of these models as different cuz they treat each prompt differently which gives us happy accidents because sometimes you find that some kind of model gives us a lot better of a result compared to the other one and they give you stuff that you didn't even think of in the first place. So think of these as different like color palettes to spark both your creativity and but also to give you just different results. So let's try the version three. I generally want to do four images with lower resolution so it doesn't cost as many credits. But we need to have some kind of images to actually give us the prompt itself. So and then we forgot the circular layout. I think it's okay. Keep this circular layout the same. But ju keep the c keep layout the same. just use the imagery and the text from the latest prompt. Let's see if that works. Let's see if this works. Here. This is more of what I'm talking about. Okay. So instead of doing it the manual way, we now use AI prompt to actually create the design for us. And this looks great because we got both the design here and with a circular layout with the line art. But we forgot one thing which I I just see now. And then I just got to make it say change the font in the prompt to be a cursive font. Cursive font. And again, we make mistakes. We're all human, which and and I know it can really suck to like lose the credits on things that we test, but we got to do this. We got to test in order to make this like work. So, let's just copy this and see what happens. Cuz again, we all make mistakes, we got to be able to even though it cost credits, which really sucks. We got to allow ourselves to make the mistakes so we can actually like progress and get better. So, let's take do another one and see if this one works. This is one more what I'm talking about. So, let's just try the same thing with Flux cuz Flux gives us a whole like it's a whole different color palette or like style that they do. So, let's just see what they can come up with. Ooh, this looks really good, too. But I forgot some words from somewhere. This is perfect. This looks really good. And again, we're using reverse prompting for this, which makes it really powerful. And then once you actually like have these designs. So, let's say that we want to use this one for instance, as an example. Now, if we want to actually make this and use this, we got to save it. And then I always use this myself. I think it's easier. I I remove the background and then I upscale it. And then I create a new listing. and they want want to make sure that we have a good collection page for it. So let's just do here. Again, this will look different dependent on your own like collections that you have which are just basically folders. So we go here and then save to listings and then it will both upscale and remove the background for us which is really really good. Saves us a lot of time. Then we go to our collection because again there's one thing that we've got to fix before we proceed with this. So I got to download this. So I download it and then I go here to photoia because again this will work really well on darker garments since it's a lighter design but we got to make this in black too. So it works on lighter garments as well. So we go here and then I just drag it into here. What I then do is I press the magic wand. I make sure that the tolerance is kind of high. So around 200 and then I just press each part here. As long as the tolerance is high it will like mark most of the letters kind of fast. And then we go here to to change the color. And then we press the bucket so it's black. And then we just go here and just each part here we just make it in black instead. And there we go. Unless I miss something. No, looks good. So then we just go here, export it as PNG. And then we say one more chapter and then save. And there we go. All right. So now we actually got both the white one and we also got the black one right down here. So now we have both a black version and a light version that we can actually use in our store. And this is how like you would use reverse prompting to create designs. Now there's a second part to this too which I really want to emphasize too when it comes to reverse prompting. And that is that we can actually combine different layouts together which is kind of hard to do when we are actually like if you want to combine two completely different layouts together you can combine that really easy with AI. So what I'm referring to, we can use the circular design here, but from our bestselling elements list, we know that the different colored sentences work really well. So let's say CHBT asked us, take the same design, but use different colored sentences. So something like this. But use different colored sentences for the design. Something like this. And again, this comes from a completely different H design style. So something like this. Something like this or something like this. Let's take this one for this case. Inspire the Oh, it might actually create the design now, which I don't really want. Let's see here. No, it creates the prompt. Great. Perfect. So, what we're now doing is that we're taking two layouts. So, we created a listing using both the line art and the cursive and the circular layout. So, those are all combined here. But we can also take go one step. So what we now like now combined we've combined this one with this one with this one. But we can also take it one step further and combine it with this one and just give us a whole different design layout. Now I got a new prompt here. Let's see what chat what my designs gives us this time. And let's use flux for this one too. Let's try it for this. The version three the version this one. This could be something. So, what we're doing now in this case is that we're actually like we're taking it one step further. We're doing using different colored sentences inspired basically by this one and using it in the one more chapter niche, but we still have the circle layout with the actual line art book. And we also in this case use a retro more of a retro font and I think honestly that works better. I didn't even think of that when I actually created it cuz I thought it would be cursive. But again, in this case, we would use more of a retro font since bigger bold letters, it will definitely probably work better for different colors since it will show more. So that's how you would actually like combine different layouts to add even more value to your designs. Another thing just to like hit home with this, so I really go through this whole this thing thoroughly, is that you can even like there's this uh retro sunset. Let's see if I can find that. this one and we can just have it say instead of the use the retro sunset from this design style in our AI prompt and again which taking it even further like I didn't write the retro sunsets but this is this is all over both Amazon and Etsy it's been popular for years so let's see what we can actually get through this again this is the the actual like design is like prompt is getting a bit complex And then we can just have it say if it looks like this, we can just say make an AI friendly prompt with this. Let's just first see whatever what my designs actually will give us with this whole thing just for fun. This is more how a prompt should be like it looks a bit more simpler. But before we even do that, here's one of those. But let's just use the new updated one. Let's see how that looks. This looks good too, honestly. So again, what we're doing here is that we're taking different elements from our bestselling elements list and we're just combining them in new ways. And the key thing is that we don't have to stop at just doing the reverse prompt. Like we can take the different colored sentences that we also had written down in our bestselling elements list. So this one which came from this one and this one, we can ask Chachi BT to basically use the same design but use the different colored sentences for the design. Something like this should inspire the design itself. And through that, we got something that looks like this. And at that stage, I would probably wouldn't like do like add more elements further because then it can look a bit more complex. Like this could work, but it's a bit much honestly with the red ro sunset. Like it can work, but at that point once you actually have combined three different elements, as I mentioned previously, three different elements together, then that's enough. um doing it more like I just did now was a bit too much. So, I would just keep it like this instead. And that comes from the first thing that I mentioned really early here in the design class. And that's that we don't want to make it too complex cuz people just got to look at the page uh on Etsy like the first page and just see get it right off the bat. And if we make it too complex, it can be a bit too much cuz honestly I think this is a bit too much. Uh so keep it to three design elements based on the bestselling elements list. when I added this one, it was a bit too much. Okay, so that concludes the second design method, which is using AI powered designs and mainly reverse prompting using AI. The third method that's really great for a lot of things is to just have AI replace stock assets. So, what I'm referring to now is instead of using creative fabric like we did in the manual design method when we search for line art book and then we found this one. Instead of actually like trying to find this using AI, we can instead just get these kinds of images through my designs. So we can do here, we can take this one here again. Let's make a whole new one here. Let's see here. Let's see here. We only want the book in this case. So let's see. Then we hit describe. And then I can just see from the first line here that it says on a dark charcoal or black background. So I'm just going to say on a dark on a black background. So we take that and then we just go here again to my designs. I enter the prompt and since I just found in the first sentence the problem with the background, I'm just going to have it say on a black background. So what we're looking now is to only use get our design or like the images instead of using creat. We're just getting the image itself from using my designs. So, let's see what we get. This looks good. Let's also try flux to see what we get there as well. This one looks better, honestly, from Flux. We're just going to use that. And then we just save that to our listings. We remove the background. We upscale it. We save it. While it's loading, the reason that we're doing that is that we want to we're replacing Creative Fabria with just AI generated images. It c it gives us honestly better images usually and more unique images and people can really replicate them for you because it's your own image made by AI. So it's hard to replicate the exact one that you actually did compared to when using Creative Fabrica when people can just download it exactly from the same site. And in all honesty, the best reason for doing using AI this way is that it's great for using scalable designs. Because again, a big reason or a big way to actually scale our business on here on Etsy with print man is to find a design that really works and put it in different niches and put more variations in the same niche. We'll get more into those specifics later on too. But now we actually like have the design here or like the im like the image asset which I would call it. So we got the image and then we just go here. So this is the mandal mandal design. So if I just go here and just copy this one and instead of using this one, I'm just going to use this one instead. Let's see here. Then can also do here in my designs is that we can actually vectorize this. So I'm just going to press this. So I'm just going to press this and then image and then vectorize and then replace default image. Perfect. Now we got the vector. Let's see if this works because I haven't gotten this to work all the time. Let's see here. We now got an SVG file here, which is what we want. A vector is just a type of image that you can upscale this infinitely without having any like loss in quality. Apart from that too, you can also usually change the properties of it. So you can actually easily change the colors and so forth of the actual design. Let's see if that works. Now if there's any hiccups here, there we go. So this is this is a vector which we made through my designs here as well. I can just go here because again why I'm doing this is to fasttrack the design process. So I can make this easily and for both lighter garments and darker garments cuz we don't want to only sell lighter garments. We want to sell both darker garments and lighter ones. So first off, let's make it fully white. So everything is white here. Now this is perfect. And then if this is the design style that we did like before chapter this again is combining the power of AI with just making a lot of the designs itself in here in Canva. Again, if you find this design is working really well, you can just easily again change the text itself to again which which we did previously to I have no I have no shelf control but use the exact same images because again finding good images can be a really pain to do and it's a big variable to actually make the design itself work. So using my designs in this way is a great way to specifically do scalable designs. Then again, if I want this to be fully black, I can just do this and do this. Will now work for lighter garments. Uh, which is really neat. And at the same pace, I can also do this. We got to choose F5, F5, F5. So, we do that. And then we go to the text like this, like this, like this, and like this. Again, we always use off-whites for this so it looks crisper. And now we got a design, another design. Instead of it saying one word chapter, we now says I have no shelf control. But we have one that works really well for both lighter garments and darker garments. And if again like when you just use my designs this way, you can vectorize anything. So it makes it really easy to do. Plus the more if you sell like bigger items where you need like bigger products apart from apparel where you need bigger images using vectors like this since you don't get any loss in quality is really good because then you can just upscale it to whichever dimensions that you actually need. So this is the third method actually you instead of having finding the assets like the images here that we did before when we found this through creative fabrica we actually use my designs for this we replace that part with my designs you now again you still need the fonts through creative fabria because they have the most fonts or like they have really good great fonts and it's really easy easy to search for them and honestly just cost really low it's usually around like four or five bucks uh a month so it's really really cheap generally or like 50 bucks or 60 bucks a or something like that. So, super cheap generally and there's there's a link in the description if you want to use that for that, but generally it's usually super cheap because they have these big sales. So, you still need to use them for fonts and stuff like that, but I would like now since AI is so good, you can just replace finding the images and creating the images. You can use that with AI instead. Again, this is this is really good for use for getting scalable designs where you just change out the wording, keep the other parts of the image the same. So, you change the wording up here, wording up here, but the rest of the design stays the same. and then you can just make another design and you can batch out a lot of designs that way and be in a lot of niches here and there. Okay, so that wraps up the third design method. Now we're going to talk about scaling what works. So when a design sells, we got to scale it. But what does that even mean? So let's say that you have a brand new shop and you made three sales from one design or like one listing with one design or you have multiple listings with the same type of design style. That's a huge signal that you want to focus all your effort and attention on that. And to do that, you make more variations in the same niche. Again, if the design that worked for me was this one that said one that said one more chapter, what I would do is use the exact same SEO and then I would use and then I would just change the design. So, instead of it saying one more chapter, I would have it say I have no shelf control. That's the the first way that you can like double and triple down in the same niche with the same type of design style. The other way to actually like scale a design style is to use the same design format in other niches. Let's say that instead of just focusing on the book nation in this case, we can just have it say first grade because again this could represent books, they could all this could also represent teachers because like flowers and stuff like that works really well in the teaching niche as well. So you can just have it say first grade teacher. There you go. Now you got a teacher shirt. Apart from that too, you can also make this say librarian or something like that. Something for for librarians. You can also have it say like second grade teacher of course and then then like kindergarten teacher. So kindergarten kindergarten teacher. Again a key thing with this too is that you might think that this only works specifically for the book niche. But that's not the case. Like again if we find that this design style like every type of design style it works differently in different niches. That's how it always is. And but we can't control that part. What we can control and what's worked the best for me is just understanding that okay, if we have no sales and this design style works really well, then we should scale it out within the same niche. So we use different type of quotes like I did before with no one with I have no short control in one more chapter. And we can also branch out to the teacher niche and have it say kindergarten teacher or second grade teacher. We can also have it different type of nurses and so forth. But we scale it out as much as possible and we only change the text. This is what I mean by scalable designs in and of it all. The way to scale something is to is to one put more like different variations of the same design in the same niche. The second one is to put the same type of design in other niches and you change as little as possible so you keep the margin for error as low as possible. A as a tidbit to that too. The most valuable data apart from like the research part that we already did previously, but like apart from that whole thing, the most valuable data that we actually have is data from our own shops. Like if we know that that design style is working, we should just triple down on that one and let's say that that we are further in along in our journey. Let's say that we have a thousand sales now. We probably have like a couple of list like design styles that actually sell in our store. Then should do in that case when like when we're in that type of seat, we should combine our own design. Like if we have like two different design styles, let's say as an example that we have this type of design style that that work really well with different color sentences. What we then do then we should combine this type of design with different color sentences. So what we can do here is just make this in one color and this one in one color. So how to do that? We would just take this and do something like this. We just import it and then we just do something like this and see how that looks. Let's see here. Oops. There we go. We can actually do this instead. So one more. What we do here is that we do one and the more part here would be like the yellow thing. And there we go. Yeah, probably something like this. This is one way of doing it. And again, like uh we should not judge our designs. We should just create the value and see what happens because again, I personally might might not think this look good, but again, it's the like the majority of stuff that actually have sold for me has always been stuff that I wouldn't wear myself and stuff that just make a couple minutes. So, don't ever judge the design. Just create something based off of these this research and then add the value to the marketplace as long as it hasn't been implemented before. Now, this is one more t-shirt, which is kind of funny, but okay. Okay. Either way, what I want to emphasize here is that if we have the different color sentences in one place here and the circle layout here in our own store and they've sold separately in our own stores, again, we're basing this off of our our own data, which is the most valuable data. We can then combine them in new ways to create something new. So, we can create a circle design with the different color sentences and so forth. That is just what I what I want to hit home with when you're at like 500 to,000 sales. That's how you can scale a shop because and I would highly recommend that you just focus on your own data in that case because you do have some data in that case. But yeah, that's how you would scale what works. And as I kind of mentioned that I was already into here now is that if like you want to create these listings that you create through these types when you combine your own design styles and you you make you make something new with them based on your own data and your own design styles. you create hybrid winners because you all have these winners separately, but then you can create hybrid winners to stand out even more in the marketplace. So, the whole thinking is that you got you got two designs that sells, you extract the winning elements from each and then you just merge them together to create something new and valuable to the marketplace. If you do this consistently and you get some some sales here and there, you end up with something that looks really unique in that case. At least that's been my experience. Now, before we go into the recap of this whole thing, I just want to really emphasize one thing that I found with almost every Etsy seller that I've encountered or basically most of them, not everyone, but a lot of them. Uh, and this goes heavily into where I was at too when I started. So, I'm I was the exact same as you when you started because I judged my designs heavily. But the thing is that you don't want to you want to focus on systems if you want to make this a business, not taste. My ugly designs has honestly been the ones that sold the best. It's not been the ones that I personally like the most. That's all the best. I've put up both and the data just shows me when I just follow the research, it works. And when I don't judge things, it it works. And judge comes in different forms. You might think, okay, this might not work in the teacher niche like that that we show before. Like this type of design. Let's see here. This type of design might not work in the teacher niche. But again, we shouldn't even think of that. Like we shouldn't. That's a type of judgment that we should not do. If the scenario is that we have a new store and this type of design style works really well in both in the book niche then we should just change it to first grade teacher. Don't judge if something works in another niche or not without testing it first. You got to test it and based on the data you can then make conclusions thereafter. But you don't think okay this would only but work in a book niche because you don't know that until you actually test it. So ensure to just not judge it at this level either. If you know that this works, like this design layout works, make it say first grade teacher or kindergarten teacher. You don't have to be constrained by the book niche just because it's a book. This can be referred to as like kids growing for instance. It can be referred to just many different things and we don't have to think about that at all. We just create the design and then we just put that out. And if this works, you just change that to another design just like this. So that's one level of judgment that I really highly recommend that you don't judge at all. And when it comes to like just creating the designs itself, you just combine the proven elements and then you see if there's any listings like that in the niche. If there's not, you make the design then put them and put that in a niche. You don't ever judge if something is good or bad. Like I really want to get this through with the camera, but like you don't judge if something is good or bad. And if you don't have it in sales and and you're you're new with this, it's easy to to be like have that harsh critic be there and like talk down on you. But it's so important to just keep a growth mindset and just understand that you you are learning, you are getting better. But as you are, you have these false preconceived conceptions. You think that you should like Etsy is in a way that it is. You you navigate the whole world through those conceptions and those perspectives, but those are usually wrong because you're new and you don't you don't have the experience with like selling high volumes Etsy and you don't have the experience from being successful on this yet. But if you if you follow this framework, it works. A key thing to that too is not judging. Because again, if you judge something, you're judging it out of your own perspectives. And this comes from from then from someone who doesn't have the results that you want. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't have the results that you want? You should probably listen to someone who actually has done the thing that you're actually trying to do. And if you're trying to make this a business, just follow the framework. Don't judge it and say that this doesn't work for this, this doesn't work for that, I can't make a design for this because it doesn't fit the niche or whatever. Just follow the framework. put best-selling elements together in new ways and add value to the platform through every step that we talked about in this whole design part or this whole design class. So don't judge something, make something like we are the creators. The customers are the ones that are supposed to judge itself and if they purchase it, it's it's a great sign. And if they don't, it's a great opportunity to learn. And as a final recap to that whole thing, this is my success formula for doing print on demand designs, and that's to use research, not emotion. Like follow the follow the data. Just follow the data. You should always lean on your bestselling elements if it actually works in your store. Combine them in new ways to create something new. But you always want to lean on the bestselling elements, whether that's from your store or like the bestselling elements list, but you always want to lean on that when you create designs. You don't want to create something from scratch dependent on your personal taste. you create, you test it and you scale it and you don't judge it at all. So you basically create it and see see how the market reacts and then you put it out which is the testing part and if when something works you scale it through the methods that I mentioned earlier because again when something actually works you want to double down and you want to triple down. You want to focus on the things that actually work, especially in the beginning because that's a signal that something is really resonating and it gives you a signal to like on what to actually focus on. And why AI is so so powerful now since it's so good is because you're not wasting time with it. You're saving so much time with it and you can you can create such intricate designs once you learn how to use the software. Because again, none of us are good with a tool. Like if I like a guitar and I'm like doing it the first day, I'm going to be really bad at it. But once I learn the tool itself, you will get better at it. So again, you have to think of using AI designs like this too because again, it feels like it's a cheat code. But again, just like the tractor was when you like for agriculture back like way back, you still have to learn how to use the tractor, how to use it properly and so forth. And it's the same thing with AI designs. So you need to learn how to create a prompt, how to use this efficiently. And the only way to do that is to to try stuff and get better at it. We have to get out of our heads and just spend some credits to actually like see what works, see what doesn't work and then learn from that. The key thing is that once we do this and we we build momentum and we get better and better, we'll see results thereafter. But as a final note on this design masterass, as long as we are trying stuff and getting better, we will feel pain. But as we experience that pain, as long as we reflect on it to see what we can do better, we can then iterate going forward. And as long as we keep that process, we can actually make progress. [Music] Okay. So now we'll talk about listing optimization. So, this specific part of the whole course will cover a big chunk of things and mainly like how to choose which mockups to use in in your actual listing, how to structure the mockups and like the actual offer in and of itself, like how to structure the images and how to utilize SEO properly, what to actually put in the description. Basically, everything that covers the listing itself apart from pricing because pricing will will be after this as a whole separate uh part because there's a lot to go through there. So to start off, this is how I would structure a bestselling listing. Now the first part here is that there are a lot of mockups and this is basically the main and core offer. Like the most people just watch like look at the images and that's how they base their decision if they actually want to buy or not. Like it's probably one of the main contributors to having a high conversion rate. So it's really really really important to do your due diligence once and when you have that done you have like a framework that you can put all your designs on and through that you will basically have listing templates that you can just put your design continuously on. So first of all we need something that I call proven mockups. So all of these images here in the listing apart from the video are what I call proven mockups and we need to have proven mockups for each one. Now, what is a proven mockup? A proven mockup is a mockup that's commonly used by different shops that all have best sellers in wildly different niches. So, for instance, if I just search for comfort or just t-shirt here, maybe cuz honestly, there's so many comfort colors shirts selling right now. So, if I just do this, and again, I'm a Swedish seller. So, I got to make sure that this says delivered to the US since that's my target market. Fiscal items filter and then the star seller filter. Then I swap out star for best in the search bar up here. So I only get the best sellers for this given keyword. Now as we scroll down, we basically want to see the same mockup coming up several times in search here. So for instance, this one is one that I know is a popular mockup. So let's see if I can find this specific mockup coming up again and again in search. And here it is. So if I just look at this one, and again this is a copyrighted design. So, never ever do something like that type of design. But what we're looking at is the mockup itself. So, this mockup is being used by two different shops in wildly different niches, but both have best sellers on it. And how I usually determine if it's a best-selling mockup or not, is that I want to find a minimum of three bestselling listings, like current bestselling listings from different shops in different niches, all using the exact same markup. And the key thing is there is this is the exact same. And honestly, I can just find even more here. So this, this, this, and this. So four listings here from four four widely different shops are basically using the exact same mockup. And through this, we can determine that this is a proven mockup. And what's good with proven mockups or mockups in general is that this type of mockup, if I just go here and just search for comfort, cuz I know that this is a comfort colors 1717 shirt. Usually you can actually find these um mockups on Etsy. So, let's just search for comfort color 1717 mockup and see if we can find it. And there it is at the top of the page. So, we can then buy this again. This is the exact same mockup. We then just just buy this specific mockup and use this within our listings. And that's how you get proven mockups basically. So, all of the images that I currently use or that you should use in my opinion within a listing should all be bought this way. You need to do your due diligence for every single mockup like this because it's such an important part to having a higher conversion rate. And believe me, I would tried this out. I changed my listing image just about 10 over 10 times over. So I do believe me when I say that it's a crucial element to actually like making your conversion rate higher enough or at least within the 5% 6% range that I I'm usually in or that my students in the creative seller mentorship is in. So, every single mockup that I have here in this listing is basically determined and bought through this process. I find different shops uh that all have like bestsellers in wildly different niches and they all use the exact same markup. I go to Etsy and then just buy that mockup. So, I do this for every single listing here. Like the only exceptions to this rule is the size chart and which is this one which which basically just shows the customer how big it is so that that they can get a sense of the sizing of the actual shirt. That one is more of an info card on how to actually order and same thing with the other info card on how to actually order. And that's the color chart which I'll get more into later. that one. As long as you have a consistent theme and they can they can actually just see the design on each different color that you offer, then you'll be good. But all the rest of the images here need to be proven mock-ups. I can't state enough how important this is. Again, you just need to spend all these four to five hours to just find these these current bestselling mockups and buy them yourselves and use them in your store. Before, I had this preconceived conception that you just should stand out with your own mockup cuz you want to be different in search. And that didn't work at all. What I've found in my own journey teaching this deaf now is that that's a common conception common misconception that a lot of people have. So don't do that. Just follow the data and just follow what actually works. And this is what works. At least that's been my experience. Now in the mentorship, I actually even have a resource for this uh where you can actually just go to for instance the Bella 3001 and then just buy these straight up. And I have the same thing for the Gillan 18,000 and the 1717. And then I'm adding more resources like this regularly. If you want to fast track this whole thing, you can join the mentorship and more more info on that in is in the description. But through that, you don't have to do a lot of the guesswork and find your own mockups. But if you are like strapped for cash, which I know some some people are, then you actually can just find the proven markups yourself, just like I've done, and use that research and base your purchases of mockups on that. I would definitely not recommend to buy bundles. just buy the exact mockups that you know sell cuz those are the ones that you actually need to use in your store. You don't need like a hundred. You just need nine. So, all of these mockups are basically determined and bought through this process. And this is the thumbnail that I've used. But the key thing to know too is that any single one of these mockups can be used as a thumbnail in this case. But one thing that I've noticed in my own journey is that I usually have a higher conversion rate somewhere around 1.5 to two with a good video in your listing. And the purpose of having a video because I've seen so many videos that are like slideshows and let me see if I can find that. So let's see here if I can find any. Okay, this is a great example. So again, this is kind of a slideshow. It just shows how the design looks. It's basically just a static image with a nice little cool video. But what we actually want like in order for a video to actually work like it needs to bring more value to the actual listing itself because you can get this type of result with just a static image. It's kind of the same thing. The purpose of a video is for the person to actually just understand how it will fit them. So if you have a moving person with the design on it, it gives the customer a better feeling on how it will actually be on them. So what I would highly recommend in this case is that you use model mockups and I generally use playset for this. So something like this instead or as an example is this one that I have here which is exactly this one from playset. This shows the design on top of the product which is the shirt and how the actual fit is on earth. It's a bit big which is kind of the whole vibe with comfort color shirts and the customer just gets a better understanding of how it will fit on them and that's the purpose of actually having a video in your listing. If you use slideshows they don't really work. The only exception to this is a video size guide that you can actually buy off of Etsy 2. So you can buy something like this. Something like this for instance is is also really good because again the added value of having your design on top of the actual listing is is great. But if you're strapped for cash, you can also buy a video size kit like this. It's just still does the most important part about the whole video markup thing. And that's for the customer to understand the actual fit of it all cuz that again that is the key reason to having a video markup. So, I would highly recommend to use that and you can use Playet for this and links to all of these kind of kinds of resources are in the description. There are affiliate links, but it definitely supports the channel if you use that. But again, I've used Play It for years and it's at least my has been my go-to way of getting video markups. But again, if you strap for cash, then you can just buy this one time instead, and it's a bit more time efficient as as well because it still performs like the core purpose of actually having a video mockup in your listing. Now we go into the actual meat and potatoes of the actual offer itself. So this is misspelled, so sorry for that, but this should say happiness guarantee. So one thing that I really really recommend within the offer is that you have a guarantee. And I've talked about this before on my channel, but or or specifically when I implemented this in my store, I actually saw a 2x like a double conversion rate from this. Before I implemented this in 2022, like I was a new seller at that time. So I had between like 1.5% to about two% in conversion rate. But once I actually implemented this, again, this was the only change that I made this specific month. And once I actually implemented this uh guarantee in my store and just added that as an image just like this, my conversion rate went from 1.5 and 2% to three and 4% in conversion rate. So I saw basically a double increase in conversion rate just by using a guarantee like this. And the guarantee just needs to state something like, "If you're unhappy with your purchase for any reason, you can contact us within 14 days of delivery and get either a refund or a replacement." And the crazy part about this is that since we're selling on Etsy, they still push us in the end to always refund the customer. If they make a case after like they made a order help request. So either way, we still have to abide by this. So just showing that they can have this just increases the conversion rate, just gives you more sales. So, I would highly recommend to do it because you either way have to buy this anyhow since we're selling on on the Etsy marketplace because again, if someone makes a a case against you, you will still need to refund them either way, even though they might be really really wrong or or stuff like that or like the customer might be obnoxious. So, just displaying the guarantee itself just increases the conversion rate. At least that's been my experience. So, I would recommend to have this in at the beginning of your listing and somewhere in the description as well, which we'll get into in a sec. But yes, the core purpose of all of these images overall like is to have all of the customers questions answered within the listing itself. So all of their questions should be answered once they've just gone through all of the images. That's the thinking that we want to have with all of the images. So every single question that they have should have been answered by the end of all of these images. That's why we do this in the first place. And something that really enhances the whole listing itself is bonus mockups. So, I would highly recommend to have some bonus markups as well. These still need to be proven, but it gives the customer a better sense of how the design looks in different colors and how the shirt looks overall. So, by just adding bonus markups like this is something I would recommend to do and just sprinkle them out during the whole offer itself or like the during different parts of the listing. But after you have some bonus markups, uh after after you do two bonus mockups here, you need to have some how to order images. So, and this might seem super obvious to us as Etsy sellers, but if you're like 70 years old, you've never touched Etsy, it's really good to have this cuz again, there's old people buying this, buying items on Etsy all the time as gifts. And you all always need to have a maximum of three steps. You don't want to make it difficult for anyone to read this. So, just stating choose your size, choose your color, and then proceed to check out like the check out button. And then a little note that you can add express delivery uh at checkout if they want to. But again, we always combine these info cards with a proven mockup, which is why we need about eight or nine proven markups to make this whole offer complete. And the other part of the how to order images is the size chart. The core thing about this is that it should show the customer how the fit actually is. Cuz again, no one really wants to like take out a ruler and measure measure their own shirts, even though that's the recommended way to doing this. But just showing through images here again is a highly recommended way of actually showing the actual fit cuz that gives them a better understanding if this is a tight fit, if it's a relaxed fit and so forth. And again, you can buy a size shot like this on Etsy as well. Now we go to the color chart. So a big important thing in my opinion is to offer at least like 8 to 12 colors. In the beginning when I started I actually chose because I basically heard this thing that if the customer has too many color options it gives them decision fatigue and that will drop the conversion rates. So in the beginning I had like a like maybe two to four different colors. But then I started experimenting a lot with adding more colors and I just found that my conversion rate increased by having more colors. So having option or like optionality within the listing itself is really important for a high conversion rate. So I would I would recommend to have just have the top 10 colors within the Printify insights. And so as an example, this comes out of Printify insights and the these are current stats. I printed this on the on May 5th and today is May 23rd. If I'm selling the Gilden 18,000, for instance, I would just choose the top 10 variants here. But again, we don't want two different greens, for instance. So like for instance, we we wouldn't add forest green and military green. Instead of that, we might do another color that's that's not included here. So all of this, for instance, I would probably add, but I would not have two different greens. I would just choose one of the greens. So either have nine colors or just swap out, for instance, the forest green or the military green, probably the forest green for dark heather instead. And there we go. Those colors are what we actually use cuz again, we have to base this on data, not our own taste and not our own false preconceived conceptions. We just focus on the data because those that tells us what to actually do and how it works. When we actually have chosen the colors, we need to have a color chart for those. And the key thing with the color chart is to do something like this. Maybe make a collage just like I've done here, just stating something like this. And the key thing with the color chart is that you actually put the design on top of the different shirts so that the customer can get a sense of like, okay, this is how it will look on a pink shirt. This is how it will look on a yam shirt. This is how it would look on on an espresso shirt and so forth. So the key thing with a color chart, don't just b play from the say that this is the jam shirt, this is the this is the espresso shirt. Put the design that you made on top of it because otherwise the customer actually doesn't get a sense on how it looks uh on the color itself and it kind of loses its purpose, so to speak. I know it's a bit of more of work, but it's key to the for the person to actually know if that's the color that they want. And again, use the mockups that you just buy on Etsy and make a collage out of them just like this, cuz that's what I've done here. And yeah to create a color chart like this again I would recommend to buy the actual sizing chart here from Etsy and then you could create the color chart yourself. So what you do is you find the colors that you actually selling on Etsy uh through the printify insights and then you just buy the different markups for each one something like this and you need the the kind of consistent outlook. So these doesn't need to be proven the same way that the all the other markups and need to do except for the size chart. So, the key thing is to have a consistent theme in the color chart. But just to show you how I did this, if I just delete this, I just delete this basically here. Uh, boom. And then I go here and just add I go again. I use camera main for this. You can use any software you want to. It's really simple to do. I go here, just add an element something like this. A I choose a white. Choose it to be white. Do the same thing here. I just copy this by holding down alt and shift at the same time. So, it's will be on a line. And then do the same thing here. Same thing here. Same thing here. Same thing here. Same thing here. Same thing here. Then I just go in and find my actual mockups. Let me see where those are. Here they are. And then they have this nifty background remover which I'll just use so I don't get that white background. So we just one click the background is removed. Super sweet. Boom. That's done. Same thing here. Background remover. Then we want to ensure that it's the same size. So I just make sure that they it's they are aligned at the top here like this. Yes. And then just drag this so it match. So I get this little grid line here. And then I know it's the exact same size like the other one. Let's see here. And then I'll do let's do that one. Same thing here. And again this this would correlate to the actual H shirt colors that you are selling for this listing. There we go. So let's see here. Let's change this so it's the right size again. That's key. Something like that. Yes. And again, this is a bit of a pain to do once, but once you've done it, then it'll be fine. You have the template for the future in that case. Mhm. A little bit smaller there. Okay, there we go. Now we got all of them here. Now I press T to get a text element. And then I just write underneath here. I used a font called GER for this, I think it was. Yep. Let's use that. And just call this pepper. Make it big so that it's see what it says because again, most people actually browse on their phones and actually purchase from the phones. and then black. This one is called yam. This one is called blossom. And to copy like I'm doing here, I just hold down the alt button to just get another text element directly. So yeah, now we're just naming everyone here properly. I don't even remember which one this was. What color is that? Oh, that's ivory. That's got to be ivory. Yeah. So white, ivory. This is the moss one. Espresso. And this is So this one is called the blue jean. Okay. Now we got the names. And then we want some shadows to make this look a bit better. So we go here and then we press edit. Edit. And then some shadows here. We make a drop shadow. We make the angle on the other side. We blur. We takeaways. We blur it a little bit. Let's fix that angle a bit more. Maybe the distance less. And then maybe something like that. And then to make this speed this up a bit, I usually just remember these effects. So 30 49 33 40 30 30 49 33 40. Same thing here. 30 49 33 40 30 30 30 49 33 40. Now I forgot it. So 30 49 33 40. Okay, there we go. Now we actually got the different shadows for each one, the blur mode. So like that. And then we do the same thing for the actual boxes. So edit and then we choose shadows. Sorry, I have to go here. So drag that one along. Press this one and then press command Z. So I regret that thing. And then I just let's see here. How I do these types of shadow. Yeah, I usually actually just search for shadow in that case. And then let's see here. Take one of the graphics. Maybe take something like this. Then we just do do this. We got the position and then backward. Something like that. Maybe that looks good. Then I just take that. Copy that. I make this horizontal so the shadow kind of makes more sense. Then we want to blend them together a little bit. Might need to do this. The edge here looks a bit bad. So let's see if we can do let's see if we can reposition this a bit better. There we go. Something more like that. Again, it's subtle subtle changes, but they do a lot. So let's drag this one more up. More like this. Do this. One didn't really work. Let's just take another shadow instead. Let's take this something like this instead. Do the same thing. That looks kind of good. So, I would go with something like that. And then I would just take these two, hold shift to press them both, group them, copy these, and then just paste them here. Press them backward. And then, honestly, before we even do that, let's just fix the opacity for both of these. So, we do this. We ungroup them. And then we just lower the opacity so it's not that strong. 66 looks a lot better. Same thing for this one. Yeah, let's do it like that. And then maybe we'll even do something like this so it covers more of it maybe. Yeah, there we go. Something like that. That looks good. We group them, copy them, we place them at the back. Something like this. We just hold alt so we can do this fast. Hold alt again to get another one. And then same thing here. Same thing here. Same thing here. Thing there. There we go. And this is how I would actually create the color chart itself. And I honestly I don't remember how I created the first one, but this is the process how I would actually create an actual size chart itself. But yeah, I don't actually remember remember how I created the first one. But this is the process that I would use to actually create a size chart in the first place. Now we have the size chart done. And apart from that, after you have the how to order images, you want to add some sprinkle in some more bonus markups. And again, all of these needs to be proven just like the first one. And all of these images that I chose here are proven markups at time of recording this video. Again, it can change depending on when you're watching this cuz stuff like this change all the time, but these are proven today. And the last image that I would recommend to use is an image with some social proof. So just some stars to indicate that it's a review and some text from a review that that you actually have. Like social proof is is a great thing that really impacts the perceived likelihood of them actually getting what they purchase. And having an image of one of your reviews just reaffirms that. If you don't have reviews yet, you can just skip this one. But if you have some reviews, at least one, you can use that as the last photo. uh like the text from that review an outline like this as your last image in the whole listing. Another key part thing thing too that I also want to just emphasize like point two is that all of these images are clearly labeled. So this is the pepper one, this is the ivory one and this one here is the yam one and then you have the moss one. But everyone h are clearly labeled because people usually just ask which color is in this in this picture here. So having it clearly labeled like this erases that questions because again remember the purpose of listing images are to answer every single question that the customer can have because that leads to higher conversion rates. Okay, so that's it for the images and just like I mentioned you want at least like and for this one since the color chart just look better with a 3x3 so nine colors in total. I chose to have nine colors which I think I have here right? Three, six, nine. Yeah, but you want at least eight to 12 colors so that customer actually has some variations like some variational options to choose from. The key thing with these images though is that you want one color of each so you don't have two greens, you don't have two blues and so forth. And you and to know which colors to choose from, you just do like choose the Printify insights. You need at least 20 sales or more to have access to them. But I've referenced this so many times in so many videos. And you can see the Gill 18,000 one here. If you're actually in the mentorship, there's also a resource for that that just that are like regularly updated so you can actually know what colors are selling the best currently and what products are selling the best currently and that's only available in the membership. But again, yeah, just using the Printify insights as to actually like which colors to choose from is what I would highly recommend to do. And again, you need 8 to 12 options to actually choose from when it comes to the actual variations. So what I would recommend further down the line is that you have like different optionalities in your listing. But that is hugely overwhelming as a new styler. So when you start just do size small to through 3XL especially if you do the comfort colors ones because again there are 4X and 5X in this in this shirts but they run out of stock so much during like Q4 and stuff like that and they it's hard to get a hold of them cuz not all print providers offer shirts like the comfort color shirts up to 5XL and honestly there's usually so few people that actually buy the 4X and 5X. So I would recommend to just keep S to 3XL as the sizes. But the key thing also to know is that big shops which you'll find in your research almost always have like different types of product variations. So in the in the research part of this course we saw that they offered multiple type of variations like kids clothing and so forth. So we want that later on. But the key thing that I found in my own journey was that once they actually just ask for a specific type of shirt or like a sweater or some or something something like that, that's the time that you add that option into the listing itself. You don't do that before because it's a bit overwhelming to do. But once you actually get requests for like a long sleeve or like a like a V-neck or like a tank top, that's when you add that specific product into that listing as a variation. But not from the start. Just start off with this. that's it's a lot easier to just know this product from the get and just add that one to begin with. And as you can see, like I'm a Swedish seller, so all of my prices are in Swedish kroner. And we'll talk more about that in the pricing se pricing section, why it is like that, why it's not in US dollars. But because of that, I won't go into pricing here. That will have a whole different section to it that will just be covered on pricing because it's just it's a big topic to talk about. When it comes to the product variations, just have the 3XL to start with. Once people ask for specific items like a sweater, like a V-neck or like a tank top, add that product in the variation at that time when that happens. But start off with something like this. Okay. So now we will talk about the description itself. Description is basically it should not repeat what it says in the listing images. The listing images should give customers all the answers that they actually need. But if they want specific info about like the whole offer and the product itself, that's what should be in the description. So we want like a simple but still a more elaborate explanation what the guarantee is. So that's is one thing that we want to have. And the key thing to know is that these first I think it is like 40 characters or something like that. But like the first sentence basically of the description is actually indexed in search. So this one has to have some kind of reference to the actual product you're selling. So saying something like this in my fereral bright era comfort colors t-shirt is a great gift for someone who will soon get married cuz then you get the married keyword you'll get gift the gift keyword you will also be indexed for comfort colors t-shirts. So if someone search for like cat bride comfort colors t-shirt your shirt will much easily will be able to be populated for those listings because you have that in the first part of the description here. Now then you want the guarantee and just elaborate more on what the guarantee is and then you want to have some kind of more info about the sizing itself. You want to reference to the size chart but like for an over like usually people want that specific look especially with the comfort colors ones and just a note about like how to get that oversized look within the description is great cuz again the description is there to elaborate more on what's already been said in the listing images if they want specific things. Another important thing too is like production and shipping times. I think that's great to have within the description itself. And generally to start off, I would recommend to have one to five business days in um processing times and two to five businesses business days in shipping time. Then as you go on, you want to match your processing times and um your shipping times as close as possible to the competition so that your delivery times are competitive as long as you you know for sure that your orders are shipped and delivered within that time frame that you have set. But to start off, I would recommend to have this and just some text stating how long it actually takes to make them and to ship them is always good to have in the description. Apart from that, some info about the actual shirt itself, how it's made and what it's made of is good. So having for instance like 100% ringspun cotton since it's a comfort color shirt cuz some sometimes people want 100% cotton shirts, not any polyester shirts. And that can be from a myriad of reasons, but also that a lot of people have a questions that or like inquiries if you're doing a vinyl shirt, which has this really bad feel to them. And just stating that you do DTG is really good. And so that's really important. But basically what what the actual shirt is made of and how it's made is good to have in the description and how to care for the shirt, like how to wash it. And I think this one is really good and it's mainly for you as the seller. So a disclaimer that policies can change dependent on conditions. So I think that's great to have too. But another important one to finalize description because some people view like my monitor that I'm looking at now is really bright and sometimes the colors might appear slightly off from the from how it looks on the screen depending on the monitor and actually like the lighting when the mockups was taking. So just having a disclaimer here again to just say that colors may appear slightly different due to your screen settings, resolution and lighting. While we aim for accuracy, slight variations may occur. That's because like sometimes the a white shirt might be a little bit darker in in in reality compared to how it looks on screen. That can definitely be because of different monitor settings that you have on different monitors, but also like depending on how how accurate the mockup was uh to the actual shirt itself, so it's not edited too much. So that's how I would actually have make a description. And you can use chat GPT to help you write this for you as long as you know what to actually put in. So but this is actually what I would have in the description itself. And again the thinking about it is that the first part here is indexed in search. We want to ensure that this part is in reference to design but the rest should just be more detailed answers that of the listing images so that every question that they have will already be answered if if they first look at the images and then look at the description. Okay. So now we'll touch on another part that I honestly feel that a lot of people blow up way too much and that's SEO. SEO is just mainly the title and the tags. You also have the all text and what I found with all text like you have that within the thumbnail itself. What that is is mainly like uh for blind people to understand search and again I don't have anything in my all text for most of my listings and I'm doing fine. So what I would do is just all text is a bit overrated. You don't have to put anything special in that. Just focus on the title and the tags. When it comes to that, we it's a very simple formula, which is why it's not a like separate section just for SEO because people are in my honest opinion SEO doesn't have to be like super hard to do. It's pretty simple. So, for instance, this design that I did in this listing in my feral bride era shirt was based because there wasn't any designs like that in the niche itself. So, I then added this design in that. And when I do that, how we want to actually approach this, we don't want to like reinvent the wheel. So we basically just take this and take away the stuff that doesn't make sense because we want to be hyperargeted because again any bride to be won't like a funny bride cat shirt because not everyone are cat people for instance. So we want to always reference this cat bride. So we we take like the bulk of this we take that into our listing and then we take out the stuff that doesn't make sense. So for instance we have a cat shirt not a raccoon shirt. So we will say cat bride instead of raccoon bride. So retro in my fereral bride era shirt. Retro in my fur bride era shirt is the same. Funny cat bride shirt. Funny bride shirt is way too broad in this case because this is specifically for cat like people who like cats and like a cat bride which is why we had cat bride here instead. And then we take retro cat bride comfort color shirt because again we don't want to have it to be too broad. We don't want we don't want to say retro bride comfort color shirt. We want to be specific to the value that that we're actually adding into the listing which is the a cat bride cat design. So we had retro cat bright comfort color shirt and then instead like raccoon meme gift. I think meme actually is a very unique word. And if I just go here to search meme was trademarked before. Let's 25 is not trademarked anymore. It was trademark trademarked before. So we could use that in this case. But let's see here. But I went instead with just vintage feral cat bride era t-shirt. That's how I did it. Cuz again like funny for bride to be is way too broad. That could be so many different things. We want to be hyperargeted. And the reason for that is that if we ever want to use Etsy ads, then we don't want to be placed in random searches. We want to be placed in really relevant searches, which is why we got to be hyperargeted with our SEO. It's the only way that that really makes sense because otherwise, if we use Etsy for instance, they can put us in like related searches to bride to be, which might be like way off something that's actually related to cat bride. So, always reference cat bride here in this case. And that's how you just do SEO. It doesn't have to be more difficult than that. You just take this, take out the thing that the things that are too broad and then you just swap out the actual like value ad that you already did with when you were designing. This is a cat bride shirt. This is not a raccoon shirt. This is not a funny bride shirt. This is a funny cat bride shirt. So, we just add cat here in between. And that's how you make the SEO. Doesn't have to be like harder than that. It's just the title and the tags. And it's basically just what people type in. And as long as as your listing matches what people type in, then you you'll have a high chance of actually getting uh clicked and then getting a sale because that's what actually what they want. If they search for funny gift for bride to be, then that's way too broad. This doesn't apply to everyone. This doesn't apply to every bride to be. It only applies to someone who's like who likes cats and is a and is a and is a bride, which is why we have to reference that within every single word within the SEO. Apart from that, I think it's important also to know that some sometimes I see people have like the like the thumbnail is really zoomed in and it can't really be that zoomed in because then people don't understand that it's a church. So just do a slight like a really slight zoom in ch like zoom in here is what I would recommend. So doing something like this is all you need because then people can still like the design is big on the shirt which is key because then they can see it clearly in search but you always zoom it in this much because people still need to get a vibe of the actual listing itself. But this is how much you zoom it in. You don't zoom it in like all the way. You still want to keep the like look of the mockup so it looks like the best selling mockups do in search. Now again here's the description that I mentioned. This is not a personalized order. So it's not there's no person personalization here. I'll talk about pricing later on since this is an SDK. I don't want to confuse anyone that's not Swedish. So we'll skip that for this one. Another important part here is this part when it comes to the listing. So in order to be able eligible to actually sell this on Etsy, we need to have our production partners listed on it. And I've gone through that in another part here. But the key thing with this is that uh we need to actually have a our production partners selected here. So, for this one, I've chosen Swift Pewdie, Awkward Styles, and Monster Digital. But the key thing is to have those production partners listed within your shop so that you can actually choose that this item is made with production help from these specific partners. You don't put Printify here. They're just the middleman between you and the production partners. You actually put the production partners you choose to use on Printify here. Those are the ones that you choose at this stage. And it's really important to do this because if you don't and you actually use another company or person to fulfill it, you're actually breaching their terms of use. Like I've seen people losing their shop because they have just missed this one setting because then you kind of you breach the handmade policy that they have, which is kind of crazy just because you missed this setting. This is important to know that you always have to for all your listings that are fulfilled with production help, which we all do here. All listings basically have to have this enabled for and you have to have the correct production partner enabled for the listing itself. Now, as you can see, I have three different ones. So, you can have different ones here. There's no problem with that because again, sometimes I use Swift POD, sometimes I use Monster Digital. I used to use awkward styles a bit when they actually were on Printify, which is why this one is also enabled. But you can have several. The key thing is to know is to have at least one of them enabled in your listing if you are using production help which all of us are that are doing PD in this kind of sense. So I just want to emphasize that you don't want to miss this setting. It's an important setting to just enable for your listing itself because otherwise you're kind of breaching their handmade policy I think and you can actually lose your shop over this if you forget to do this for a lot of listings and you just keep it like that for months. So always have that one set so it just looks like this once it's actually getting ready to be published on Etsy. The category should just be t-shirts. So, gender neutral clothing, tops and tees, t-shirts, that's one that I choose. These attributes, I've filled them out. I've not filled them out. And I've just found that it doesn't make a huge difference, honestly, whether you have them or not. You get indexed in more searches, yes, but like I've just found that it doesn't doesn't make much of a difference. And it takes a lot longer to fill this out every single time. So, I just decided to honestly just always keep these blank. They don't do much for the SEO anyways. But one thing to do like the last part of this is this here the tags. So we got the title down. Now it's just the tags and how we think about the tags. So I would say that I would actually change the feral bride shirt like f feral bride t-shirt and feral fereral bride t-shirt here to cat bride shirt instead. So that's what one thing that I made wrong here because the reason for that is feral bride. We use everybody here just to see how many it has like 26 searches a month. 22 for like fertile bride. But if we do cat right instead and again when we do this we also got to make sure that there's nothing like this is trademarked. We should do this even before we design it. But just to ensure that this word isn't trademarked we got to check it like this. We search for capbride just to ensure it. Let me just refresh this page. Perfect. Nothing for capbride. Let's try feral bride. Nothing here too. Capride just to double check. But yeah nothing for caprite. It's okay. Capbrite is fine to use. Now, Capbride instead has 265 monthly searches, which is a lot higher. So, in this case, I would actually swap out fereral rides. So, fereral bride shirts should be catrite shirts and then you should say catbrite t-shirt and then cat bride t-shirt because sometimes people write t-shirt or shirt in different ways. And we want to use still use the main keyword catbrite for this. We want to be hyper specific. So this should actually say cat bride shirt, cat bride t-shirt, cat bride t-shirt, cat bride shirts and then have maybe I mix in usually like some broad ones it might be bad like when I can come up with any hypersp specific words the main way that actually just get my tags in and of itself is that I just go here and target the main keywords which is like in this case feral bride or cat bride. So, fereral bride and cat bride. Ferbride is really low searched. Again, just like I mentioned, I would change all of this to cat bride instead. And then bride bride era is really, really big, but let's try catride era instead. That's nothing for that. And I always just use the like the search suggestions to give me better info if I can for any like suggestions when it comes to tags in and of itself. But if I just don't come up with any and I can't find any more hyper specific tags, what I do is that that I just go one level broader. So in this case, I use the word bride era shirt instead here. But yeah, when I just can't come up with any diff with any different tags, I just go one level broader to see if I can find that, which is why I use the word bright era shirt or like bright era t-shirt, bride era shirts, bride era t and so forth. But for the all the other ones, I'm hyper specific. And again, I would actually change out federal bride for cat bride instead. So all of these that says federal should be swapped out for cat to use better keywords. And I found that out because I just went to the search bar. Every showed me that feral bride has like 26 and 22 22 monthly searches. And then cap ride has a lot more. 265 for just cap ride. Capric shirts has a little bit less probably. But like overall it seems that people search for capride more than federal bride which is why I would use that. But yeah, when it comes to the tags I base most of my tags on my title. I keep it really really simple. So this one says federal bride. I would use feral bride in here or cat bride and cat bride in cat bride here which is why I would use that. And again I made a mistake here. This should say cat bride cat bride shirt cat bright t-shirt and so forth. And then since I couldn't come up with any at the time of when I created this video when I did this couldn't come up with any other like this hyper specific words. So I went one level broader and just wrote bride era shirt bride era t-shirt bride era shirt bright era te instead. So when you can't come up with any better keywords that aren't hyper specific that you can see from the title itself, just go one level broader and just use the search bar to see how well these keywords are searched. So bright era is highly searched and like so brighter shirt is also highly searched. So I just go one level broader and use those in the tags. That's how simple it is. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Just use what works and fix it the stuff that are ways way too broad like I've done. And then so that's what you do do with the title. Like since this is a cat party, not not a raccoon tea, I just swap out like cat for raccoon. And when it comes to the tags, I base most of the tags on the title. And when I can't do any hyper specific tags that I can find from the title, I just go one level broader and just do for instance bride era shirts and bride era t-shirts instead of cat pride shirts for like feral bride shirts and so forth. Now the last thing that I want to touch on in this listing optimization part is how to actually create the mockups once you have the proven markups you want to make because this is a question that I get a lot like how do you efficiently create mockups there are softwares like simply listed like Cassie have done but if you are again start cash and you don't want a lot of software cost you can you can do it yourself and this is how I've always done it and I found this to be really efficient so I basically make one new design for each and the reason for that is that if I do this and this all of the different like mockups if I take this one for instance instance, it doesn't exactly match the format here that this one actually has, which makes it hard to have them all synced like this. And again, I like simplicity. So, I just create one new design for each markup that I have and label like name the actual design itself, like one thumbnail. Two is the bonus markup. Three is a bonus markup. Four is a bonus markup. No, sorry. Two is actually a guarantee. Uh, and then three is a bonus markup. Four is a bonus markup. Five is a how to order mockup. The sixth one is a size chart. Seventh one is a color chart. Eighth one is a bonus markup. And the ninth one is a review. The reason I have that is that once we actually download these, they will be labeled 1 2 3 4 5 6. Yeah, one to nine. When you drag them into uh Etsy and you have those labeled like that, they will automatically be set in the order that you downloaded them because they are labeled 1 through nine. So you basically when you're at this stage, they won't be like smooshed and in in a weirdly different order. they will automatically be be in the correct order that you actually want them to be in which is really really neat because when you do this fast it just saves some time. Yeah. So you have one design for each and you just drag the listing itself for it. Usually what I do with my thumbnail especially is that I want this one to be 3000x 3000. So I make a new one. Create design custom size because the first one has to be squared. So the first one at minimum has to be squared. So to recreate this, I just go make a 30,000 by 30,000 just like you saw. Custom size 3,000 by 30,000. I upload the actual mockup itself, which is this one. Go here and then just drag it so it's big and covers the whole screen. And there we go. Then we want to center it a little bit more, I think. Or rather, yeah, maybe more like this something more like that. Yep, there we go. And that's how you get the mockup itself. And then to actually create the mockup, you just go to elements and like again you want some kind of like thing just to show what color it is. So you go just go to shapes and then you create you press maybe something like this. Go here. For this specific mockup, it works best if it's here. So maybe something like this maybe. And then you press T to get a text element. I used the the Ger font for this again. So I didn't just make it say pepper in all caps. Change the font color to be black. And there we go. Something like that. Doesn't have to be more complex than that. And then you do the same thing for each thumbnail itself. So if we just do that, I create a new design. Preferably 3,000 by 3,000 if possible. The most important part is that the thumbnail itself is 3,000 x 30,000 or at minimum 2,000 x 20,000. It needs to be that in order for it to work the best on Etsy at the moment, at least unless they change it. Create new design. Custom size 3,000 by 30,000. And then you find the mockup itself. And for this one, let's use the yam one. We do this. We do this. And a 30,000 by 3,000 doesn't really work that well here. We Yeah, never mind. It does. Something like that. And for this one, we just need a big classic square. Something like this. Change the color to something that works better. Maybe something like this instead. Lower it a little bit. Press D to get get a text element. And then we just use the Ger font. have it say love it guarant or like happiness guarantee whatever you want to call it and then you press T again or you just drag it and then what type of font did I use here I use the antic font and then let me just copy the text just to speed this up a bit but you write this in the guarantee itself we do something like that so it's a bit broader take this up a notch something like that and this is how you actually go about and creating the mockups itself but the key thing that like the workflow we have to label them once like this. This one should be two. This one should be one. Just like I've done here. And then once we have that, we have our like mockups template set for each and every one just like the ones I showed you here. Now to create designs fast, what I always do here now is that I just take my design here. I do this. I change the opacity to be 89 so it looks more real. And again, we can put this behind the color and do like all sorts of like fancy work, but doesn't really matter is people don't really care about that stuff that that much. So, just do something like this. Then we go here, we download it. We download it as a PNG 80%, press download, and then we got that one. Then we just again we we take this design, we press command C or control C if you're on a Windows. You copy it to this one. We change the design so it fits better. Something like this maybe. Again, the purpose of having it on the on the markup like this is so people can get a better sense on how it looks on the shirt. So, this fills that too. Done. Download JPEG. And then download that. And again, copy this one. Sorry. You paste it here. There we go. And again, it doesn't fit with every wrinkle and it doesn't matter. So, like don't focus on making this look perfect cuz it doesn't really make any difference. I thought about like I did that stuff a little bit in the beginning too and it just took so much more time to do the mockups like this is fine to do it like this. So just download it like this and then as a JPEG. Same thing here. We copy in here. We then we do this and this and then we just download that. The reason that I'm also saying that is because I've seen listings that have that have one image, a blurry image and a pixelated image that looks really bad is that it has no size chart, no anything really. just one image with a with one mockup that looks very and people still buy that and I've found bestsellers with that previously. So again, I just commend you that you don't have to make every wrinkle like fit. This still looks good. You don't have to be in the weeds with every single small detail. This is will work really fine either way. So you download this as a JPEG. Same thing here. You do this and this. Something more like that. And then we go here backwards. There we go. We download that one too as a JPEG. download JPEG 80%. Done. Side chart. Don't need to do anything here. And for this one, we have we just copy and paste this one. And then we take the black version of it. So the black version of the design. If this is design that we actually make, fix the opacity. So it's 89 on this one because this one is actually already 89 since we copied it from the previous ones. We highlight both so that both are displayed. Let's see here. So they're just so that they're actually like the same height and width. That's key for this. Something like that. Like that. Perfect. Then we just highlight both like that. And we just minimize the size like that. And there we go. Then we take this one, add it to the ivory one. And all all like the lighter garments. And then we just copy this, paste it here. Copy this, paste it here. Copy this. Paste it here. Copy this. Paste it here. Copy this. Paste it here. Copy this. Copy this. There we go. Now the size chart is done. And again, I'm not in the weeds with every small detail. It just has to be done fast. That's the key thing. So, share, download, download as a JPEG. Done. Again, we just paste the design in here. Drag it correctly. And then we download JPEG download. Same thing here. And this is the ivory one. So, we just have to go to uploads. Paste this one in here. Drag this one so it's the right size. Fix the opacity so it says 89. Make it big like this. And there we go. download it as a JPEG. And there we go. And now we have all the mockups for this listing done. Again, once you do this a couple times and get like the ball rolling, it goes faster and faster and faster. And generally, I've usually like I get all of these mockups done like within like about 30 seconds for one listing. So, it goes really fast when you do it this way. And this way, you don't have to pay for any other software if you don't want to pay for another another subscription to automate stuff. So, this is the workflow that I've used for years that's worked really well for me. All [Music] right. So, now we're going to talk about pricing and this will be an in-depth guide on how to actually do your pricing in your Etsy print on demand businesses. So first of all, I just want to talk about the um importance of using pricing strategies because pricing really matters. And the reason for that is that it's the easiest lever to drive sales. Because generally what I found is that the lower prices you have, the more sales you do. Whereas the higher prices you have, the lower sales volume you do, but the more overall profit you actually make in the business. Which means that it's like the balance between the two is key on these platforms because you need sales volume in order to have rank because you need to have rank in order to have sales. But once you have the rank, you need to bump up the price to actually receive a tangible profit in your business. Now you know about the impact of pricing in your whole Etsy pen business on a high level. But if you will look at this at a very granular level, there's different strategies that we can implement to make to bring rank to our listings. So the first thing that we should do when we actually list something is that we should is that we should list our items at a break even price. And I call this the newly listed listing boost effect just because it's a fun word to use. So the newly listed listing boost effect is that Etsy actually pushes our listings in search initially once we list them. It's in this period where it has this initial boost so that they can actually test if it actually sells. If we put our items at a break even price, it helps generate sales and rank because if they are boosting the listing and you get quick sales on the actual listing itself, that will lead them to expose them more because like the main reason for them like showing your listing more in search is because it's getting sales. That's the main thing that you have to worry about because what I'm referring to again like if I search just for t-shirt here, like everyone is on their own algorithms and dependent on what you search for, you get different results. But the biggest reason for like coming up here in the first page of these search results is because of sales. Like if you get a lot of sales on your shirts, then you can rank really high for these search results. So when I talk about rank, just to be clear, what I'm referring to is how high up in the search results you are when I search for a given keyword like t-shirt in this instance. Now when I say break even pricing, I don't mean that in a literal literal sense. I mean that we need to earn a$2 to4 profit margin when we actually get a sale and fulfilled the item on Printify. So the profit that we're left with after we've actually fulfilled the order should be $2 to $4. And when we count our prices and we'll get into the nitty-gritty of actually how how to actually like count the prices. I'll show you that when we get to the shipping model section of this. But you always got to account for your applied discounts when you're setting the prices. But key thing to know with break even pricing is that we put that on newly listed listings because they usually get a a boost in search when you list something on Etsy. And if we can drive more tra if we can drive more sales in the beginning by just lowering the prices we can get the most valuable thing when it comes to these marketplaces and that's rank and that rank will lead to more and that rank will eventually lead to more sales. And once you're at that specific rank, you can increase your uh margins to profit pricing. And that's and what profit pricing basically is is that you want to earn like once you've actually achieved the rank with break even pricing, you want to bump it up so you earn a healthy profit. But you only want to do that once you have earned 10 to 15 individual sales on the specific listings or and slash or a 50% visibility score on Everbe. So if I just search for t-shirt here again and I just scroll here on the first page. What we can see here is a lot of different things. Let's take this one for instance. If I go into this listing and using every you can see the visibility score here and this has so what I found when I've done Etsy is that if a listing hits either 10 to 15 sales or a 50% visibility score that's when you bump it up to profit pricing. But you also got to use your common sense here. So if for instance you have like two sales and a 100% visibility score, there's something off because again these are just projections, everybody is just projecting stuff with their um tool. So you got to use your common sense when you're doing this. So if you got like two sales and 100% visibility score, keep it at a break even price until you at least hit seven to eight sales. But you usually like 90% of the time they go with each other. But there's also times where you have like 15 sales and a 20% visibility score because maybe it's in the niche you're in. So use your common sense. If it's getting at least 10 to 15 sales and a visibility score of 50%, put it up to profit pricing. But if it's at eight sales and like 60% visibility score, put it up to profit pricing. And vice versa. If it's at like 15 sales and like 20% visibility score, put it up to profit pricing. Usually they go together, but there can definitely be like exceptions to the rule here. But yeah, when we actually price our items at profit pricing, we want to price them really high. So I believe like when we have actually achieved the rank, like you don't lose rank if you just change the prices. You lose rank if you if you change the SEO. So that means if we just change the prices, we keep our rank and we can actually make a healthy profit in our businesses. So we want to aim for at least 30 to 40% gross margins for our profit pricing. And I think higherend items like the comfort colors 1717 that can even be closer to 40%. Same thing with personalized products, they can also be higher, but I'll get more into those in a sec. The key thing to know too is that if you rank drops on your profit pricing listings, you can actually just revert back those listings to break even pricing to again drive more sales to get more rank and then put them back on profit pricing once they've recently done like 10 to 15 sales. And just like the break even pricing here, you always got to account for discounts when you're doing your price calculations. And I'll show you exactly how to do this in a sec when we touch on the different shipping models because that heavily affects the prices that you do. And it's also worth noting, and I'll touch more on this later on too, that you want to keep your loss leader at the same price in your break even price as your profit pricing price. So you keep the same loss leader in your break even price as the profit pricing price. That's the general overview of profit pricing. Now, when we talk about personalized products, generally honestly, you can actually charge a higher markup for them. But just for simplicity sake, because I'm a big believer in simplicity, we want to keep it as simple as possible in order to have an easy workflow in our business. Cuz generally, I found that you can you can charge for profit pricing for like a Bella Camos 3001 shirts. You can charge like from like $24.99 to like $26.99, but I haven't dare go even higher than that. But you can probably charge like $29.99 for personalized products themselves. But in order to keep things simple, I just think it's easier to just have like you do profit pricing for all listings like this and you do break even pricing for all listings like this. Like you don't separate personalized products from your other products is just to keep things simple. So I believe and I recommend just keeping profit pricing consistent across all your profit pricing listings. Don't separate personalized listings from your non-personalized listings just because it's easier to track this and it's easier to just keep track of everything in your whole business. So, I believe in just keeping like a 304% margin for all your profit pricing listings across the board whether they're personalized or not. But the key thing to know is that you can charge more for them if you'd want to. Now, this will be the meat of the potatoes of this whole thing. So, when it comes to the shipping model, it has a huge effect on how much you can actually sell because it also goes heavily into your whole Etsy strategy. So, the first thing is is that you got to choose the right shipping model for the thing that you're selling. So, free shipping, from my own experience, I found that free shipping works better for group focused items and items overall that cost above $30. And paid shipping is generally better for single items under $30. And I'll get into the gist of the page shipping a little later on too after we talk about free shipping. But if we do free shipping, what that basically means is that because there's no such thing as free shipping, you still pay shipping. Like there's still a service that you have to use to get the thing to the customer. So if you actually do free shipping, the shipping cost is just bulked into the final price. That's what free shipping is. There's no such thing as free shipping. So if we for instance here now sell the Bella Canvas 3001 on Printify and I generally recommend to use two different production partners here Monster Digital and Swift POD through my whole journey they've been the most consistent ones here uh that you can always rely on and Monster Digital take in the first place but if we count on what it actually costs now so one shirt from Monster Digital cost 11.42 and this is in dollars and the shipping for that is $4.75. There we go. $13.88. $88 is what one t-shirt cost if you use Monster Digital. So 13.88. Now if we use free shipping, it's really easy to calculate our prices because we don't lose any prices if they hit a specific guarantee like it's the free shipping guarantee. So if we use our break even pricing as we list something, then we want to earn $2 to $4 margin as we list something. So, if we for instance price it at $18.99 or maybe like I don't know 19.99 that's a bit too high. Again, we want this number to just say maximum of $2 to $4. So, $18.99 is perfect. So, what I would do if I would use a free shipping model in my store is charge one item for $18.99. And this would would account for the S to the XL's. So if I just make a Google Docs here and I just have it say S till Excel should be $18.99. Now I live in Sweden which basically means that I have and we'll talk about this more too but all of my prices is in Swedish croner. Uh so I got to convert this to Swedish kroner because that's the actual like um currency that I have that I have in my store. So if I then just go here just go to Google and just search for USD to SEK and then I want the price to be 18 whoops 99 that means that it should be 180 croner after the sale basically. So what we do now is that we we go to Chach because I'm not good with like headmouth. So let's say that we do a 30% off sale in our store. I wouldn't recommend to do less than 25% because generally Etsy recommends that you do at least 25% as a discount in your store. So what we do here is that I say if I want a price to be 180 sek after a 30% off sale, what's the price before the sale? Because again, we got to account for our prices when we're thinking about this. And the easiest way to do that nowadays is to use just use chat GPT. I have a paid plan using this, but you don't have to do that. So 257 is the price before the discount. So 257 times 0.7. Yeah, that's perfect. So 257 is our price in Sek in Swedish croner for the shirts that ranges from S to XL cuz the 2XL and the 3XL cost more. This is the basically the price that we would use in our stores before the sale. H and once we apply the sale, it will be basically $18.99 for our American customers. Again, these cost a bit more. So, we got to count this a bit differently. So, we go back here. So, no. So, we go here and then it's 11.16 plus the shipping which is $4.75. $15.99 is the price for those. And again, we want to see a $2 to $4. And again, just that little slight price increase cost too much. So, cuz again, what I've just found in my own experience is that if you're hovering around these margins for your break even pricing, you generally lose on the sales that you make. This can be for anything really. if you have an obnoxious customer that needs a refund, if anything happens with your ads cost. But so many different variables can affect this, which is why I would recommend to always keep this at minimum at $2 and at maximum $4, cuz again, you don't want to price it too high because then you don't don't get that sales velocity in the beginning. So for the two Excels here, we still want to like just play around and see if we can find a$2 to $4 margin. And this is perfect. So 2099 is what I would use for my two Excelss. And then we just ask chat GPT again. Here it is. And for and we we go go here to the exchange rate thing to see what the actual like currency is in Switch Croner. So 2099 $2 difference. So 199. So we do this. So 284 is then what we have here. 2 XL is 284 and then $20.99 after the sale. And then we only want to sell up to the 3XL's. We don't want to sell up to the 4XL's that like for instance Swift has generally just because there's not that many people that buy the 4XLs and the 5XL's. Plus, they also run out of stock a lot easier during hectic times. It's just not worth the hassle to keep them in your store. To start off, at least keep just do the variations for for the for the S to the 3XL's until you're like well verssed in this. Then you can experiment as you go. But the three excels it cost $131 plus 4.75. That's 17.76. And then we do let's see here. Let's do 2299 then. Yes, that's perfect. We go back to the exchange rate thing. So 22.99 218. Same thing for 218. So that is basically 311. So 3 XL is 311 and that is 2299 after the sale. And now we got our break even pricing. Break even pricing for free shipping. So that's the break even price that we want to use when we actually count for a free shipping model. And you do the exact same thing when we talk about uh profit pricing. So let's do the same thing but for profit pricing. So what we then do is we want to earn a 30 to 40% margin. So 9.13 plus 4.75 that's 13.88. 88. Now, we want to earn a healthy profit, which is between 30 and 40%. So, maybe like $24.99. Yep. $24.99 or $25.99 is what I would use here for your profits. You generally want to hover between like a $10 profit. So, let's take $25.99 in this case. That's great. So, $25.99. We go back here. That's 246. We go back here. So, that's 351. And then for our Let's see what it was. That's 11.16 plus 4.75 15.91 and then Whoops, not there. Again, we want a healthy profit margin. So, let's It was $25.99. That's too low. So, let's maybe do like 27.99. Let's do maybe like 28.99. I'll do like 27.99 for this one. Nah, never mind. We all usually like default to not doing too high, but let's do 28.99 because usually that's me and my own personal bias. So 28.99 is what I would use for the two XL's. We go back here. So 28.99 275 and then 392 393 basically 28.99 after the sale and then we go to the 3 XL which is 1301 plus 475. And also I'm counting this on the Printify premium prices just because there's just such a major difference in price otherwise. If you're doing this seriously and you have and you've gotten this far in the video, I would strongly recommend to use Printify Premium. You can even like sign up and use the code Andreas at checkout in Printify after you sign up to get 30 days of free premium if you would just want to test it out. But again, it makes a major difference in your margins when you actually use this. So, I would highly recommend to get Printify Premium as one of the like the bare minimum subscriptions to do this just because the margins are so vastly different. And again, you can get 30 days of free premium if you just use the code Andreas at checkout once you actually signed up. So the cost for the 3XL is 17.76. And then let me let's maybe have this one at like $399. Yeah, $3099 for this one. We always want to have around $10 profit around there. So 3099. So we go back here. 3099 294. And then same thing for 294 420. And just to double check so that I haven't counted anything wrong here, let's take away 30% and that should equate 294 294. Yes, perfect. So that's correct. So 420 SDK for the 3XL. This is before the sale, before the 30% off sale. It's basically 3099 after the sale. And again, I know that these are high prices, but if you if you have gotten rank on your listing and you've followed all the steps beforehand by adding value, then you can charge these prices to make your own business good and healthy. If you followed all of the other steps before this, too, because again, all of these steps work in correlation with each other. If you don't do the previous ones, this will not work. Like, if you if you're one of those people that just copy people, then this will definitely not work. Then you're in a pricing game. But if you're adding value to the platform and you're doing all the other steps correctly, this definitely works because this is how I made my own business. So this is basically what I would price the break even pricing at and the process for doing that when you when you do free shipping and the profit pricing when you do free shipping as well. And now we'll talk about pay shipping. Pay shipping is more complex, but I'd also say that it works a lot better. If your focus is on like selling one t-shirt and selling t-shirts that and you t-shirt generally go for under $30, then I would say that pay shipping definitely works a lot better. It just generally works better in my experience for items that cost under $30. And a key thing to know too is that there is this $35 free shipping guarantee on Etsy. And I recommend to have that on if you're doing paid shipping, if that's your strategy. And if you go to your options here in N, you press settings and then shipping settings, you have this US free shipping guarantee here. And this is the thing that we're referring to. You just apply this to your whole store. It's really easy to do. It's like two clicks. You place like it get started and then you just press that you want it on your store and then it's on. The key thing to know with this is that it applies free shipping for the whole order as long as the items exceed over $35. Now, when we calculate the prices on this, it becomes a bit more difficult, but I'll show you every single step of the way so you'll know exactly what to do. So, the first thing to know is that you when you're calculating the prices, you want to assume that the customer qual qualifies for free shipping by hitting that $35 free shipping guarantee. And you want them to hit that by ordering two products. You do not want to price the items so that they have to buy three items or more to get the free shipping guarantee. It doesn't work. Believe me, I've tried it. This is one of the first things that I tried when I tried this out and it just doesn't work. And that's because like the balance between the production cost and the sale that you make when you it doesn't correlate just because the pricing of the items are just too low and the production cost just get too high. If they buy two or more, that's when they actually get the free shipping guarantee. At least with profit pricing. That's how we have how we have to think about it. Now if we then count out profit pricing for our items here what we do here is that we go let's say we sell the Bella Canvas 3001 here again the cost of the of of this one is 13.88. So the S to the XL's is 13.88. That's for one shirt. Now we got to count this on two shirts which basically means then that we have to take 9.13 + 9.13 plus shipping which is 2 4.75 plus the additional item cost which is 2.4. for $25.41. That's the cost for two shirts if you buy it from Monster Digital for the Bella Camos 3001. For profit pricing, we want to see a 30 to 40% margin here. So for two shirts, for instance, this is more in line what I would want to see. So $13 for two shirts. And again, we're not even counting the shipping at this stage because again, we are assuming that they're already getting the free shipping guarantee. Why I do it always like this is because it's the only way that I've found to make the the pricing accurate without losing way too much money when they actually hit the free shipping guarantee. So, whenever I count prices using a paid shipping guarantee, I always do it like this, assuming that they already get the shipping guarantee. It's not even in the calculations just because I assume that they will get it. In my own experience, I've found that generally like 40 to 50% of buyers buy up to the limit so that they will actually get the free shipping guarantee. with print print on demand. That's been my experience. And losing way too much on shipping on like 50% of your orders is not a good way to go about it if you like price it. So they need to buy three or more items to hit the free shipping guarantee because you just lose way too much money if you do it like that. So two items or more and then they should hit the free shipping guarantee. And the key thing to know here is too is that the base cost of the actual item can't be too low because again you lose out on the shipping cost here. And the easiest way to just count this in and of itself is just to count like this. So, they buy two items, they pay $44 for two different shirts. So, here uh we earn this much uh so $13.95 for this type of order. Again, when we set these prices, we set them individually for each item. So, we have still have to count out what they pay for one thing for one shirt. So, then we just take this divided by two, which is 22. And cost for one shirt is 13.88. $13.88. Again, when we do shipping costs, I would recommend to always keep it under $6 because of Etsy's limit that they now prefer to have, at least nowadays, they they prefer to have your shipping cost under $6. Otherwise, they've said that they limit your reach in search. I'm not sure exactly how accurate that is, but I've just found that it works better to have it under $6 nowadays. If that changes later on, you can fiddle around with it more, but for now, as it stands right now, I would recommend to just keep it under $6. So, if we do $4 in shipping, that means that we basically earn like $3.99, it comes out to the same price as profit pricing, as you saw here. Like $25.99 after the sale is what we want them to pay when it comes to profit pricing for our free shipping. So, if we do it like this, we hit the same thing just with one. And we always want to drive them to just buy one thing. We need to pay shipping, not more than that. That's the general goal here. So this is what I would price my profit pricing at when it comes to profit pricing. So basically then $22 and if we see what that is and that's 208 and then same thing for 28. It was 208 right? Yes. Same thing we use a 30% off uh discount here. So 297. So then it's S pay shipping profit pricing and then it's S to XL is then what was it? 297. So 297. So the first thing that we do when we count these prices is we already assume that they're buying two so that they're hitting the free shipping. So we do this plus 2.4 29.47. That is what they purchase. And then we basically say 48, right? Maybe like 40 22. That's 44. Let's do 46 instead. 46. That's perfect. And then we divide by two. That's 23. So, we now count out how much they actually will pay for one shirt. Uh, so because that's the thing that we actually have to put in our Etsy listings. And for one t-shirt, it was 15.91, I think. So, 475 + 116 15.91. Correct. 23 + 399. Let's see here. It's a bit low. It's a bit on the low end, I'd say. Let's do let's do $24.99 instead for that one because we still want to have this at minimum 30%. So $24.99 for this one instead. And then we do 24.99 237 237 was it? Yes, that's 338. 24.99 for this one. 24. So 27.99 and 297 297 times 0.7 to take out the sale. I just got to double check the previous ones. So it was basically 28 208 plus 208 that's 22. So $25.99 then after the sale and then the three excels for profit pricing that will be let's see here 1301 + 1301 + 4.75 for one shipping and for the additional shipping is plus 2.4 that's 33. Yes 13.01 1 + 13.01 + 4.75 + 2.4 33.17. And now for these ones, we again count out the shipping price. So maybe we do 49, maybe 50, maybe 52. Again, this now since we are in such a high like cost now, it means that the percentages is a bit off. We still want this to be at least $10. So let's just do for instance, let's do 51 maybe. Yeah, let's do 51. 51 divided by two is 25.5. That's perfect. For ease of use, let's just do $25.99. So, there's a basically a $2 difference between all of these. So, cuz that's what it is, right? Yeah, it should be $25.99 plus 3.99. How much is No. Am I counting this? Let's do 25 + 3. That's basically 28.99. Yeah, we want one more. So, $29.99. So, we'll do this at 26 instead. 26. Let's do a $2 difference between each. So it's basically 25 27 and then $29.99. So 3 26 plus 3.99 that is $29.99. And what are if they buy two items of the 3XL we still we earn about this. Again I'm using common sense in a lot of this cuz I just noticed that 25.5 seems seemed a bit off. So let's just keep the difference here the same. Let's take uh 20 $26 here and then 33.99 to keep the difference the same to make it logically just the same. And then for one shirt they pay what was it? 1301 plus whoops 131 + 475 1776. Perfect. And then we earn basically $9 when they purchase this. And again we still want to keep it around the $10. And this is fine I see for this. So I would use this in this case. Then we go back to the currency converter. So 26.99. So 26 here. We're excluding shipping. So 247. And then go back to chat for 247. It was 247, right? Yes. 353. Perfect. So this is how I would do my pricing for profit pricing when we use a paid shipping model in our store. Now we're going to touch on break even pricing as well. So paid shipping, break even pricing. So, S till XL, 2 XL, and 3 XL. Now, this might seem a bit off when it come when I'm counting break even pricing here, but I'm think I'm doing the exact same thing just using break even pricing. The only thing that really differs here mainly is that it it will look like we won't hit the guarantees. So, it will look like we won't hit the free shipping guarantee when we count this. But, we still for two items assume that they're getting free shipping. And it might seem a bit off, but it's the only way that I found to make this whole thing work because sometimes they might buy a profit pricing item and a break even pricing item just to get up to that specific threshold of $35. And the only way to mitigate this to so that you're not losing money on your break even pricing listings is that you count out the shipping for this one too. Even though the numbers might not exactly like hit the $35 free shipping guarantee if they buy two break even pricing items. So if for instance they buy two S2Xs two of these S shirts for instance. So 9.13 plus 9.13 plus 4.75 for shipping plus 2.4 for the additional item that's 2541. And now we want to earn a $2 to $4 margin for our break even pricing listings. So what can that be? Can that be like let's see here 34 that's a bit too high. So maybe like 33 or 32. 32. That's great. This might again might seem off, but the only way to make this work using break even pricing and profit pricing is to count they're not paying shipping even if they just purchase something for $32 because sometimes again they might purchase a profit pricing item and a break even pricing item just to hit the threshold and to mitigate the loss of those listings of shipping here is that you count the break even pricing listings just like we did the profit pricing even though the numbers here might not hit $35. So 32 that's 16. So, if they buy one item, that's 13.88 and 16. That's perfect. And then four $4 in shipping. If we use the same shipping profile, maybe we want to do like $3 in shipping for this one. I generally would recommend to just keep the same shipping profile across all your listings just for ease of use. But in this case, you could actually use like a break even pricing shipping profile just for all your break even pricing listings. So, you can hit a smaller number because otherwise you'll almost at $4 in break even pricing, which is okay. but on the very high end. So you can use it like this. I generally use it just with one shipping profile across the board just to make it easy. But uh if you want more sales volume on your listing, you can actually use a shipping profile specifically for your break even pricing listings. In that case, it would be like $2.99 for shipping for shipping. Instead of doing that, let's see if we can do it like this because I said 32. What if we do 31 instead? That's on the low end here if they buy two. So it might be on on the very low end. 13.88. That's 15.5. This is maybe a bit better of a balance, let's say. So, let's do 15.5 instead and just keep the same shipping profile across the board. I recommend to having having it like that just because it's a lot easier. So, 15.5 plus the shipping profile before. And then we want to go here. So, 15.5, that's 147. And then same thing for 147. Again, we're using the same discount for all of our listings here. So, 210 in this case. This is before the discount. So, we do uh 210 and then it's 15.5 + 4. Let's do 399 just like the rest of them. That's 19.49. It's great. And then, and then the two Excels, same thing. 11.16 + 116 plus 4.75 + 2.4 29.47 is the cost of those. And then we do we want to see a $2 to 4 margin here. And then let's do I don't know 34. No, 36. Whoops. 36. And that's basically then 36 / 2. That's 18. So let's see if that works. 11.16 + 4.75. 1591 for one shirt. And let's do $18 for this one plus $3.99 shipping. Is it too high? So maybe go back. There we go. Maybe we do 35 instead. Oh, that's too low. That's too low. We have to do 36. So 36. So 18 and then it's 15.91 here in the cost. So 18 and then 3.99 in shipping. And then we go back here. So 18. Same thing for 170. So now when we count up the prices on how much it actually is before the sale, it's 243 basically. So 243. And that is then how much was it? It was a 18 + 3. That's basically 21.99, right? Yes. and then 21 and 999 after the sale. Now we got our last one which is the three XL's. So 1301 + 1301 + 4.75 plus 2.4. So 33.17. Perfect. Okay. And let's see here. Maybe it's like 39. No, too low. 41. Too high. 40. Maybe it's like 40. 40 bucks. Perfect. So if we do count one here. 1301 plus 4.75 for one shirt. So 17.76 and then it's $20 plus 3.99. Perfect. That's great. We'll do it like this. This is great. So then we go back here. I have to convert it because again I'm living in Sweden and we use our native currency in our stores. Really, really important to do and I'll get more into that of that later. But then we go here and we say 20 one 190 basically. And then same thing for 190. 271. Perfect. And just to double check so I haven't counted all of this wrongly. So 271. If we take out 30% of that, it's you take out 0.7, it's basically 190, which is great. So perfect. And this is basically 30 23.99 after the sale. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you count out the exact pricing for your store. This is what I would use if I would sell the Bella camos 3001 in my store. If you do the comfort color 1717 or any other product, this is how you would do it. You would just apply the specific product costs instead of the bell cam 2001. I've sold the most of this shirt. It's my like tried and true seller. So, which is why I'm counting on this. It's sold for years and it's a great shirt. But again, if you're doing for instance the comfort color 1717, this would still apply. you would just need to change the prices according to the production costs if that makes sense. That is how you count out profit pricing and break even pricing for your listings. And I also know that this is quite a like long section and it can it can be quite confusing. But if you just rewatch this whole thing, like this pricing section as I talk about the principles and then you watch the examples again and just watch me how I work these prices and how I calculate them, it will all make sense. You don't have to get it on the first try. No one gets it on the first try and it can seem quite complex which because it kind of honestly feels like that. But the key thing to know is that if you just look at the specific section again, it will probably clear it up the second or the third time you watch it. You don't have to get it on the first try. You can get it on the like the third or fourth. But you have you just have to keep on trying in order to get this right. Now I want to talk about like uh exchange rates cuz I know that a lot of us foreign sellers can sometimes be kind of paranoid about like how exchange rates vary, especially in these times. What I would say with this is that if you do the pricing just like I showed you step by step here, you don't have to worry about it that much because we are basically so much in the u in the green that we can take any fluctuations. I haven't even seen this myself but like if your currency fluctuates by like 30 20 to like 30%. then you might need to recheck your prices and that basically means that if Swedish croner for instance towards the USD changes by like two or three sek so it's two or three kroner which is a lot usually fluctuates between like one to two but if it fluctuates between like two to three or like three to four then just like consider changing your prices accordingly but I haven't even seen that because that is a major major change so generally just for these minor fluctuations up to like the 10% or up to 20% honestly just ignore them and just keep on doing your business just like I showed you because there's so many other things that we have to focus on and having your attention be stolen for for these kinds of things just takes a lot of your energy away. So just ignore them for fluctuations up to 20%. Now also want to talk about like listing management. So you want to manage your pricing strategies effect efficiently. You do that within your sections on Etsy. So most buyers honestly when they purchase from you they always say that they purchase from Etsy not directly from your store because that's their experience. they're on this side of Etsy and they're purchasing something off of Etsy. They don't really feel that they're purchasing it off of your store. That has a like major pros, but also cons to them, too. But a major pro with this is that we can actually utilize our store sections to categorize profit pricing listings and break even pricing listings. So, you can have one that says like break even pricing, one section in your store, and then another section in your store can say break like profit pricing. It helps easily track when a product reaches the sales threshold for profit pricing because then you can just go into your sections of your store. You can press the specific section that you want to see like break even pricing and then you can see okay all of these listings here are on break even pricing which one have sold about about 10 times and if if someone is hovering around like 8 to 10 sales you go into that one you watch the visibility score on every be and then if the visibility score is above 50% you just put it up to profit pricing and I'll get into how to do that in a sec but in order to like see which ones you should be changing your prices to you generally use your uh sections for that on its Because again, there's so few people that is like going into your store, looking through your specific sections and wanting something from there. Like every single sale on Etsy happens here. So someone is typing something here and based on that they make a purchase decision. We're playing like the game here on search like this the search bar on Etsy. That's where people like base their buying decisions off of. They don't go into your store because again every store on Etsy from a buyer's perspective is just Etsy. they don't feel like they're p purchasing this off of you. They're p purchasing their items off of Etsy. And the great thing about that is that we can then we can just use our store sections for organizing our listings properly. And the best way to to do that is to like organize one section for all our break even pricing listings and another section for all your profit pricing listings because then you can easily see which listings should be put to profit pricing and which listings you might want to revert back to break you in pricing if they're not selling that much in the profit pricing section. A great way to utilize the sections is for that. Now I also want to talk about loss leaders. So loss leaders is a great thing and what a loss leader basically is like if I just search for for again for t-shirt here you see these like this is a Swedish croner but like this is basically one of the variations here are put on like the lowest priced variation that you have in your store. that is the one that will actually be displayed here in search because if you can see it from here like in this listing it has this plus sign after it which basically means that the prices ranges from in my Swedish corner here from 149.77 and upwards that's how they basically display this and the loss leader is the one that is actually displayed in search so if we have a loss leader means that one of our variations is priced lower than the others just so it's displayed with a cheaper price. The only reason that you'd actually want to use a loss leader is to win the battle in search cuz the customer actually choosing one of these listings and going into it, that's a battle in and of itself. And the loss leader just like increases the likelihood of you actually getting clicked in search. That's the reason for using a a loss leader. The thinking that I have with loss leaders is that you want to keep one v variation near break even, maximum of $2 profit. You want to use the same loss leader for break even pricing and for profit pricing, but you don't want to price it more than 50% lower than the regular items. And you also want to use logical loss leaders like a shirt size or color. And just like you mentioned, it helps increase click-through rate. But the key thing to know too, just like the the basic common sense here is that that you have to provide the variation that you're actually advertising. Like you can't not provide it if you someone buys it. So you have to like provide it if someone buys it. And people buy it once they want the specific thing that you're actually advertising. And what I mean by this is that you want to use a logical oscillator is that you don't want to use this. So in this one, it says 149.77. And I think this is a comfort color shirt. But if we scroll way to the bottom, it says digital file only. 149 croner. And this is not okay. Like you're displaying some an entirely different item and it says largely really cheap price. and you sell a digital item at that uh for that price, not the other ones uh here, which is not okay to do. I think this is called like a bait and switch. So, never do anything like this, like we want to keep our stores safe and do things right. So, never doing anything like this. Like, if it's a shirt that you're actually displaying for this, you don't want to like provide a digital file at that low price. You actually want to provide the actual item that you're advertising. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. And I think at least this is like called a bait and switch. Here's an example of someone who does it really well. So, they sell different types of shirts here in this one. This one says 93 croner here for one variation, for the cheapest variation. And if you go to the bottom here, we can see that there's a like this one here, the short sleeve baby bodysuit, which is basically a onesie. Like that's the one that they're actually advertising for that specific amount. So, if you for instance sell shirts just like in this one, like do a baby bodysuit for instance, or like do the short sleeve in excess for the cheap price. Don't do digital fire or anything like that if it's actually shirts you're selling because it doesn't make sense. And you can just like this one. It's still clothing. It's a onesie that has that cheaper price, but it's still within the same category. It's still clothing. So, in this case, I think this is a much better way to actually utilize a loss leader. You just got to keep it logical and so it makes sense. Now, to show you how to count this out, I would recommend to just keep it simple in the beginning and just keep your excess in like, I don't know, like some weird abstract color that you generally sell like orange. keep that one as your loss leader. So if we go to the Bellacma 3 3001 here, Monster doesn't actually sell the excess. Swift POD does though. So let's see here. For this one, again, we're going to keep them the same when it comes to break even pricing and profit pricing. So we do 9.2 plus 4.75 13.87. So if we count this for our free shipping model here, we want to earn basically really really low here. So yeah, something like this is what I would again you generally lose a bit of money when you when you sell this when you sell your loss leader, but it's just to get them in the store itself. For this one specifically for the break even pricing for for free shipping, I would just use the same here. So whoops, not like that. I would use $15.99 loss leader in excess. Like the shirt in excess is the last here. So 1599 and as you can see it's basically not less than 50% of this price here. So, and when it comes to the profit price for the paid shipping thing that we do, we count the same thing as well. We have to count it on two two items. So, 9.2 9.12 9.12 + 4.75 + 2.4 25 39. Let's see like like 29 maybe. Let's do 29. And 29 divided by two is 14.5. And then it's uh 13 87 14.5 399. That's great. So 14.5 is what I would use as my loss leader. So have to do it like this. So 14.5 14.5 oops 14.5 138. Basically same thing for 138 cuz again they all all affected by the the sale. So 197 197 uh loss leader 197 loss loss leader excess and that's uh basically plus 399 1849. I would start off like this once you're rolling basically and you've experimented with adding more variations and I'll get into that in a sec. That's when you I I would recommend to just use like a baby body suit and use a lower loss leader for that. I think that can be a great thing to do or like a toddler shirt, you can also use that for instance. The key thing is that I don't want to overwhelm you in the beginning with just too much to do. But generally, I have found that with cheaper items, like if I just for instance search for like baby bodysuit here or just Okay, let's do bodysuit then instead. And again, since it already says bestseller here, that's usually the one that I go for. This one costs just less to do. So, you could use you could also use this cuz it has a cheaper price, which basically means more click-through rate. And the cost for this is again it's cheaper than the other one. It's about the same, but it's still cheaper. But again, like just to keep things simple, I would recommend to keep the excess. Like add a variation for the excess, and that will be your last leader for a shirt. That keeps you everything neat and tight in the beginning. And once you are rolling, you can experiment more with like taking away the excess, and then using a baby bodysuit, loss leader instead. You can also use like a toddler shirt, just cheaper items compared to the balcon 2001 as a loss leader if that makes sense. But you just got to keep it logical. So you just keep it as a shirt as a clothing cuz that's what you're selling. So for this one, this is what I would use as the loss leader. And then for I forgot to count this out. How much is it? It's insect. So $15.99 is 151. And then the same thing for 151. That's 215. And there we go. That's how we price the loss leaders when you actually use either a a paid shipping model or a free shipping model. But and you would keep the same the same loss leader here for both of these different pricing. So you have the same loss leader in break even pricing and the same loss leader in profit pricing for both of these different shipping models. Now as I mentioned like I would recommend to just keep your sizes with like S3 3XL and the loss leader being the excess shirts. Once you're rolling you will notice that like a lot of people will ask for does this design come in like a tank top and that's when you add those variations to that specific listing itself. There's so many things to do, so much stuff to do. But if you just keep like start like this, it will get you going. And once you actually get requests for specific type of items for a listing, that's when you add those different products and sizes and so forth to the listing is when customers request them. Now, I also want to talk about like how to efficiently change prices and you do that using Vela compared to using Etsy. Etsy's bulking is really slow and it also lacks a lot of flexibility. So in Etsy here, you can go to your listings here. You can press editing options and then edit prices. What you can do here is that you can edit price for all shoppers and you can increase by amount, decrease by amount, set a new amount for all of them or do a percentage increase or percentage decrease. Now the difference that you do for each specific uh like size and variation, it al it differs because it's a 2XL, it's not the same as a 3XL, it's not the same as an XL and so forth. So this is clunky. I've never found a good use of this because again if you do like changes like this across the board it never matches up like exactly as to how how you want it. So what I use to change prices effectively and easily is to use Vela. Now this is a software that you have to pay for and if you click link in my description you get a 7-day free trial. It also helps a lot with the channel. If you click these affiliate links before you sign up it just supports your channel if you want to do that but again you don't have to do that anyhow. If you're in Villa, it looks kind of looks like this. But what I would say is that they offer better bulk editing features because they have customizable pricing profiles. And the key feature that you want to use is their profiles because you can copy variation details into a profile and reuse it. If you not familiar with Vela, which I assume a lot of you are, this is how it can look. This is my demo account. So, excuse all of the different listings here. But what you can do here is that you can enter listings. You press into a listing here and then it will look something like this. This is the listing that you then have. So, you can scroll up and down. And here is the listing itself. Now, the only thing that that we really want to be concerned about with this, because again, there's a lot of features that that you can do, but there's one thing they do really, really well, and it's their profiles. So, let's say that this is a listing that you have on Etsy and it has break even pricing on it. The first thing that you want to do is that you want to go into the listing that has the break even pricing and then you want to press this button right here that says save as profile. Boom. And then you want to press this one here, variations, because that's the only thing that concerns us, the variational profiles. And then we can have it say break even pricing because again this is a listing that basically had the break even pricing in it. So we can say this is a specifically for a convert color 1717 since you can see that in the images. Then we can say CC 1717 and that's our break even pricing that basically creates a template out of all of this. So it basically creates a template from your pricing and all of this which is so everything of from like ranging from your colors to your prices to your sk like like everything in the variations basically on Etsy is copied into a template here on Villa called a profile. Now they basically then make make a template based on your listing which you can then name whatever you want and for this one it's a break even pricing like for instance here this can be break even pricing I think I made this one with free shipping and then you can name it like this boom done and now let's say that you want to make a profit like a version of this for profit pricing let's say that you don't don't have a profit pricing like you don't have a template for that in your Etsy store what you then do is you press copy let's see and then it's copied here and then we just go here demo and then you say profit pricing instead. You press save, update the current profile. Now, all you need to do here is just change the prices accordingly. So, you can press show all and then you just change the prices. Again, this is just a random template on it. It doesn't affect anything. So, what we do then here like if I want this to correlate with my profit pricing, which I have here, I would basically then say 351, 393, and 421, 420 if this was the Bella Canvas one in that case. So then we just let's see here. So 4 351 for instance in this case. So 351 and and an easy tip to just change these prices fast is that you write this one down once. You hold command C or control C if you're on a Windows. I'm on a Mac. Then you press tab and then tab paste it. Tab paste it. Tab paste. Because as you can see all of these are the S shirts. So tab paste. Tab paste. Tab paste. Tap paste. You can just change this accordingly to to the prices that you want to set. that you've already like counted out which we basically did in the Google Docs here. So tab paste, tab paste, tab paste, tap paste, tab paste, tab paste, tab paste, tap paste, tab paste. And then you see that the two excels come here. And then we just change that to that. So tab paste, tab paste, tab paste, tab paste, tab paste, tab paste, tab, and then we're in the three excels now. So I did one wrong, I think. So 420 for that one. Again, this is assuming that we're doing the one. This is just to show you how to actually manage a profile. So this is what we do. And then we save it. And then we have as easy as that. We now have a template for our profit pricing for free shipping. Now if we have done our sections properly on Etsy, we can just go back here and go into one of our categories. One of these can in this case if this was called like for instance break even pricing or profit pricing here. We can just go into these ones. Like if this one is break even pricing here, I could just go here. Boom boom boom boom and boom. and then just go press edit and then again don't worry about this or just don't like this is because of the demo account but again all you would do is press inventory because this is everything that concerns us so in inventory variations and then choose profile and then again if I'm bumping up these up from break even pricing to profit pricing we choose this one demo profit pricing boom and it says preparing to saved and then done usually I have to apply it and stuff like that but that's usually that's now fixed And that's it basically. Let's see here. Yep. And then done. Usually you have to sync it with as well. I know that Villa is updating a lot of their software now, so I'm not sure it's going to look exactly like this, but the gist of it will will look exactly like this. Because again, if I just show you once once more, if this is our like break even pricing listings, we go here, we press edit, we go to inventory variations, choose profile, and then we just if we're taking them from break even pricing to profit pricing. We just apply the correct profile to them, which is basically just a template. And this all this changes accordingly. The key thing to know here is that it's really easy to lose our SKUs when we do this, which is why I recommend to not have them like synced in the first place because we have to experiment in order to make this work. It's just a constant thing in business that you have to experiment to get better and to just learn from failures that you do because if this is for instance like instead of unisex t-shirts, you wanted wanted to say unisex like adult t-shirts or let's say for instance that you have another color. Let's say that you added for instance like one color to this. Let's say that you added for instance, I don't know, like the heather mob here to this one. That will then erase all of the listings variations on Etsy and replace it with a template, which basically means that your SKS will be linked. Or if you have any SKS like in this one, if this one says like this, the SKS will basically say this instead. It would just be erased with the template. But you want to keep your profiles like this instead. So just ensure to like if any of these like variational changes here like if anything of these changes then just know that you can lose your SKS and I recommend to just not have most of them synced anyway just because you have to do so many experiments so many experiments here and then once you've done that you press save and then you're done. That's how easy it is. Just the key thing to know is that you can you usually use your at least I usually use my SKUs once I do a lot of experiments because the template itself it erases the thing on Etsy if it not correlates exactly. So if you add a color for instance then or like erases or take away a color the profile on will completely like replace the thing that you have on Etsy. Once you are at this stage, you always want to ensure that your SKUs looks like this. So you don't like inevitably like skew link products that they shouldn't be skewing with different designs that you have on Etsy. If that makes sense. That's how you would use Vela to bulk edit your prices efficiently. And if you have like done all of the work by just having different sections here for profit pricing and break even pricing, it's really easy to manage because again you just go in here, you mark the ones that you want to change and you just apply of profile. It takes maximum 30 seconds once everything is set up accordingly. So really really easy to do that I'd say. Now one of the last things that I want to touch on here is conversion fees and credit cards. So, you want to align your Etsy currency with your bank because otherwise you incur a 2.5% conversion fee on all payouts to your bank. So, highly recommend to just keep the currency that's within your bank account, the one that you actually set up your store with because you can't change that later on. Keep your store currency the same as that. So, if you live, for instance, like me in Sweden, I have I have mine set in Swedish corner and then my chosen like shop currency is Swedish Corner. The reason for that is that otherwise you receive a 2.5 conversion fee to all payers to your bank and that does a lot once you're at scale. You want to use a high quality cashback credit card when possible. But I also want to preface that and say that I've had a lot of difficulty finding a good high limit cashback card. And I have like basically a perfect credit score. But it just doesn't exist the same way that it does in the US because all my US friends for instance they usually can easily get a really good credit card. But for us it's really really harder. But when you actually want to find a credit card, the key thing to know is that you want to pri prioritize low exchange rates, preferably like 0% with cashback credits if you can find one. But it's really hard to do. And if you can't find one, like a good one at least, you want to have like one credit card as your backup if anything happens to your debit card. Because like if you can't find a credit card, you use your debit card instead for to fulfill all your orders. But if anything happens to that bank like bank card that you have, your whole business is kind of at risk. At Q4, anything can happen. Believe me, like having a backup in these hectic times is really important. So just have some kind of backup with a credit card if anything happens when you really need your bank account. And as an example, like if you like do manual orders and you do like over 120 to 130 a day and you live in Sweden like me, the bank like all of these transactions on Printify are foreign transactions and they can kind of look fishy because it's all these small transactions for these specific orders and it looks really shady according to the bank. Even though like you might do everything correct, they it might trigger some of their like security systems and they have no way to go around that and they are there just to keep everyone safe. So in order to like mitigate that, I've talked a lot about that previously in this video. It might be after this. Not sure honestly, but you want to use an automatic approval on Printify to mitigate that. But anyhow, like if anything basically happens, it could be like that you get too many orders and like the bank finds it fishy or anything really that happens with your bank. You want to have a credit card as your backup. That's the main use of it. if you can't find one that has like a really low or preferably like 0% exchange rate on the card uh or if it if you don't have like a high limit on it. So that's how I would think when it comes to these credit cards for us European users. Now a summary and final thoughts like this segment became really long and it's because it can feel a bit complex and it's especially like the paid shipping model is a bit complex but just to summarize like you start with break even pricing you shift the profit pricing after you hit the performance milestones. So like about 10 sales or 50% visibility score on FB your shipping strategy like free shipping contract pay shipping and your you use loss leaders strategically dependent on what model you use but you use those strategically in your business. You use store sections for easy organization of your listings. And Vela is the preferred tool that I use for bulk editing prices for their profiles. And you want to keep the same currency in your bank in your Etsy store. You want to use a credit card when possible. And if it's not possible, just use it as a backup. And you want to let minor currency shifts go. You want to act on major ones. And the major ones generally like happens once in a blue moon. Hasn't even happened to me in my journey. So I've never ever thought about it. But like we never know what happens in the future. And if you notice that there's a major change then that's the only thing like and a major ch change in this one is like a 30 20 to 30% change. If that happens then for instance like act on it but otherwise just let it go because doing pricing like this will enable you to focus your attention on where it matters the most. Okay. So now we'll talk about order management for a streamlined workflow. So first off, the whole philosophy that I have with this is to aim for zero delays by implementing efficient systems. We want to make automate all approvals at a consistent daily time. And I'll get more into that in a sec. And apart from that, we want to process orders and messages once per day to keep our operations organized because again, we're basically all small businesses here. But if we keep the whole workflow organized and structured, we can scale this properly and and we can actually like handle days or like seasons where we get a lot of orders. This is really key to have a business that actually functions when there's a lot of demand. So this is key when you're at scale. But if you implement this early, it's going to make it a lot easier to streamline the whole process and make everything easier for you down the line. Now, one thing that I mentioned there really fast was that you want to automate the approvals. And when I say that, what I practically mean is that if you go to to your Etsy store, you press settings, and then you go at the top here where it says order settings, you scroll down to this part here, the order submission settings. These are really important. But like when we actually get our orders, there are usually issues that happen like at the syncing stage because either like the customer has missed some information like missed their last name or something like that. It could also be that something hasn't synced properly. Some kind of mistake basically within this whole process. And there's so many different things which I'll get into in a sec too that can happen at this stage which is why I think it's really important to have this setting on. What this does is that all orders that that get synced to you will be placed on hold and then at a specific time that you set, I have mine set to 12:00, so at noon, they will all go out at that set time. But that basically means that I every morning I just go through all of my orders. I see if there's any mistakes, if there's if there's any issues with the whole thing, and then I correct those issues and then I just leave them on hold cuz they all go out at noon. And it makes it really easy to just handle order fulfillment that way because again I go through every single order just to check if there are any issues and there can be a lot of issues here. A big one for instance is that if you get an order and this person has actually like ordered two items but only one of those items are actually skew linked with Printify then it will show up as an onhold order with a containing only one item. And this is really, really, really bad because if you have this setting on instead that it will automatically go out within an hour of getting the order synced, then that means that like one of the items will be missing from their order, which is really, really bad cuz then you have to make another order, pay the full amount for shipping again, and you'll basically lose money that way. That is a really common issue that happens, which is why it's really important to check all your orders before they actually go out, which is why I think this one is the best setting to have. And there's more issues to that too because once you basically add scale, one thing that I found is that if you do manual orders, which I did in the beginning entirely, which means that you have to press the green button and submit them each time once you get them. These are basically all foreign transactions for me. That means that after a certain amount, it looks kind of fishy for the bank. And even if you tell them exactly what you do, you give them basically everything. They have security systems in place to prevent shady stuff. And even if you tell them about it, they can't really do much about it. That's been my experience at least. But the problem with this is there's a lot of foreign transactions. And if you're doing more than 120 orders a day, that's where you go into the gray zone, at least in my experience, where they can decline you like for further transa foreign transactions. Since I live in Sweden, this really applies to me and for anyone that lives abroad from the US, this would definitely really apply too. So a big fix to this whole thing is to use the automatic approval setting. This mainly is apparent once you're at scale because when this happens or when you use this setting, what they do is that they take the amount of all the unhold orders. They charge you once for all of that. Then they put that amount that they charge you from your bank account. They put that in your Printify wallet and then they allocate the money from the Printify wallet to each order accordingly. But the most important thing is that you only have one transaction with your bank account and that solves like that whole bank issue that happens once you're at scale. However, if you're still small, like manual approval is fine. This is mainly when you're doing like over 120 orders a day. But I would strongly recommend to at least think about this. Like if you can set a time each day where you're just doing all of your orders every single day at the same time, it makes it really easy to process the whole thing. But I I do understand that everyone has a different circumstances and like if you have small kids, this can definitely be really hard to do. So then you can definitely use the manual option because you might not know exactly when you can fix or or exceed your orders. But once you're at scale, this will be necessary. So just keep in mind that if like your bank declines and stuff like that, it's probably because there's a lot of small foreign transactions for each order if you do manual approval. And having this setting on will fix that for you since there will only be one charge for that specific for all of the orders in total. Now, another important part too is that people are flimsy sometimes and which is why I think it's really important to wait 24 hours before you're submitting the orders that you actually got. This again is solved entirely by just doing your orders once a day. Some will not be able to wait 24 hours because some people they will actually like submit the order closer to the time that you actually are submitting the orders yourself to Printify. But doing it this way, most people will have to wait uh 24 hours cuz at least for me here in Sweden, I do all my orders in the in the morning. And for most US people, it's usually nighttime for them when it's early morning here. which means that if I do it in the early morning, there's really few sales that generally happen during that time since it's really late there. But if the time zone is different depending on where where you live, just pick a day where where it just fits the best for you to actually fix all the orders and then this problem will just be mitigated automatically by that. Some people will not have that like period of waiting 24 hours before their order is actually submitted to Printify like that you actually like submit them yourself to Printify. But most of them will, which is really good. But why we even do this in the first place is because sometimes people want to update the ship by ship um sometimes people want to update the ship uh shipping address or and sometimes they actually want to do change like the size or the color or anything like that. So we give them 24 hours to see if there's any changes that they actually want to make in with the order and we don't want to account for this in the processing and shipping times. It should be bulked in when you're thinking about it. But in my experience, I've just noticed that waiting a day or so doesn't make too much of a difference when you're submitting stuff to reliable production partners on Printify, which is in my opinions with POD and Monster Digital when you're doing clothing. As long as you're choosing solid print providers that you work with, one day or so doesn't make too much of a difference. So, you don't have to think about it like as a big thing to fix or like to allocate time for within your processing shipping times. But if you use unreliable ones that can be like that doesn't ship their items on time reliably, then it might be worth to think about it. But generally, if you use Monster Digital and Swift Pretty when when selling clothing, you will be fine. At least that's been my experience. Apart from that too, if you like send something to production and they actually want to cancel it later on, even after 24 hours when you've submitted it, what you can do here, since you have waited 24 hours, it's not gone that long of a time to actually fix the order. If they do it after like a day or so, then you can just cancel the order, duplicate it in Printify and fix the issue, like change the color or change the size and so forth. So overall, just process your orders once a day and all of this will be fixed is the overall message I want to send out here. Another really important thing when it comes to order management is cancellations versus refunds. And what I recommend to do is if I go into my order here and press these three dots, you always want to cancel the order. you don't want to use the refund button. So, you always want to press cancel instead if you're doing full refunds. If you're doing partial refunds, you have to use this one. But generally, I would recommend to use the cancel feature more. Why is that? Well, that's because cancellations limit the review window to 48 hours. Whereas with a refund, if you just use the refund function, the customer has about 3 months to leave you a a review, which is insane in comparison to the cancellation feature. So what it does is that it helps reduce the risk of getting negative feedback. And negative feedback if we have new shops especially, it's really important not to get to just see immediately. So using that cancellation feature is something that I would strongly recommend if you're doing full refunds because of the refund window being much much smaller for the customer. So now we're going to go into SKUs syncing and then the Printify template management. So, I believe in not syncing SKUs by default. And the reason for that is you want to experiment a lot and you want to test things out a lot. And for instance, if you test new pricings and stuff like that, it's really easy or like let's say that you want to try some new colors for your shirts. You lose the SKS a lot of the times when doing that. So, at least that that's been my experience. So, bulk editing often just wipes SKS entirely and you kind of need to bulk edit stuff when you're experimenting and trying new stuff, trying new pricing strategies and so forth. I'm going to show you an easy way to sync them. So, so you can feel comfortable with actually losing the SKUs because honestly, you put up so many listings, but 20% of the listings actually sell. And honestly, 4% of listings that you actually make account for most sales. So, having all of your listings synced in my head doesn't really make sense. You have to list them through Printify, which is another step and takes like a lot longer to list stuff on Etsy. But apart from that, you don't need all your listings synced since such a small amount of your listings actually sell. So syncing as you go, as you actually get orders is my preferred way of doing this. So I'm going to show you here how you can do that. So what once you basically have an order and it's not synced like synced with a skew, it will be basically be placed here in your other orders tab. So this is one that I have here. I just to sync it basically. Then if I already have a template like made in printy, I already have the design in printy. What I do here is is that I just go into the order. I press my products. I search if I can't find it in the top ones here, I just search for it here. So, let's just search for tasty test. And this is the one that I wanted to have since I've named it properly, which we'll get more into in a sec. Then I just choose the color of the shirt that I want. And then I choose the size the customer ordered. She chose the large for instance. And then I ensure like if this is not a personalized order I would ensure to just have this box checked because if it is checked that means that every order that when the person buys this specific design on Etsy and that specific color and then that specific size it will automatically be synced to this template color and size. So this would basically this specific variation will be synced going forward if you just check this box. And it's so easy to do this as you go because again there's such a few amount of listings that you actually put out that actually sell well and there's such a few listings that actually carry your store. So doing it this way saves a lot of time. Now an important part to this too is when you're adding a template you always want to ensure that the design is centered and close to the collar itself because generally I just found that people like it like that. So for instance if I just go into this one here I want to ensure that it looks something like this. And again, another important part about this is that we want to have the design be quite big. Not too big, but it's better to have it too big than too small. And we can just press preview button here to see that. I always find when I'm want to check how big something is and like how big your design is and if it's specifically centered. This person, the person too is really good to see that. And I can see that it's centered and looks great. And we want it as like as again as far to the top as possible because there's always going to be some margin here between the collar and the design. But if you place it like this, then it makes it really easy to within a template to have it fulfilled and look good. Now another important part about this too. Let's say that for instance this works really well for lighter garments. But let's say that the template that they purchased a darker garment like the dark gray heather. To make a template efficiently in Printify, you want to select all the colors that the person bought. So let's say that they bought this, this, and this, and this. Something like this. So, okay. And let's just take another design that I have. So, what we do first is that we take either the black design or the or the dark design. We center it properly. And then we make sure that it's as big as we want it to be. So, something like this. Maybe we check the person too. If it looks good, this looks great. And then what I do here is that I, as you saw, the first thing I did was enable all the colors. Then I added a design. Then I basically made it so it looks properly so it's as big as I need to be. It's and centered. Then I just press this button here for every single lighter garment design. And then I go here and then I just take this off cuz I I'll count this as a darker garment. Then I'll take the lighter version of the design. And then I just go in here. I copy the information here and just paste it into the darker version here. And there you go. That's basically how you add a design efficiently in a template on Printify. So then I just press save product. Let's see here. Perfect. And also another important thing to go along with this is that we need to keep our printify templates organized. So we need to use clear naming when we do this. And I prefer to use this format. So design name that product and then production partner. It makes it easy to find and manage listings as you get new orders. So this is the one here. Let's call this one one more chapter cuz this the design says one more chapter. And then the shirt is the Bella Canvas 3001, which is the most popular t-shirt that I've sold. And then I make an abbreviation of the production partner that I use for this. And this one is Monster Digital. So I make it say MD. So the design name is one more chapter. The shirt is the three Bella Canvas 3001. And the abbreviation for the production partner is MD and it stand for Monster Digital. And then I just press save as draft. And then we're up here. And perfect. There we go. So again, if like the order that you got here, if you can't find it on Printify, what then you have to create a new template for it like I just did. So what you then do in that case is that you just since we now have the new template, I just sync the new template that I just made cuz and it just pops up at the top of the page here. I take that one, I choose the right color, the right size, and then again, if this not is not a personalized order, I then just have ensure that this button is selected or this box is selected. so that every time someone b buys that shirt in that size and that color it will automatically be synced to printify. Another important thing about this whole business especially in the beginning is to send like personalized shipping notifications once something has actually sold. So once something has actually sold what we can do now on Etsy is that we go here and then we just go to the completed tab and these are all the ones that are completed. Now, what we do here, if we see that there are new orders that are completed, what we do is that we take a shipping message and we just send it to them. Like, we do that for every single order that that has been completed recently until we see that we've already sent a shipping notification to this person. And that's when we stop. And to know exactly what to say, this is the thing that you say. So, this is available for free at no extra cost in the school mentorship. But, this is exactly what you say. You just say, "Hi, thank you for your purchase." And you can track the package here. insert tracking link and insert tracking number if they want don't want to press the link and then if they have any questions they can just reach out and then take care. So that's what you do once something actually has shipped. And this also makes it really easy to get reviews later on too because once something has been delivered, you can go to your Etsy store sort by completed and then go to the deliver tab here. And then when we're at this phase, if something has been delivered and they didn't even respond to the first message or they didn't say thank you, what we can do, it's really natural then to just ask them this. If they give you a positive message after they you gave the ship notification, I would recommend to say something like this. Like, I see that your order has been delivered. I just want to check if everything is okay with the purchase. This can also be uh said if they don't give you a reply as well. Now, if the customer is happy, you say this. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to hear that. If you have a moment, I'd love it if you could leave a review about your experience. Reviews help us small sellers a lot. But no worries if you don't have time. Thank you so much for your support. If they don't even answer this part here, then just leave it be. But again, h another part too is that if the customer is unhappy and we're in the new beginning stages, we actually notice those issues like really fast before they actually leave a review, which helps us mitigate reviews. And if we actually fix the issues really fast, it makes it really easy to get good reviews as well. This is how I've been able to have at least a 20% review rate in my store. Generally about 20 to 25% review rate when I was a new seller. And if you're you basically then fix the issue with them, you can just ask for a review once the person has got the new item. But this again is a great way to mitigate bad reviews and get good reviews. Now another important part that's kind of weird honestly, but most people on Etsy, they buy their items as gifts. So you can actually like disable gift like u gift notes in your store which I would highly recommend to do because we can't do gift notes for every single item if we do other items than shirts and if we do other like specific print providers that are not monster digital and with POD cuz though with those you can actually use gift notes at least where it stands right now. So what I would recommend to do is that you have it disabled. So, you go to your settings here, this cog wheel, you press options, and then you go scroll down to the gift notes here, and you make sure that this one says off. Now, with Etsy, they have this feature called gift teasers nowadays, and people can still send that I think because I think the customer still gets an email as a gift teaser of the whole thing, but this still gives the customer the impression that they will actually have a gift note within the package, which is a bit of a hassle. Now to fix this like we always want to like if the if the customer is include a gift teaser or they just include some kind of like include within the notes they want a gift note then try to include it wherever possible and how you do that is that you just go here to the printify settings and you just from this page like you go here in settings and at the top here you select gift messages. You want it disabled on Etsy and enabled on printify because you can customize. Again, this will be blurred because this is my gift note, but you can customize the gift note itself. And once you actually like if someone buys like for instance a Bella Camel 3001 with Monster Digital, then you can actually include a gift note. And then for those or orders, you pay 10 cents extra, which is really cheap. And you can give them a really nice gift note in those cases, which I highly recommend that you do. But overall, keep it disabled and keep it enabled on Printify by just pressing this button here. And then design a nice simple gift note that the customer can send with a with a gift. Now, another important thing about orders too is that sometimes there's production lag and especially in Q4 when delays occur, it's really important to just adjust the processing times because the most important time like uh times that we actually have to meet and I get more into that in a sec too. But uh how we do that practically if we go into our settings, we go into our shipping settings and then we go to our shipping profile right here. This is the part that we want to change. So, and it's mainly this this one here. So if there's production lag and the production partners are in shipping stuff out out on time because of the huge demand then we just add one or two days here and then that's fine. Uh we always have to do that accordingly to how the season is going. Like if it's a lot you might want to do seven days but I just found that having this at 1 to 5 days is the best usually and then you might want to increase a day or maximum two if there's ma major lag but generally one to five is is perfect. But the key thing is that you that you don't want to mess with the shipping times. You just want to mess with these processing times. It helps manage expectations for like when people will get stuff delivered during during high seasons. But it also does not penalize your shop when you do it this way because we should never ever ever have delayed orders in our shop because if we do like if we exceed these processing times and we do that for too many orders, Etsy actually limits your reach in in search. They send you this email saying that we see that you're not shipping on time. So that to get to get back on track, we will like lessen your reach in search, which is really really bad because the rank in on our listings is how we get sales from from the get. So and this comes from having too many delayed orders. Apart from that, if they still deem that you're not shipping stuff out on time, even with this, they can even put you on payment reserves, which they do for all of us in the beginning. So they keep a portion of your revenue to ensure that you're actually shipping your items on time. So to fix this cuz again like it happens for everyone where there's lag and like a specific order might not be shipped out on time. To fix this again what we do is that we go to our orders. Let's take this one and then we press the three dots here and we press update ship by date. And again we want to do this with a minimum of 5 days. We take away this standard message. Again this is a free resource that's available at no cost in school. And then we just send them this message. So we just take this copy this I send that into here. So, I just say that, hey, hi, we're a small family run business and we're having some delays in our production here, but rest assured, your order is being prioritized. And then you just insert your own name here. And that's the message that you send. But the key thing is that you update this ship by day with a minimum of 5 days. And if there's even more lag and you you're unsure that you will actually ship it in 5 days, especially like during Q4 seasons, then use 7 days. Now, the reason for this is because you can only update the ship by date once. Which means that if the production partner hasn't shipped out the order within the like extra time that you gave the order when you updated the ship by date, that means that you will have a delayed order, which you can't fix. And again, as we've gone through now, you can never have delayed orders because they can lessen your recent search and they can even put on put you on payment reserves in the worst case. And it's always just better to have more time than enough. And in my experience, I found that doing it with five extra days is usually like it usually works like a charm. But if you're unsure even with five days, just do seven days. And those two options has always worked for me. Okay. Now, we're going to talk about custom orders and proof deadlines. So, when you're actually providing a proof to someone like this, that does someone actually want a proof of a design if it's a custom order before you actually made it. You generally don't want to send proofs because it takes too much time to do them. And if you are stating your like your listings clearly, you generally don't have to. But if sometimes people just want it and if they actually do want it, the key thing to know here when you handle these types of orders is that you send them a message like this like, "Hi, thank you for your order before sending to production. I'd love to confirm the design with you. H please take a look at the the attached image and let me know if there's any changes needed." So you take this message and just send that to them. The key thing with this message with any type of message like this is that you need to have a deadline where you will actually send it to production. So at the end of the message, you say, "I'll proceed in 12 hours unless I hear otherwise." And if you do that, they know that there's time limit with it. And again, if you follow all of these steps accordingly, you also know that we only do orders once a day. So if we get these orders and we see that this one actually wants a proof, then we just send them the message and we wait another day. So let's say that we got the order and they've already waited and then during the morning you're doing your orders just like I do. If you get an an order like that, you want to send the proof and wait another extra day to see if they actually want to change anything with the proof because you send send them that message with the proof of the design. And if you don't hear otherwise, you just after a full day because again, we're still doing orders once a day, we send it to production because the key thing with messages like this is that we say that there's a deadline of 12 hours. But the key thing with messages like this is that we want always want to underpromise and overd deliver. So we see that the deadline is 12 hours, but in actuality it's 24 hours just because sometimes people are like responding after 4 to 14 hours and they procrastinate and so forth. But if we give them 24 hours, there's more than enough time for them to change anything. And the good thing is that in a lot of cases, people actually don't even respond to these kinds of messages. And when they don't do that, they can just see from their chat history that, okay, I should have probably responded to this message. I didn't, and now I just have to live with it. And most people are like are okay with stuff like that because most people are very nice. Sometimes you get these obnoxious people where you have to exchanges and so forth. But generally this helps mitigate a lot because overcommunicating is always more important than undercommunicating. So apart from this this two which is a really important note about this too is that having a deadline like this ensures that you can actually move forward with the design without a reply. And if you move forward and they're not super happy about the design, you can just refer to the message that you sent prior to them. So really important to do this when you send proofs. Always have a deadline within the message itself. That's a key part about this. Now as I touched a little bit on there, sometimes people want to do returns and exchanges. And I recommend to have those on as accepted as your store because it increases your conversion rate. At least that's been my experience. Now to handle returns when customer gets the package, there will be a return address to the production partner's facility. All returns get donated once they're actually like returned to the production partner. So this is a like like a pure loss for you. But what it does is that it increases conversion rate. So you make more sales. If you get 10 more sales and you have one return, it's like you still made the profit from nine shirts, which more than makes up for the one return that you actually got. So highly recommend you use returns and exchanges. And to handle them, just have them return, use the return address that's on the package. And once they've actually returned it as a process of doing this, always ask for a a picture of the receipt, the parcel, and the label. And again, we always want to underpromise and overd deliver. And if they just send you the receipt of the actual return, refund them anyway. The key thing that we have to know is that as long as they send us one of these three things, uh, then we can still process a refund. But it mitigates a lot of the people that want to like get stuff for free and stuff like that. So doing it like that is highly recommended for at least that's that's worked really well for me. When it comes to exchanges, it works a bit differently because like what I've always done is to use a replacement fee. So you make a listing on that's just blatantly called replacement fee. And how it works is that you let the customer keep the original item, you send them the replacement fee and once they pay for that, they get the new item at a much cheaper discounted price basically at an at cost price for us. And how we have to think about this is that let's say that the like this is a shirt from Monster Digital. It cost 13.88 and then we sold the shirt for $24.99. That means that we actually made $827 in profit. Now, if we send them a replacement fee, it has to be a lot cheaper. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense cuz it's an exchange. So, let's say that we do it for $12. Once we actually fulfill this order with Printify, we lose $3.51. But the key thing to know is that we still made $8.27 on the first sale. So, if I just take $8 and then we lose $3.51, the overall profit for the whole sale and the whole like net profit for this customer and this sale is still $4.76 in the green, which means that we can offer the replacement fee at $12. The whole thinking behind this is that we just want to make sure that we at least break even on the total sale and hold. If I charge it at $24.99 and then I earn $8.27 in profit, I sell the replacement fee for $12. I lose $3.51. So I subtract that from the profit. That means that I still walk away in total with a profit of $4.76 and also giving the customer a great experience because again, if they want to exchange something, they can get a new one without an in return hassle. They can even keep the item itself and they just have to pay a much smaller fee. So, this has worked really well for me in most cases. Sometimes you get these obnoxious customers that don't like it, but those are the exceptions. This has worked really well overall for me. Now, another important part about this, and I kind of touched this on this a little bit earlier, but sometimes people forget their to actually put their last name within the shipping address. And if they do that, I have a really great way to solve that. So, let's take this one for instance here. This person has this name. I can't show this since this is my actual name for my own store. But what I do here is that I take the name and the address. I go to Google. I just copy and paste that in here. I press enter and search for that. And then I make sure that the search has to include the first name. So I make these type of citation marks here. Whoops, not like that. Like this. And then from these first three results, I can just see that okay, this is the correct last name. This is the correct last name. And this is the correct last name. Or like these like last names are the same. And I can just see that the the exact same first name and last name correlates which with three separate search results which means that I can highly understand that this person's name is this. So I don't even have to contact customer in this case because all of these search results on this specific address with that first name all correlates to the same name. So I can use that as the actual address for the order without having to reach out to the customer. Apart from that too, sometimes if you look at their email, it can even be like firstname.lastnamegmail.com or like first name.astame@hopmail.com or something like that. And if like if that's the email and you find like in this case that three of the search results all correlate to the same name, then you can be pretty certain that it's that name that you actually want to have in your shipping address. But sometimes you get mixed results. And what you do in that case is that you always overcommunicate with the customer. So you just reach out to them and just ask them about it. If you don't get an email like a response for them within a couple days, then send them an email instead. If they don't use that Apple cryptic thing, take their email and send an email through your store email to the customer and reach out through there and see if that you have better luck there because sometimes people don't have the app, but usually people respond on email. But always refer in the email that they should answer your message on Etsy, not through email. So that just refer to the messages that you actually send on Etsy so that they don't they don't feel that there's anything shady going on. All right. So, we talked a lot about communication here. An overall principle that I have is to just overcommunicate because overcommunicating is much better than undercommunicating because if we just send our like the deadline for instance with proof and stuff like that, people are usually really forgiving because we've done our best to be really communicative with our customers. But the reverse is also true. not communicating this stuff with the customer is really perceived really badly because like lack of updates causes frustration and people just get really irritated with that stuff because they expect that you actually should reach out about anything like that. So always have in mind that you always want to overcommunicate like don't be afraid to send customer messages because I know that can feel it can feel like that sometimes you want to mitigate any issues for the customer at all times but generally overcommunicating is better than undercommunicating. Now, as a last final part here to the order fulfillment, like if you do personalized orders, you don't need to automate it like right away, but you can like using paid software and stuff like that. We need clear systems to do this. Now, what I've done is to you combine chat GPT with my design software. It saves time and it's a way great way to keep our orders order fulfillment to under 90 seconds. Like I've just found in that in my experience that the keeping order fulfillment to under 90 seconds is key if we don't want to spend all day during busy seasons on our computers. So let's say for that we have something like this that we sell something like this. What we then do here is that like this one has an established date and names as the personalization. And how people can write this as when they actually order something is something like this. So 2022 Jack Jack, Olivia, Sophia. And this is not the format that we need it in. So what we can do here is that we can have GPT reformat this to to just say Jack, Olivia, and Sophia with the first letter capitalized and just a space in between, no comma, and then the second name and the third name. How we do that is that we go to chatbt. You don't need a paid plan with chatbt. You can just use the free version. This is the paid version, but you can use the free version as well. And we say, can you please format this? So can you please take away any commas and the date from this message? I want the first name of each I want the first letter of each name capitalized. And then we just paste in the what the customer wrote in the personalization. And we see what captivity gives us. And this is perfect. This is exactly how we want it. So we take that and then we just copy it. And then we just go to I use Can for as my designated design software, but I could just go here. I just paste it in. I copy this here. Whoops. Something else came in. And there we go. Super simple again. And then to train this what we can do here is say do the same thing for these for this I don't know 2024 Elenor David Jack and and again sometimes like with personalization like this they usually want the order of the names to be exactly as they put it and then since that's automatically in here we can just take this and just put it in here and there we go some for some reason 40 comes in but that's how we can do this really fast by automating personalized order fulfillment and then we can just go to the other Canva design here and just write in the exact like either 2025 or like 2022 and then just download that and that's how we get our designs really really fast. Now I done this two times. What I can do in this case probably here is just give them the personalized text that the customer gave us. So what I can do here is just say 2023 uh let's say I don't know Cody, Jack, and Chris. And now just by giving the personal like if this is the personalized text that the customer gave us, I just have it automatically in the format that I want without even giving any anything else cuz they just understand what to do. I just take this and I go here and just take away the 40 which is really weird. Fix this and there we go. Super simple and super easy. That's how you can automate personalized order fulfillment if you do like these names for instance. But this can be applied to anything that that you need formatted properly and you want to do it this fast. And generally what it does is that it just helps you skip pro spoof and keeps to because the designs are just kept consistent and it just avoids a lot of like manual cleanup and it just speeds everything up. So you can keep again creating designs and putting them into printify it just keeps the time limited to within 90 seconds. But a key thing too again with this whole thing is that when you do personalized orders like you don't need to do all these crazy things with personalization. We want to keep it as simple as possible. So use generally a name and a date. That's really all you need. And if you scale this up, if you keep it simple, then you can even use Hello Custom to automate a lot of the personalization work for you if you do this at scale. But remember that it still costs to use automation software like that. So if you're not at scale, you can still do it just like I showed you with Chat GPT, which is the preferred way that I used it myself. Now, some final tips with order fulfillment. Keep operations simple. I'm a big believer in simplifying things. Like keep it as simple as possible. Like simple is not easy. Doing simple stuff is hard generally hard to do. But the simpler you can make something, the easier your life will be. And you can do that by just having everything structured and following the steps that I just outlined. If you just do that, a lot of the issues will be mitigated and we will it will be a lot easier to scale your shop as well and keep up with the scale your shop once it's actually growing a lot. You always want to f focus on proactive communication and strategic automation to again to simplify everything and to streamline the process. And the goal is again is to have h happy customers with minimal manual intervention. And again this is a big and in informative like part. If you struggle with every different section in this just go back replay that specific part and watch it again because again there's a lot of information here and we can't absorb that just in one go. So if you struggle with anything just go back to that specific part and listen to it again. [Music] Okay, so now we're going to tackle Etsy ads and we're going to go through how they work, when to use them, and measuring profitability. So, first off, what does Etsy ads do? While Etsy ads are PPC ads, which stands for pay-per-click, which means that you get build once someone clicks your ad listing. All they really really do is that they increase the click-through rate to your listings. That's all they do. What specifically they do is that they create a separate listing in search. So, let's say that you have your organic listing here. Then they create the ad listing up here. So, you get a you get a second listing in search which is labeled as your ad listing. And it provides a chance to appear twice in search results. And this is really important which I'll get to in a sec. Apart from that too, Etsy ads also enables you to show up in related queries. So when someone searches for something else or related things to the things that you're actually selling, your listing can pop up and that in that related search as well. So you can show up in related queries which increases your visibility and your clickthrough rate by default there. So first off, why would do you even want to use SE ads? Well, if a listing is converting well, increasing traffic to it can boost the sales because if you're already converting well, just getting more traffic will usually lead to more sales. But this also goes into the rule of seven. And what the rule of seven says is that a potential customer should encounter a brand's marketing messages at least seven times before making a purchase decision. When it comes to engagement for your marketing campaign, the principle emphasizes the importance of repeated exposure for enhancing recognition and improving retention. What this basically just means in layman's terms is that the customer needs to see your listing a bunch of times before they actually make a sale. And having a separate listing in search, like the same one but separate listing in search of having having your listing seen twice highly increases the conversion rate. And the rule of seven just states that they need to see it seven times before they actually make a decision. So it gives you a much higher chance to be clicked in search if you use ads. Now, when should you even use Etsy ads? Well, the best practice here to use Etsy ads, like the easiest way to do it is to only use Etsy ads if the listing is already converting well. So, if it's already converting well, putting Etsy ads on it will definitely just increase the uh traffic, which will eventually lead to more sales as long as the ads themselves are profitable. Now, there's also a high-risisk approach that you can do with this, and you can also spend $10 on ads. Uh, so on new listings, you can spend $10 to test their conversion potentials, like to see if they actually work. What this does is that it fasttracks the progress and it's honestly not recommended for beginners and especially if you're strapped for cash cuz all it does is give you the results if something works or not faster. And it's also really worth noting here is that if you are not able to actually use the Etsy ads because you're bootstrapped for cash, which I was too in the beginning, so I can definitely understand the situation. You don't have to use Etsy ads. can make sales organically as well. And the key thing also here with this is to know that you shouldn't use Etsy ads if your conversion rate is less than 4%. Which is also why I don't recommended for beginners to do it because you need to convert at least 4%. In order to actually make this work now, how do you even determine profitability with with the Etsy ads? Well, the key metrics to analyze the profitability is this. You want to analyze listings with a minimum of $10 ad spend each. So, you want to spend $10 on on a listing in ads to see if it actually fares well. That's like the test budget. So, $10 per listing. Then, you want to check the total sales in a 30-day period. And we'll get into how to do that in a sec. Everyone want to rely on solely the sales from Etsy ads because those are skewed. H. You want to look at the total sales. And the key thing to know here is that when you actually look at the total sales and you look at the Etsy ads, if a listing doesn't hit your break even rorowaz, then turn it off. And I'll again I'll go through each specific part here to make it easy. So first off we got to understand what rorowes is. What even is that? So rorowaz stands for return on adspend. So the money that you get back for each dollar spent. And the rorowaz must align with your profit margins in order to determine the break even points because again as I mentioned before if a lesson doesn't hit your break even rorowaz then turn it off. So we got to know what the that break even rorowaz is what that even means. So let's say that you actually sell a shirt and you know that your profit margin is 20%. This is with free shipping. So let me just show you here a shirt here from Monster Digital using Printify here. And we always look at the Printify premium price cuz the margin is a lot better with the with the premium price. If we take the production cost here plus the shipping, we get $13.88. So that's the cost for this. So 13.88 just like I wrote actually previously. If the profit margin is 20 20%, let's say that if we sell the shirt for $20.5 and it cost us $13.88 to do it and this with free shipping, again, we talked about this in the pricing section, but with free shipping, you include the shipping price within the cost itself. So that means that whenever a customer buys something for $20.5, that means that we earn 20% of that, which is $4. This means that we get a fifth out of every dollar back that we spend, which is why our rorowes is five here in this case. So for every dollar that we spend, we have to get a fifth of that back in order to break even. Because again, for every sale we make 20%, which is a fifth out of the actual revenue made, which is why the rewards has to be five in order to break even because then that basically just means that we have spent as much as we have profited from the sale. So, and again, we don't ever want to go minus, which is why we got to know these numbers. So, uh because if this for instance would say four, that means that we would have spent more than we actually earn on the sale, if that makes sense. Now, as another example, just to make it even clearer, let's say that your profit margin is 25%. So you sell it for 20 for about $22. That means that for every order you sell, you make $5.55, which it's a fourth. Like out of the revenue that you make, you earn the profit out of every order you make is a fourth. So out of every order, a fourth of the revenue is is the profit. So that means that we can't go under four cuz again if we spend more then that means that we are not profitable with the listing because that's our break even point because that means that we have spent as much as we have earned on the sale. So you never want to go below the break even rorowaz. Now when it comes to paid shipping it's a bit differently because as I say here the shipping cost is not added into the ad revenue. We'll get into specifics and examples of this later on just to make it easy to understand. So let's say that our profit margin here instead is is 20% again. So let's say that we sell it for 20.5 but we also charge shipping. So in this case we might charge I don't know 4.5 in this case. Again if if someone buys one shirt and they pay for shipping for that specific shirt that means that we actually earn 33%. The problem is that the Etsy ad revenue only shows us this number. it will show us that you only actually earn $20.5 but in reality you actually earned $25. So we have to know that when we're looking at the ad statistics and when we're looking at the rorowaz because be lower than it than it should be and that's because they're not including shipping within the ad revenue. So what we got to do is to know that for listings that where you use as a paid shipping model you got to know know at the back of your head that the rowas can be lower than the than it says on the Etsy ad statistics. So, for instance, if someone buys this and the it says that the margin actually is 20%. Again, if that's the actual like margin you have in your Etsy ads, you got to know that it's actually kind of higher because the profit pricing is not accounted for. So, in this case, for instance, if if you know that the profit margin in for that specific listing is 33%. then you know that um you can go to a row of three in order to break even on the sale. So you can spend more on ads in order to actually hit the break even point. So even though it might say that you earned 20% on like the rowas, it might be lower than this. Even though it might look like you're not earning as much on a paid shipping listing h you know that's this specific listing the break even for that is is three because uh the shipping is not accounted for in the ad revenue. And again I'll show examples to make this clear because I know I know I can definitely understand that this can feel confusing but as another example let's say that you have a higher base cost and it says that the profit margin is 25%. So in this case, let's say that you sell it for like $22 and then you have this instead. Something like that. So $4 in shipping and should $22 in the base price. That actually means that you 2.8 is your break even rorowaz for a listing like this. And if I just take this off, it will say that you have a net profit of 25% instead. But again, we got to know that with our paid shipping model listings, we can have a lower rorowaz because the paid shipping is not accounted for when it comes to our Etsy ad revenue. So, we know that for those listings, our rorowaz can be lower and specifically in this case 2.8 if you have like a higher margin or in this case if you have a lower margin can be three in this case. So, how do we actually even like calculate this stuff? And again, I'll show examples in a sec. The first thing that we got to do is figure out the revenue per order from ads. So, we take the ad revenue, we divide that by the orders made via the ads to get an average revenue per order. And again, I'll show an example that in a sec just show you exactly how to do it. After you done that, you got to understand the total revenue excluding shipping from the listing. So, we take this that we actually learned here. So, the average revenue per order, we times that by the actual total number of orders. So, the total number of orders and what I mean here is that you go into your listings, you press the cog wheel here, like the settings button, and then you press view stats. And then once you do that, it'll show you this part here. And it's these orders that we want to account for. We don't want to use the Etsy ad orders in this case because those do not account for the organic sales, only the ad listing sales. So again, we take the average revenue per order that we got here. We times that by the total number of orders actually made, which I just showed you how to get to. That gives us a total revenue excluding shipping for that specific listing. To understand the profit before ad spend, we take the total revenue times the profit margin and that gives us the uh the profit before ad spend. And then to get the total profit that you actually made, you take the profit before ad spend minus the ad spend, which gives you the total profits. So a bunch of numbers here now, but I'll go through exactly how to do this now. So as an example here, this ad listing here, it made about $1,75 in ad revenue. So 1,75 approximately there excluding the cents there to get the revenue per orders from ads. We take that and divide that by the amount of orders made. So 42 our amount of ad orders. Now we know the total revenue made excluding shipping. Now we actually know the average revenue per orders from ads. That's what we know here. to get to the total revenue actually made from this listing including ads and include and and including organic sales because again this the ad listing here only accounted for 42 orders where in reality I also got about double the amount when it comes to the organic listings as well because again you won't get the organic sales without the ad sales because the ad listings drives up the rank for the organic one as you get momentum and get more sales. So, what we got to do, we got to take the average order revenue per from ads. We got to take that times 93 cuz that's the actual amount of orders that we actually made. So, let's see here. 259, sorry, 59. We take that times 93. That gives us $2,379, $87. So, that's actually how much revenue we made. We didn't just make $1,000. We made about more than double that because of the organic sales, too. to now understand how much like we actually profited and like the actual row was from this listing is not four. It is actually over nine because then we just take like the total amount of like revenue that we actually got here. We take that we divide that by the ad spend which is 253 53 and that gives us an over nine. So it's it makes a huge difference to do it this way and it gives you an accurate depiction if you're actually making the ads worth it if you count it like this. If you only count from the ad statistics, it will not give you an accurate overview on how the ads affect your listings because again I it would not have reached this much revenue without the ads. So the ads drive up the rank for the organic sales as you get sales on the ad listing and the organic one drives up in rank and then you basically make 50/50 amount of sales. So you make like 50% comes from the ad sales and then another 50% come from the um organic sales. But you you need the ads to get the organic ones. So this is the only accurate way to do it. So you can actually see the total rorowass for a listing using ads. So really important to do this this way. But there's also another example right here where we have the ad revenue is 469.32. So 469.32 to understand the average revenue per orders from ads. We got to take that we divide that by 19 which is the amount of orders. That gives us 24.7. So 24.7 then we take that times the amount that of the orders that that it actually made. So it actually made 16 orders not 19 according to the ETS here. That gives us 395.2. Then we take that amount and we divide that by the ad spend. That gives us a row of around two twoish. But why is it even saying more? Well, it's because of the thing that I told you before. It is because of this. So your ad listing can show up in related queries. But the key thing is that this actual ad listing that you had, it led to another one of your listings getting a sale, for instance, within the same niche. So let's say that you have a listing in the mom niche and it's a mom design, but they actually like wanted a grandma design. So your listing might pop up first and they might have clicked that ad listing, but then this scroll down again. this your mom shirt might been show might have showed up in for instance the grandma niche I don't know something like that a related query basically or better yet let's just use this example instead let's say that you have a mama shirt that popped up in the mom shirt niche so mama and mom might sound very alike but it's not exactly the same so your mama shirt show up in the mom niche but you also have organic like you also have other listings within the mom niche this mama shirt showed up in the mom niche that means and they first clicked your mama listing and then they actually purchase another listing of yours within the mom niche. So your mom listing instead of the mama one that means that this listing actually affected the related sale that it made. So the mom sale that you made was related to the mama listing that you had on ads. And that's why the orders here are bigger than the actual rorowaz that it actually made because this listing again it it sold less than accounted for here. But the three extra sales that was garnered through this ad listing was because it showed up in related queries. So it's key to understand that like again if this number is higher than your total rows then it's definitely because this listing showed up in related queries. The third example is this one. So in this case you see that the ad revenue here is $245,60. So $245.60. So 245.6. What we then do to get the revenue, average revenue per order from ads, we take that amount, divide that by the amount of orders, which is 10 divided by 10. Now we know the average revenue made per order on ads. Then to understand the total revenue made, we go into the listing, we view the stats from that and then we see that okay, it actually made 14 sales. So we then take that times 14 and that gives us $343.84. So the total row excluding shipping is 2.6. So we take that divide that by the ad spend again which is 129.66. That gives us a total of 2.65 in rorowaz. And again if we know our margins we would know if our listing hits our break even point or not. For my sake in this case my break even rorowaz was 2.5 which it definitely is not under which is why I'm going to keep it on in this case. So that's how you count the Etsy ads. You got to look at the total row. Really really important that you do that. Now some additional considerations which is important to know is that the organic sales are heavily impacted by the ads. So as I mentioned like the promoted listings ranks high that leads to customers may purchase a variation instead and that becomes that happened in this one. So it it ranked high and it then showed up in related queries and that led to like it actually popped up in other niches where you have other listings which led to other sales. But you wouldn't get that sale if you didn't like the likelihood of you getting that sale is not as high if you didn't have the ads on. So it's important just to know that using ads you pop up in related queries and it does definitely affect all of your listings when you do this. Apart from that too as I mentioned that that's how ads contribute indirectly to related listings. But the key thing to know with all of this all this stuff is that if ad costs are overall too high turn ads off and just focus on getting organic sales because again Etsy tries stuff and they experiment a lot during their whole business with their whole business. That's been apparent since I ever since I started on Etsy that they just do different experiments to try and get better and better as they go. And if you notice that the overall ad costs are just way too high no matter what you do, just turn them off and focus on getting organic sales because again, you can still make organic sales because there's so much inbound traffic on Etsy. People go there to buy gifts. They go there with their wallet wide open. So, you can still definitely get sales even if you're not using any Etsy ads. Don't use Etsy ads as a tool to drive traffic and just feel that doping rush if you people are looking to my shop. Do the work like get better and focus on creating great listings and putting that up organically if the ad costs are too high because again you don't need Etsy ads per se to make sales is a great tool to scale your business once you're at that point. Now an important tidbit about this too is the Etsy ads optimization. So sometimes you kind of get stuff like this. you get like SVG for instance or like gifts for her really broad stuff or like decorations something like that really really broad terms we should turn off unrelated keywords that's not associated with with the item we sell so for instance SVG here is a word that we turn off because again people are just that those are other sellers just trying to find SVGs for their own print on demand business or something like that so just turn that off since we're selling a shirt in this case so any unrelated keywords we turn those off and a key thing to note too is that if if it's too broad of a keyword. So in this case, for instance, let's say for instance that you have a mom shirt or a dad shirt. If you're indexing for just the word dad or mom, that's too broad. If you're not getting sales for that, just turn those off because again, if someone searches for dad or mom or mom gift or mom or something like that, it's way too broad to know that they even want a t-shirt in this case. If it's a t-shirt that you're actually selling. So for way too broad terms, just turn those off. Like if you're selling a mom shirt or a dad shirt, you got to say dad shirt or like dad t-shirt or something like that. It shouldn't just say dad or mom because those are way too broad. But a key thing to know too is that this has a some nuance to it. So if you're actually getting sales for like the word dad or mom, keep them on. But do monitor them because the like the ad spend can skyrocket some days depending on the season and it might not be worth to have them on if you're not getting enough sales to account for the spend if that makes sense. Because again, if you're not hitting your breaking where it was, you got to turn it off. And if it's only coming from one of those broad keywords, definitely turn off the keyword and see if you can make it work without that. And again, if you can make it work without the keyword and it's the and if you're going below the breaking rorowaz, just turn it off. But if you can, try to just take off the broad keyword and try to spend more stuff, more ad spend on it to see if it's allocated towards better keywords. The key thing to know is that the broader the SEO, the more unrelated keywords here in the ads you get. So, this is why it's so so important to be hyperargeted with your SEO. We talked about that in the listing optimization part of this. And again, it's not a hugely like difficult thing, which is why I haven't made a section for SEO cuz again, just like it's just make it really simple. Like if you sell a flamingo shirt, then have it say flamingo shirt or like flamingo t-shirt. Don't have it say bird shirt or like animal lover gift because if someone searches for animal lover gift there's a low likelihood that they will actually want a flamingo shirt because they are searching for animals. There's a broad range of animals that that you can find. But if you had only are using flamingo shirt or flamingo t-shirt or flamingo lover gifts that means that they specifically searching for flamingos and the likelihood of you actually selling on those keywords is a lot higher because you're actually providing the thing that they are searching for. It's just that basic. So don't complicate it like provide in the SEO just have exactly the thing that you're selling. Don't go too broad and again it also leads heavily into the ads because if you have like bird lover gifts or like animal lover gift that means that you will have more of these ad keywords. You will show up in really like related queries to the word bird or like animal lover and that's way too broad which means that you have to optimize your ads time and time again because you have not made the correct SEO. So again I implore you be hyperargeted with your SEO. just do the thing that I showed you in the listing optimization and it will save you so much time with the Etsy ad optimization because you don't really have to do much at all if you have a correct SEO that's hyperargeted and this is a bit of a cheat sheet. So if you want to count out the return on ad spend the rorowaz it's revenue divided by ad spend. If you want to get a profit calculation you like see how much you actually made from a specific listing you take the revenue times the profit margin. So as an example to that for instance just I think it showed that if I take this one for instance here this one is 2379.87 and that's the actual revenue that I made from this listing and the profit margin for this one I think was around 33% or something like that. So if I just take that times 0.33 this is how much I actually made before ad spend on the listing itself. So that's actually how much I made. Now, if I want to understand how much I made after the ad spend, I just take out the ad spend and that's how much actual profit I made from this listing. So, that's how you count out the profit calculation. The revenue per orders from ads, just like I showed you, is the revenue divided by the ad orders. The total revenue from the listing is just like I showed you, is the average revenue per order times total orders. So you take the amount that you earn per order on average times the actual amount of orders that you made in total which you can only see if you go into the statistics in your listings page. That's how you understand how you actually get the total revenue made from a listing. And again the profit before the ad spend was just like I showed you. You take the total revenue times the profit margin and then you take the total profit is is again you just deduct the ads from that which gives you the actual profit from it. And in this one I actually think I did it wrong. The profit calculation is this is not the total revenue. This is just the Yeah, this part is basically the same here. So, I think it made a typo. Sorry for that. But basically, to understand like profit, you just do exactly what I did. You just take 2379.87. You then take that times your profit margin. I think this one was 0.33 for me, somewhere around there. And then I just deduct the ad spend from that. And that gives me the total profit that I actually made from the listing. So, this is just a cheat sheet. So, just so you know how to do these types of calculations. Now to analyze these ad statistics easily like we can complicate it so much. It's just key to to have a easy framework to do this which is what I'll go over in this section. So the first thing that we're going to do is calculate the revenue per order from ads just like I showed you. Then we're going to multiply that by the total orders including the organic sales. So as an example as I showed you we got to get this part revenue per orders from ads. So we do that by following the example. So ad revenue is 1075. We take we divide that by the amount of orders made which gives us 25.59. Then we multiply that by the amount of total orders that you have. So the total orders that you actually made from the listing including the organic sales which is the key part here. And you go to your listings and then to the stats on that listings which I showed you initially to see that. So we go there and then we take that times 93 cuz that's what it said in this listing. That gives us a total revenue of $2379.87. And then we want to apply the profit margin to determine profit before ad spend. So I think for this one it was 0.33. So 33% for me. That gives us this number. And then we subtract the ad spend to get the total profit. And for this one it was 253 53. Yes. So we got to apply the profit margin now in this case. So we take that times 0.33 and then we subtract the ad spend which is 253.53. There we go. So that gives us the we subtracted the ad spend to get the total profits. And then the key thing to know here is that at the end of this got to consider the variational listings impact in how our ad listings performed because again in example two here we can see that we actually made more orders than the total orders for this listing. So I made more related sales because I had this listing on ads. So, it's key to know that after you do these calculations, if it's like not exactly where you want to be, but you get like an overall like it's going overall well with your ads, you got to consider the variational impact or like the impact the list this listing on that has on other listings of yours as well. A key thing to know to make this whole thing easier without having to do all of these calculations is just to know your rorowazes. If you just know that, okay, you can't go under 2.8 for instance in this case, all you need to do in that case is just calculate the revenue per order from ads. So 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 10 1 1075 is the ad revenue. We take that divided by 42 to get average revenue per order and then we multiply that by the total amount of orders made including the organic sales which in this case was 93 259 * 93 which is gives us $237987. And then the thing that we do from there we just know okay so that's how much I actually made from that. That's actually the total amount of revenue that I made from from all of the orders made. And that just shows me in this case that okay, this rorowaz is actually over nine. Let's see here. Cuz if I if I then just take this divide that by the ad spend just like I show you showed you, it gives us a row over nine. So it's a much more simpler way if you just know your rows cuz again you see all of your rows here and all you need to do is you got to look at the total the total orders. You take 1,75, divide that by the amount of orders made, which is perfect. And then you look at the listings to see the statistic for the listings. You take that times 93. Then you take that divided by the ad spend. Boom. And that gives you a rorow of nine. And doing it this way, once you've done this a couple times, make makes it goes so so fast to do this. So highly recommend to know your rule is so you actually know when to turn something off or when to have something on because again if you just know your ROS you can just do one step one step two and then you got to divide the aspect from that to get the ROS and then just consider the variational listings impact once you're at the end of the calculations to to know if you're profitable or not. But that's how you do that. But if you know your roses, it's so much easier to do all of your calculations and all of your optimizations at once. Now, during busy times, it's so important to have an easy way to check for profitability when it comes to your ads cuz ads can skyrocket during Q4 and or hot seasons. So, what we do if I just go into like this is the quick and easy profitability the check that I always use during busy seasons and overall honestly it's always what I use. So, I go this one specifically here is for July I think. Yep, this one is for July. So, what we do here is that we measure the ads over one month. So, a period of at least 30 days. Really important that it's 30 days. And this is mostly important when your sales actually drop, but it gives you a good overview overall to see how things are going. Now, what we do to do this is that we just take the ad revenue here, which is $11,83.78. We divide that up by $3,500.19. That gives us a row of 3.1. And I know that most of my listings like the t-shirt listings that I have using the ads generally are around 2.8 in like that's where I want around 2.5 to 2.8 somewhere around there is where I want but I do know that my break even for most of my listings I do have like several different products in my store. So for instance I do have mugs and I do have t-shirts. This means that mugs have a lower cost and the generally the margins are generally a bit higher with those. That means that I can generally be around 2.5 to 2.8. 8 like a minimum 2.5 or or preferably around 2.8 minimum but 2.5 is definitely like the break even point where I can't go under in my own shop. That means that as long as this is over that so like the overall revenue divided by the overall ad spend for a month as long as that is basically about 2.5 for in my case that's how I know that I'm in the clear. And the key thing to know is again if if things are going calm and it's a busy season and lots of things are happening. What you can do every single day which takes like 10 seconds is just go into your ads check like take the last 30 days again it got to be less than 30 days cuz if like you we all get days where it goes up all those days where it goes down. So look at the last 30 days at minimum. So you take the revenue divide that by the ad spend and that gives us a ROAS of three. And if your ROAS overall row in your store is below break book break even adjust your ads accordingly. You just go through your ads and try to identify budget draining keywords to turn them off. The key thing to know is that the Etsy ads automatically spends most of your budget on your highest converting listing. So the listings that are working the best for you, it will tend to spend the most on. It's an automatic type of campaign where you don't have much control of it. But it usually always just allocates the most budget to the highest converting listings. And when it comes to like broad keywords and stuff like that, just ensure that if you go into these listings where you're noticing that the ROS is a bit too low, see if you can identify like too broad of a keywords and just take those off if it's not working. The key thing to always be with these ads though is that you got to be vigilant and be really harsh with them. Like if there's not a big broad keyword that's actually not working that well, then ensure uh to just cut that listing off entirely from ads. Even though it might be like you're a great designer of yours or whatever, just turn those off. if it's not actually profitable. It's key to do this because otherwise the ad spend can fly off the roof. Now, as a conclusion to this, so what Etsy does is that they they boost visibility and clickthrough rate. That's all they do. They will not fix a bad listing, which is why it's key to already have a great listing before you even use Etsy ads. Like, don't even consider using Etsy ads until you're at minimum a 4% conversion rate. Otherwise, you will just throw money at the wall and not fixing the actual ball and neck of the business. Like you got to fix the problems first, then get more customers in. But you got to fix the problems first before you even touch these. Otherwise, it will be money money down the drain for you. And if you want to be on the safe side, the best practice to use them is to just use them strategically for already converting listings. That's the safe way to do it. But a key thing, if you're doing more of the high-risk approach by testing out new listings to get data faster if something works or not, then it's really important to always analyze the profitability with them so that you're not losing money on the ads cuz you can really easily lose money on your ads. If you just turn them on and are not really thorough how it's going with the ads, like if you're not looking through the statistics often and you're being more more risky with them, you can definitely lose money on them. So overall, just regularly analyze the profitability with them just to see how it goes. If you're using the best practices, I recommend doing it like I tend to do it like once a week if I do it that that way. And the key thing to know too is that if you're using way too broad SEO, you will generally spend more money on ads because you will be indexed for related queries and you can be indexed from really weird queries if you had too broad keywords. So overall, if you're unsure about Etsy ads, look at them once a day at least. But once you get going and once you have like fixed a lot of the issues, like you're being hyperargeted with the SEO and let's say that you only use the best practice of of only like putting your ads on listings that are already converting really well, then like once a week could be good. If you're being more risky and have all your listings on ads and you're listing new stuff with with ads on, then ensure to check them at least once a day and at least do this calculation that I showed you here. take the revenue, divide that by the ad spend just to see how it goes because that will let you know how the health of the Etsy ads actually is going. And a key thing to to this too is that once you see that something is flying off the roof, like check that specific listing, optimize the keywords to maximize the returns so that you're not overspending on stuff where you don't have to overspend because again like if you're too broad with your keywords and you're indexed for two broad keywords, you generally don't spend. For instance, if you sell a mom shirt and you're indexed on like mom or dad, like generally you don't make that much on those type of keywords because they're too broad. But mom shirt or dad shirt is different. So be really precise when it comes to these ads and try to only target the thing that you're actually selling. So if it's a mom shirt or dad shirt, only use those kind of words. If you are index for the word mom or dad, those are too broad. If you're getting sales for them, keep them on. If you're not getting sales for them and they're just draining budget, just turn them off. [Music] All right. So now we're going to talk about customer service. How to automate it, how to communicate with our customers, but most importantly, how to protect our stores in the meantime. So the core philosophy of this is to automate where possible to minimize time spent on individual issues because we don't want to spend either thinking about problems with customers because that just drags us down and we don't practically want to spend too much time writing out different replies because it takes too much time to write specific replies to a lot of customers. It can take too much time when we do that with everyone. So we got to automate a lot of it to make things go faster, especially if we get like customer messages while while we're out. We want to be able to respond to them fast, not have to think about it that much when we're out and about. A key thing with Etsy is that when we talk with our customers is that we got to be human, empathetic, and solutionoriented. But key word here is human. We don't want them to get to to feel like they're talking to a big company. We're all small businesses on Etsy. And that's how like the brand itself, Etsy, has kind of branded themselves that there's always like small businesses selling on Etsy. And we still want to keep that essence in our communication with our customers. Another important part too is to when someone brings up an issue with anything really we always need to confirm the customer's issue and after that we provide them with clear and easy resolutions. So basically as an example if someone says that this shirt does not meet my expectation at all. We shouldn't just go in and be defensive in that case. We should in that case just say okay I'm so sorry that the shirt did not meet your expectations. to help you further, could you please provide me with an image of this shirt so I can get a better sense of the situation? Something like that to just validate their concern and then find a clear and easy way to resolve it together. So a key thing with this whole thing too is that in neither cases with any situations further down the line, we never argue. We just listen and we validate the val validate them and through that we can solve the situation, but we never argue with any customers. That just leads down a very bad rabbit hole. So, first off, if we're in their first like in the early stages, so 0 to 10,000 sales, I would highly recommend to respond as fast as possible to every customer inquiry. And the reason for that is that if it's a good customer inquiry, like they have a specific question about a listing, if you respond fast, it maximizes conversions. At least that's been my experience. So, if you've handle the issue or like the concern that they have really fast, then usually it's easier for them to convert because they are about to, but they faced an issue with which they need to have solved. And the faster you can solve it, the higher the conversion rate. That's been my experience at least. Apart from that, the most important part about fast replies is that it mitigates negative reviews. So if we actually take the issue at hand and we solve that directly by validating customer and then providing them with a solution really fast, it provides a really good customer experience. So overall, high responsiveness is just strong first impressions and it's a great way to like save our shops when we're at the risk of actually getting negative reviews, especially in the early days of our shop. Now, what I do each day in my own store, I actually only do that fix every single message once a day. And that's because at scale, it's hard to do all of the messages as they come. So, I would recommend that in the beginning, once you are rolling 10,000 sales, I would recommend to that you are responding to the um messages as fast as you can. But once you are at like 10,000 sales plus, I would recommend that you only respond to the messages once a day at the same time that you're processing the orders. makes it so much easier to like handle big amounts of orders. And when you're doing this at scale, the most important part about this is to focus on clear communication and overcommunicating it at all times. So, if you notice that there's anything that might be an issue with the order, always always always just reach out with this to the customer cuz you can sometimes feel that you don't want to bug them and you don't you don't want to introduce problems with customers if there's no problem at all. But that you usually just equates to you delaying a problem that could already be solved previously. So when an issue occurs, whether it's before an order has been made or after it's been made, just make sure to just answer the customer immediately. Really, really important for good reviews and for a good first impression with a customer. When we do this, we always prioritize issue resolution and transparency. So we always we don't argue with them. We just see what where the problem is and then we resolve it with them. And yeah, I've talked a lot about this, but like basically overcommunicating is always key here. It's always better to be safe than sorry because if you notice an issue that could happen, it's better to tell them that upfront than for them to experience the issue later on. Let's say that like a design that you made doesn't fit that good on the specific color that they actually brought bought. Then in that case, you you'd want to send them a message about that before you actually process the order to production so that they have the option to choose another color. But yeah, as I mentioned, you want to respond quickly to bad issues to avoid native view reviews. But another part of that too is that when someone files unhelp a help request and it's not resolved within 48 hours, the customer can actually file a case against your shop. Now, too many cases against your shop, like watching different sellers during my whole journey, I've seen that people have lost their shops because they've gotten too many Etsy cases all at once. That's a good reason why you want to solve it right away. But when it comes to like some cases because you will have some cases in your journey like if you do this at scale because people people sometimes don't even know what a case even means. But cases are it's something that reflects very bad on your shop because then basically Etsy has to intervene and fix the problem for you. And if they do this too much it's generally really really bad because they it kind of at least from what I've seen other shops it's gives you a higher chance of being suspended at least if you get them too many in in a short time frame. And but either way, when a case happens, what I've always done is that even if like they're in way in the wrong and you've done everything right and so forth and they just file a case against you, always just refund them because again, in my own experience, the more that Etsy intervenes with your store, the the worse it is. You want to be able to take care of your shop yourself entirely and refund customers where necessary and especially in these Etsy in these cases when they happen because the more Etsy just intervenes with your shop in my experience at least the worse the situation kind of gets or is. So whenever you get a case just make sure to refund them immediately even if you just lose a lot of money on that. It's more important to protect the whole shop than lose it on a specific like sale or a specific case that someone made. All right. So, another part to this too when it that I kind of mentioned in the beginning is to automate a lot of this customer service stuff because we don't want to spend all day thinking about customer service and like answering replies and stuff like that. So, a big feature that Etsy has is their saved replies feature. So, if you go into an order and you press this little button here, you have these different saved replies here. If I go into manage snippets, let's say if I don't have any, I can just save as new snippets plus press that one instead and then just name something. So for instance, one thing that I really preach which is in the part where I talk about order management, I think it's really important to message people with a friendly notification when something has shipped. So we could do for instance shipped uh notification here. And when something then has shipped, we want to have a saved reply that we can use all the time for all instances where we send out ship not notifications. But the key thing with our messages is that it shouldn't feel spammy or like too corporate so to speak since it's Etsy. And I have a whole customer service guide which is available in the mentorship. Here's for instance the ship message that I would recommend to use and I can just take this and then just go here and paste that into the um snippets of the same replies and then you just change the uh different parts that I need here. So for instance when there's a tracking link you insert that here and the tracking number from that link you insert that here. You take your name here and then you write the customer name here. Super easy stuff. But then you just save that and then it's one of the save replies here. So there we go. We can do the same thing when we for instance want to do the follow-up. So when something has been delivered and we want to check if they're happy with the with the order, we can take this and just use that and save as a new snippet and ship shipping followup. And again, the good thing about this is that we don't have to write this every single time. We can just take one of these different uh save replies, change the name, and change the sender to the name here, and then it's done. Super easy stuff just to automate the whole process of answering people. And we generally want to do this for every type of issue which is why I even created this customer service guide for the mentorship because for all different types of stuff whether it's like a package arrived damage or like the wrong size was delivered you want to have a pre-saved template for that so that you can actually just whenever something like that happens again you can just use that template and use that same reply for the for the next time that happens cuz issues happen all the time. I have um in the mentorship there's already a customer service guide for all all of this. But what you do if if you're not a part of that and if you're not ready to be a part of that whenever that happens you have to craft a reply once and then you save that as a saved reply so you can use it again in the future. That's all you need to do. And you can even use chat GPT to formulate these types of replies for you as long as you teach it how to respond to these custom messages. Again, I have a custom GPT in my mentorship as well, only available for the mentorship, but you can also create your own by just teaching it over and over again how to how it should respond to different customer messages. And through that, you can also get really good customer responses. Apart from that too, something that's really really important is that when we send like proofs and and such things to our customers, we need to have deadlines in the messages. So if I just scroll down to the e the this one here for instance this little part like when we send approve to a customer it's key that we just send a message and include a deadline because otherwise we can't really send the order to production but if we include a deadline that they have to respond by then it becomes really natural to have sent the order to production after a certain while now I've said 12 hours here but we always want to underpromise and overd deliver. So after we've sent this message, we wait 24 hours to give them more than 12 hours to actually respond. And that's so we can always underpromise and overd deliver because sometimes that they reply like 14 hours after the message and then you can still like uh change anything that needed to be changed and so forth. But yeah, the key thing is that you have a deadline like this. You could they got to respond within 12 hours, but the real deadline that you know is 24 hours just so you can underpromise and overd deliver. And this is mainly key for like when you need responses from the customers for like proofs or if something is wrong with the order just so you can go ahead with the order itself. So the actual production time and processing times don't get delayed. Now something that's really hard to automate is difficult customers. At least it was hard to automate. But some sometimes you can't use the same replies with difficult customers. And in my honest opinion I think you should use chat in that case. You can use again you can create your own as I as I mentioned by just teaching it how to actually respond to the uh customer messages. I do have this one that I've taught for several months on how to actually uh respond to different customer questions and inquiries and stuff like that and the actual tone it needs to respond in. So it aligns with how it works on Etsy. But either way you can also use like I've previously used the the free version of Chach and created my own like customer service chip through through that. I basically used the free version previously and used created my own like small like GPT from that and use that every single time because in those cases you can always just write something like this. Please write professional reply to this to this customer message. Whoops. And then you can say I don't like this shirt. The good thing about the custom GBT is that it just gives you an automated answer directly. The print is off. Maybe the custom custom GPT here just gives you a an automated response to what to do because again in these instances you actually need to ask for a photo and that's what it should respond with directly here. Yeah, in a very friendly casual but still professional tone. It asks for a photo and you can still like teach a GPT to do this if you want to. Uh the key thing is if someone is really harsh with you, having chat answer for you is heaven cuz nowadays it gives us such great answers honestly. And the best part about that too is that you don't have to give this this customer any headsp space and you don't have to feel the negative vibes coming from the customer itself. So highly recommend to use chat GPT as a way to solve difficult customers and not have to think through what to reply to them. And if you're in the mentorship, you have access to this freely and you have access to this here in the resources section in this part here. So you have access to that there. Another important thing about custom orders is that we should never start custom work before we actually get payments. So one thing that I noticed in the beginning was that a lot of people ask for custom orders even though something might not be custom. They want to just change things here and there. But a big problem with that is that they ask for that before they actually have made any payments. And what I found in my journey was that if I actually create designs back and forth and they just like create different variations and stuff like that for them, sometimes they just feel like, nah, I don't want to buy this and they're off. As a rule, never ever ever do custom work unless an order has been paid. So if someone wants to custom work, have them order the listing first and then after they've ordered the listing, send them proofs and do the custom order work thing. But don't do that prior to an order has been made because a lot of times otherwise they will just leave with and you had just made a bunch of designs and a lot of work for nothing. And for custom work like this, I think a minimum of like earning $10 to $15 per item is required for it to be viable to to do because you can charge more for custom work like this. It's really natural to do that. So make sure that you earn at least $10 to $15 on the item that you are selling if you do custom work. And I'm talking $10 to $15 per item. So not in the order total like if they buy more items than that then you should earn $10 to $15 per item to make this worthwhile for you. And as a some final tips about this we want to automate and streamline with saved replies. That's the first thing really easy to do cuz you also have the Etsy app which means that you can just answer people really seamlessly if you have all the saved replies set up. We want to stay proactive and transparent uh when issues occur. We never want to argue with someone. We just want to validate the concerns and solve them. That's all we do. And a key thing too again with this whole thing is that we want to let Etsy interfere as little as possible because we want to be able to fix our own issues. So cases are reflected really bad in our shops, which means that we always have to solve our own like help request and stuff like that. And if there's a case that's ever made in your shop, ensure to just refund them immediately no matter what cuz we don't want to risk the shop for one case cuz we want to protect the store above all. And overall, just good customer service equals good reviews, which kind of makes sense. But this is in practice what it actually means to do good customer service. [Music] Okay. So, in this section, we're going to tackle how to prep our CSV for bookkeeping and accounting. And the key thing to know with this is that if you get at least one sale a month, you need to do this. So, let's just jump right into it. So when you sell on generally if you start getting sales you will need to have some kind of way to show the sales and account for them. And in order to do that you need a list on on everything that's happened and that like the specific of every transaction. And you get that if you go here you go into finances here. Then you press monthly statements. Then you go to the month that you want to look at because generally like if you're in a new month, you look at the previous months and actually like do the accounting and and like bookkeeping for that. And then you press the generate CSV button. You wait a little bit until it's generated and then you download it. And then you press the download button here for the VAT statement as like I'm a EU seller selling primarily in the US. But these are the two things that you that you do as an EU seller each month. You generate the CSV, you download that when it's ready, and then you just download the VAT statement. And the gist of what we're going to actually look at is the CSV because that's the thing that contains all the info that we need for the bookkeeping and accounting, which the accountant basically needs for the bookkeeping and the accounting. The VAT statement mainly just shows you all the VATS or like if you incurred any VAT on all the fees from Etsy and who the buyer and seller is in those transactions. Apart from that, when you have the month that you actually want to go and bookkeep and account for, the second thing that you want to do is that you want to download the next one. And I've actually made a checklist to make this easy. So again, the first thing that we do is generate the C SECSV and B MBAT statement for the current month, which is the first thing that we did here. The second thing that we do is that we download the CSV for the next month as well. So again, this is for November 2024. It's the example statement that I had. So that's why I chose November 2024. And then I do the same thing for December 2024. So the next month. So we download that CSV only the CSV needed for in this case. So we do that. And then we want to create three separate Google sheet files. So one for the current month, one for the next month. H so December in this case and also one for the previous months. And you generally like if you've done this many months, you generally have the CSV already made for the previous month. So in that case you just bring it up. So you have the previous month's CSV CSV statement brought up. And if you haven't had um if you if this is your first one, you obviously don't need the previous months. But if you have done this for a couple months, you you bring up the previous month CSV statement that you've done this to as well. So that's the first thing. So again, we go to Google Sheets here just to show you. We go here, press blank spreadsheet, and then we press file, import, and then upload. And then we drag and drop the files that we actually downloaded from Etsy, the CSV files, we download, we drag them in here. You then go into them. And then when once you've actually like uploaded it and went into the file, you'll get something that look kind of like this. And you do this again for the same thing for December. And you do the same thing for October. So you have all of these three. So the previous month, the month after the fact, and then the current month. So in this case, it's November, December, and October. Then we make this little check box here. The thing that we do after that is that we go into my Etsy statement template. This is the free thing that that you can download in from the in the description. So, there's a link in the description if you want to download that. But you go into my Etsy statement template and you just go here. The key thing that you want to do is just copy. You press here, you hold down shift and then you press here and you copy these key things is the headlines. You take those and you just copy those into the J column here into the current month that you actually want to work at. So, you have this here. just copy and paste it. Now the thing that we now want to do is that we actually want to reconcile the time differences. And the reason for that is if we just go here into uh like the month of November because of the time differences between like Sweden and where how Etsy is uh calculating their time. I I think they're calculating their time zone by LA time. So Los Angeles time zone. Not entirely sure on that, but there's definitely a a time difference at least. So the problem is that some transactions actually happen on November 30th. they did not happen on December 1st. This is clearly stated in the financial statements on Etsy. The problem though is that you have to go to December's statement and underneath that you can see that so a lot of like if you go to the last page you can see that a lot of transactions actually happen on November 30th. That means that they actually don't end up in this CSV in November. They actually end up in December. This means that we have to take those out of December and add them into November so that the current year's transaction is correct. So what we do is that we just go through all of the transactions that actually for some reason because of the time differences occurred in December's CSV but should be in November CSV. So we go to the last page and we just scroll through until we see that okay at this specific transaction now it says December 1st and all of the transaction underneath here we have to take those and put those in November statement. So if I just go through here I can see that there's two transaction fees here and in real time you would use the actual amounts for this just ensure that it's exactly those transactions from the from that point and everything downwards from there that should be in November statement and these occur in December statement. So I then go to December statement here and look for two transaction fees that happen here. So one, two. So you see here this is December's D and there I can see two transaction fees. And in that case I just take those all of those. I delete those from the December statement. Then I go to the bottom of my November statement and just paste them here. Even though it says December here, as we can clearly see on Etsy, because of the time differences, they actually happened on November 30th. So this is really important to do just to ensure that the transaction that actually happened within the year happened within the same year. So we do that first. So we now got that one done. The second thing that we're going to do is it's got to do the same thing basically for all transactions that happened on the previous month. So we just scroll down here and then we can see like on November statement there's a lot of things on transactions that actually happen on October 31st not on November 1st. So we just go to the current month's statement and we just see that okay same thing here. There's two transaction fees that happened on October or 31st. We got to delete those entirely since those should have been accounted for in October's statement. So, we go here. We just look for those transaction fees. Let's see if we can find them. And there we go. Two transactions fees after each other. So, I just take those this all of this in this case cuz again, it's all of these transactions underneath those two different transaction fees that actually occurred in October. So all of these should be deleted from November and actually have been accounted for in October's really really important to do that. So that is correct. So in this case I just delete them right off the bat since these should have been the same process should have been done for October. But we got to delete those for November's since they will be a new whole new CSV file including all of the transactions. So we have to delete those in this case. Then we just check that off. And if you want this specific checklist this is available in in the creative seller mentorship. All of these types of resources will be available there. But you can get this Etsy statement template for free. There's a link in the description for that. H. So that one is completely free. Now after that, there's one more thing that we got to do. We got to add the previous month's deposit. So in October, there was a deposit that was sent on the last day, but like you don't get deposits like if Etsy sends a deposit from your Etsy account to your bank account, it doesn't happen the same day. Usually takes a day as long as both of those days are business days. So in here we can see that there's a deposit that happened on October 31st. So we got to go into this cuz again like they sent it on October and the thing that takes priority in this case is your own bank account. I usually make some kind of like remark just saying like okay accounted for in four in November. So just make some kind of remark about that because again this actually popped into your bank account on November 1st not October 31st. If both of those days are business days, not weekends or holidays. So just take those. I then just copy them and paste them in here. And then done. Now this one actually becomes a little bit off here. Let's not do that. I want this in another column cuz otherwise there will be a conflict. So let's actually remove this cuz there will be a conflict. I usually have it in like what in the last column here. And usually there's I have already written this beforehand when it comes to like actual deposit from the previous month. But in this case, let's just keep it off just to make it simple. But you take the basically the previous month's deposit that actually popped into your bank account in November and you add that into your CSV for November. So all transactions that happened in November happened here now. And then we can just takeick this box. Okay. Now we got to clean some of this data up so it's actually easy to view this. So the first thing is that we press command A and then command A again. So we mark the whole like we highlight the whole Google sheet file. If you're on a Windows, this is probably control A and then control A again. Then you go to data and then create a filter. So now there's a basically a filter at the top here. Boom. Done. When you have done that, you got to copy everything from the net column to the fees excluding taxes column, which is this one here. So we go here. I hold in down command. This is probably control if you're on a Windows. So I only take all of the U values from this column here. I take that. I put this into this column. So I just copy and paste it. A very important note here is that you don't drag and drop it because that skews things. So always copy and then paste. If you don't do that like that and if you instead for instance do it like this. Whoopsy daisy. This skews a lot of things. So never do that. Always highlight the things and then copy and paste it. So that's the first thing. Now we got to find all the dots like the full stops and replace them with commas. Again I live in Sweden. We use commas as decimals here. If I know that in the US you generally use dots. So I change these to commas because I live in Europe and specifically Sweden. So the first thing I do is go to edit find and replace and then I take I swap all the dots for the commas and then done. The second thing is that you got to take away all the minuses and replace that with nothing to remove the negative signs. So take this and replace it with and you do this. Done. Then you got to remove the currency symbols. In this case, it's SEK, but this could be euro, like GBP, which whichever currency you have in your in your store. And you replace that with nothing. So, I just search for seck. Find. Replace all. Done. Now, with this, since I live in Sweden, the commas can be a bit weird sometimes. So, I got to search here. And you can see that this one pops up right to the very left here. That means that the value is kind of off. So, I got go here and just remove this so it doesn't say 1.111. because this value here should be 1,111 not 1.11. So I just take remove the commas for this to ensure that the values are correct to reflect this so that this amount actually reflects this amount correctly. So I go here again you have to do this for every single value where there's an extra comma that shouldn't be there to ensure that the values are correct. But the good thing when you're doing this this way is that they pop out to the very left, which makes it very easy to see them. You can just scroll down here and as long as you see a value that's here on this side, you just fix that. Makes it goes super fast because you can see it like that. So you scroll down, do it like this. And again, this is the monotonous process, but you have to do this for every single transaction that happened like this. I try to automate this myself, but it always ends up with some kind of issue which may makes me have to redo the this whole process again. So, I just end up having to do it the manual way either way. So, I would definitely recommend to do it this way just to ensure that it's correct cuz the numbers here have to be correct. Perfect. Okay. So, now we basically remove all the thousand separators, the commas so that the numbers are correctly formatted. So, just check this box here. So, we now we basically have formatted this really easy. So we can actually make the sense of this. And again, I'm not sure if I told this, but to simplify this, I just ensure that I just made all of the numbers once, which is why you only see 1111. But this would obviously refer to your actual pricing when you're actually doing this. Now, what I got to do here is that I go here. The first thing that I do got to do is sort out the credits as it says here. like when someone refunds when you get a refund or something like that, you usually get get credit for like the listing fee or if like they actually bought it with an off-site ad, you actually get credit for the off-site ads sale fee that they take out. So you go here and you filter by condition and then you go to text contains credit and then you go here and you mark this and again really important copy this delete these and paste it here. Do not drag and drop it because if you do it won't work it will make the format really weird and it doesn't work like that. So that's the first thing you do. Check that box. Then you got to sort out the refund. So I just search for refund in this case. Now there's two parts here. There's the t a tax refund and a regular refund. So the first thing we do is that we go to the type and we go to just the tax refund. We take those, copy those, delete those, and then we go to refunds tax here. This is the one, right? Nope. Refunds tax. This one. Boom. Done. And then we go to take away this tax one and go to the refund one. just the re actual refunds that we got. Take those take those out and put those in the refunds sales column. Done. Then we go to none. So it doesn't contain anything. And then we select all. So we have so we're not excluding anything. So now we sorted out the refunds. Then we got to sort out the taxes. So what we got to do here is that we clear all of these. We go to tax. We take all since all like the refunds here is included which is why we did this beforehand. But now they're taken out. All we can do because this is just a sale tax that's paid by the buyer. Go through all of these. You copy them. You take those out. And then you go to tax. Boom. You paste those there. And then you select all. Go back to the drawing board. So, so now we've sorted out the taxes. Then we got to sort out the sales including the tax, the total customer payment. So, we go here, go to the sale. There we go. Mark all of these and put those into the this column here, the sales including tax column. Done. Then you got to sort out what you made excluding tax. Basically your actual gross earnings. So your sales including tax. So in this case you just press the column like I did here. And then you see the sum here. And then you go 158 676.34. Then you take that amount and you just deduct the tax that the customer paid. I'll talk more about this in a sec and the VAT part and stuff like that. I'll include this some parts about this too. But the customer makes a total payment plus sales tax dependent on where they live. And then Etsy automatically deducts that just after the payment was made and it remits it to the relevant authority. So it comes into our account and they take it out immediately. So, so we don't handle this at all, which is why we got to take it out. Let me see here. So I just wrote something wrong. 158676.34 minus the tax 13324.26. That is this amount. And sometimes you have extra things that actually can happen here. So for instance, if you sell to Colorado now, they have this Colorado deliver buyer delivery fee or something like that. And then you basically get another type here which will be added which would would be called buyer fee. There's also instances where you would you actually make refunds to customers but they're actually taken from your bank account, not your Etsy account's balance. And then we'll also have another one here specifically for that which is why you I have this column for the Colorado bifree and this one refunds taken from your bank account because it's just a different type here which is why I have it also here for whenever that happens. So now I know the sales excluding taxes and just to ensure that I actually did it right let's just count it one more time just to double check it. So 158676.34 minus 13324.26 that's 145145 352 3528. Perfect. That's correct. Then we just go back to our trusty checklist. So that's done. Then you sort out the refund amounts excluding the tax. So refunds here. Check the column here. 3122.2 minus the tax 146.6. 65 that is this much. So I just put that into this column. The refunds excluding tax column. Perfect. Let me just double check. So I actually counted this correctly. 29755. Perfect. Have to be really thorough since these numbers has to be correct and it comes back to you and you have to redo a lot of stuff if you don't make it correctly. So let's see here. Let's just check that one. Perfect. Now we got to do some bank reconciliation too just to ensure that the bank deposits are correct. So the first thing we got to do now is just go into our deposits and just sort everything by deposit. So I go to clear here and then deposit. So I only see the deposits for a given month. So the thing that we got to do now is just look at the deposits as we are here now. So we got to check that our bank account statements matches the Etsy statement. So and we've already made a note actually of the deposit that came during the previous month and accounted in November instead of October. H. So we've already done that ground work. So we go here, clear, press deposit. we go to our bank account statement. You just filter everything just like we did as a template. So you only see that the specific deposits. So if I go here, uh there's a lot of things that happen during a month and we don't want to do that. So we make a filter just like before by pressing data. It says remove filter because I've already added a filter now. But since you already know how to do that, you just add a filter. You go to the description or like the name of the actual transaction filter by condition text contains deposit. And then I take all of the deposits that happened during this month. I copy these. I paste them into this column here. And now I see that there's two different it actually doesn't line up correctly. And that's because these two will are most likely going to be accounted for in December statement, not for November statement. So I just take these out and copy them in this line here instead. What we got to do now is match up so that these numbers exactly like to the T matches this number. So this one is the same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. It also matches up. Yes. Yes. Also matches up. Also matches up. Also matches up. Also matches up. Also matches up. And now we can clearly see that two of these are actually missing. They are accounted for in the November CSV here. But what we then do in this case is that we make a little note here to the very left here and just say that it's accounted for in December. And same thing with the other one because there were two different ones. Then I just take these out from the fees and add them into the the deposits. And as as an old habit, you don't have to do this. I just add them to deposits according to the bank statements. So just add them to both. But the key thing is to have them at least in deposits here. Boom. And now that's done. Now to check, this is a really important part. This is the last step, but it's really important that you do this because to to ensure that you've actually done this correctly. You got to take the latest Etsy account balance and add any missing deposits to verify that your balance is correct in your books. Really, really important. So, what you do is that you go here to the last transaction that happened during the month of November and you see the balance here. For me, that balance was 59843.29. You take that amount and then you go to the deposits here and again to according to your Etsy like your Etsy account these these two deposits that has been sent to your bank account but haven't arrived in your bank account yet they've actually been deducted which and in your booking they are basically in limbo. So but technically until they've actually arrived in your bank account they are still in your Etsy account. So while they're in limbo, we'll still have to account for these as in our Etsy balance until the day that it actually hits our bank account. So in that case, since these two are accounted for in December, I just go here and just add these two amounts. So one uh 1 one plus one 1.11 equals this amount. So we do this just to ensure that our bookkeeping and accounting and stuff like that is correct. So, we always check the latest balance just to ensure that we've done this correctly. And if this is correct according to your stuff, then you know that you've done it correct. If it's not, then you have to redo all of this and go back from scratch and do it again cuz there's some something that happened and doing this whole process. But this is how you do your CSV management. And then you can check off the last little check box here. Okay. So, now we'll talk a little bit about like VAT. This is a VAT guide for EU mainly for EU based sellers targeting the US market with POD on Etsy. And and a big big big big disclaimer, I'm not a tax professional nor an accountant and this is by no means tax advice. Consult a qualified professional for your specific situation so you have the correct information for your business. Because again, I'm not a tax professional nor an accountant. This is just for my own viewpoints. Now, what is VAT? Well, it stands for value added tax and it's a tax based like that's taken and like added on top of all goods and services. As a consumer, you already pay for it. So, let's say that you pay $20 in groceries once you buy groceries. Then there's included VAT on those fees. It you will say so in your receipt. Now, businesses don't really pay VAT and because when you're VAT registered, businesses can reclaim VAT on expenses. A lot of times you are paying for it and then you get it back after the fact from your tax institution as long as you have your VAT ID. And it's also key to know that platforms like Etsy won't charge you VAT on fees as long as you have a valid VAT as like on Etsy. And a good thing to know too is that you like any business expense that's associated with your business. A lot of those you can actually reclaim VAT for like tool software services and so forth. Either you can reclaim it or you don't have to pay it in the first place dependent on the type of thing that you're buying. Now, as an example, you buy a laptop for $200. Then here in Sweden, we do 25% VAT, for instance. That means that I have to pay $250 for the specific computer because just $50 extra is just pure VAT. And as a VAT registered business, I pay the $250 and then I get the $50 back. So, I get to reclaim it after the fact. And like, this is my own personal opinion, but it just feels like you you're getting a 25% discount on business purchases. But it's also key to know that the percentage here, it really depends on the country that you live in. So here in Sweden, it's 25% in in for most goods and services when it comes to VAT. But in the UK, I think it's like 20%. So the percentages vary dependent on the country. Now, if you live in the EU, you're actually dealing with ETS's Irish subsidiary, which is Etsy Ireland UC. And in that case, you're actually working with another EU country, which means that reverse charge applies. And that just basically it's just a fancy term and it just means that SC don't charge you VAT upfront on their services if you have a valid VAT ID and you still actually need to account for it in your reports even though no VAT was charged on the behalf because of the reverse charge. So you have to account for it even though no VAT was exchanged and that's because of the how the reverse charge works. As an example, let's say that I'm on EU Etsy seller and I'm selling out something to someone that lives in Texas. So, I live in the EU, but I sell to the customers in the US. Let's say someone in Texas buys a product that I listed for $20. In that case, Etsy automatically adds the Texas state sales tax, which is around 8.2.5. And as a disclaimer there, like I think Texas state is like 6.25%, but local taxes can bring it up to 8.25 in many cities. So, you you sell the thing for $20, but the customer actually pays $21.65. Then when you get the money into your Etsy account, your Etsy account balance, Etsy then deducts and remits that specific sales tax, the $1.65 and they remit that to the like relevant tax authority. We as the sellers don't handle that at all. They do that and like meanwhile because I am VAT registered too, I can reclaim VAT like on my business purchases like I mentioned before. But the key thing that I really want to hit home with is that like you don't have to incur the VAT on your Etsy fees by having a VAT ID. Because if you would have it, you would incur a lot more fees. And you would incur an extra like percentage on your Etsy fees. In here in Sweden, that would be 25% extra on every single fee that they charge, which be would be the transaction fee, the shipping fee, the Etsy ads, the listing fees, and there's just so many fees that they have. and every single one of them would have an extra 25% cost to them. If you don't have a VAT ID in your store, it makes it really hard to do without a VAT ID if you live in the EU and sell primarily to the US. Yeah, just like I mentioned like Etsy charges you VAT on their fees. Like as an example, like I know that in like 20 24 I did around $50,000 in just Etsy ads fees, just one of the fees. And if I would wouldn't be VAT registered, I would have to pay an extra $12,000 just because I wasn't VAT registered because they have to charge me VAT in that case. And again, that's just my real profit that I would just plainly lose if I wasn't VAT registered, which in my case, I of course am. So, it's also key to know that that so VAT basically it's as I mentioned, you don't have to be that and you can be that. It's an optional thing. So it's not required immediately. But the key thing is that there's different thresholds when it comes to this. So after a c certain amount of revenue in your shop, you have to be registered for VAT. So it's easier to just do that from the get so that you don't have to incur all the fees so that you have your the infrastructure of your shop set from the get before you even start this. And the key thing to know too, again, this can definitely differ from country to country, which again like I'm not a tax professional nor an accountant, so this is by no means tax advice, but like you I think you have to do like e quarterly revenue reports if you live in the EU and sell on Etsy. Then you have to do quarterly revenue reports to your own tax office where you live and that's also like you do quarterly filings. This can also depend from country to country because you can do sometimes do annual or like monthly and stuff like that. But how you reclaim your VAT is that you file reports about your VAT so that you can actually reclaim or or pay VAT dependent on your situation. But and you do that through VAT reports that you do either either like monthly, quarterly or annual. And that depends a lot like the regulations and stuff like that depends a lot on where you live. So h definitely talk to an accountant to get the best information about your business and how it works where you live. But usually like the reports are quite simple once they're set up. But preferably, I would strongly use recommend that you use an accountant cuz this is just a lot to get into and it just fasttracks a lot of the process which also enables you to focus on the one thing that actually will drive the business growth which is just focusing on doing Etsy, not doing the accounting of it. Like having a good accountant will help a lot to actually grow the business because you can just focus your time on the things that actually matter most, which is growing the Etsy business. But some actionable steps to this register for VAT ASAP upscaling. That's definitely something I would recommend. Preferably you have it already before you even start Etsy. So you don't have to incur the VAT fees. Add your VAT ID on to Etsy to avoid the charges so you don't have to incur them once you have the valid VAT ID. And you do that in in the country that you live in that you register for VAT. And then track VAT on all business expenses so you can actually reclaim it after the fact. And then you file quarterly like or annual or whatever reports to stay compliant. And again the interval before actually filing these VA reports or like the filings can differ from country to country. So definitely like get talk to someone dependent on where you live so you have the most accurate information dependent on your situation. Now some final takeaways. So VA registration is a major business advantage. You can reclaim in my case since I live in Sweden I can reclaim 25% on my business expenses like computers and stuff that's primarily used for my business. You avoid unnecessary charges and again this is a big one when it comes to Etsy fees. It highly improves your margins. Like it highly, highly improves your margins because it makes it a lot harder to sell on Etsy without a VAT ID. If you're a US-based seller, then you can just invest those saved profits back into your growth. That would be like rundown on how VAT works. But again, I'm not a tax professional nor an accountant. So, I would strongly recommend that you talk to someone like that in the country that that you live in to get the best info for your business. [Music]