Bouquets of paper flowers, in little mini pots. $4.49 each + shipping.
My Etsy shop was supposed to be leveling off and headed into the background, supposedly.
I raised pricing noticeably… to the extent that the shop is not only profitable but that margin is nearly doubled.
I also pretty much stopped promoting it with paid ad campaigns outside of Etsy.
Figured that would hold onto some of the existing, happy customer base, but not all of it, and limit the flow of new buyers, who in some cases are unpredictable, maybe difficult to deal with.
Well, what happened wasn’t a decline or a leveling off but a boom. The existing customers pretty much all kept ordering. And the new customers kept showing up despite my removal of ads leading into Etsy, but now the customers were arriving passively through Etsy itself at increasing rates. I realized that the reason was a temporary spike in the percentage of visitors who were buying, and apparently that metric spiking led Etsy as a platform to boost my listings and their visibility, including through the Etsy search ads you cannot opt out of. Beyond all this, my revenue has almost quadrupled, hitting $50-60/week in gains due to the pricing change, the lack of ad costs, and an uptick in buyers and to a lesser extent traffic generally. And… I’m just gonna roll with it now.
Yes, I’ve gotten a Cricut. Yes, I’m releasing a line of mini floral bouquets soon and they’ll start off at $4.49 each, then probably go up a bit once there are some reviews of them piled up. Most things on my Etsy are like that – the most underpriced stuff is almost always the stuff nobody is buying or reviewing yet.
I also have a ‘Greek architecture’ papercraft kit on the way, plus extension of all existing papercraft sets to O scale and T scale in about a month, and an upcoming option for precut kits at least with N, Z scale by June.
Yes, a few new paintings are being made. That’s not high priority but it’s still going on.
Yes, there was a Cinco De Mayo sale and everything was 15% off.
Yes, there’s a Mother’s Day sale coming up really soon (May 7-15) and everything will be at least 23% off throughout it. Some items are going to be over 30% off.
No, most sales in the future won’t have discounts quite that good.
Yes, I’m seeing 60 visitors daily on the shop lately. About half of them on any given day are probably new visitors.
Yes, I’ve had 75 people favorite the shop, up from 50 at the end of 2022.
And yes, I do have big plans elsewhere too. I’m working on some major stock media updates, for example, and a revised HornbostelVideos.com site design with a ton of additional video material, which goes live soon.
Thanks everybody, really excited about this actually and figure it’ll be a big deal in terms of overhauling and improving existing content and adding a lot of new things too.
One more note – an eBay auction is also going on, lots of action cameras in a bundle starting at $49 with no added shipping cost. Take a look here if interested.
I am considering reopening Etsy printing services during Spring 2023 after all the moving is complete, ie by May 2023.
Some caveats:
-Minimal promotion of the Etsy shop. My aim is less to aggressively expand to new buyers who may or may not be happy with my work, and instead to focus on continuing fulfilling orders for the 50 or so repeat buyers who have generally been happy with what I’ve done and are usually easy to work with. These people have asked me to return and I’m genuinely considering doing so.
I spent *hundreds* promoting my Etsy in 2022 and many of the people who were drawn in were upset with the outcome for various often finicky reasons, demanded refunds. So by limiting active promotion, I not only expect to have a higher proportion of happy customers, and fewer upset one off people, but less promotional cost as well. This all makes the shop more likely consistently profitable and well regarded even if its rate of growth is limited, for 2023.
-Other notes, I still have a Greek papercraft kit in development, and several potential paintings. So the reopened physical items are not just shipped prints, BTW, they include the papercraft and handmade art as well – and better still, other new products that may surprise everyone. The copy paper will soon have a 13*19 option, a new cutting system for arbitrary sizes of prints will soon exist, there may even be a precut option for papercraft kits* pre scored with a Cricut!
Longer term, sizes above 13*19 are also possible. That will take a while to happen though. I do have plans to someday acquire a printer capable of printing up to 24″ by 48″, among other pretty cool things.
In other news: Yes, Vivid Minigolf is moving forward, yes it will be released by end of May 2023 barring a surprise huge setback. And while I am starting off with Steam, Itch.IO, Gamejolt… I may be adding the Epic Games Store to that list. Epic’s storefront is pretty huge, they’re making entry easier for indies now, and they only take 12% of sales, vs. 30% on Steam. So they will be a serious option to look at.
Prior to any of that: March 17, that’s six days from now, is St. Patrick’s Day, and on that day, just for 24 hrs, I’ll be doing another giant bundle sale through Itch.IO. Check that out here.
That is also when something new and cool might happen – that day may yet see:
-a patch and update to the furniture collection of 3d assets. (very likely, near certain)
-some new imagery relating to Vivid Minigolf (very likely)
-maybe even the launch, finally, of a Vivid Minigolf Steam Page? (somewhat likely)
That particular sale event could be really big for a few reasons. But mainly the fact that I’ve backed it with a $20 ad campaign and also some free link building efforts – posts on social media, YouTube comments, forum signatures, etc.
There’s also a little page on this site that’s seen a hundred views to date, focused on this exact sale event:
A quick note on what looks to be the year’s final Etsy sale.
All printing services are going to be 25% off from Dec. 5 to Dec. 20.
Everything else is going to be 60% off. So, paintings, papercraft kits, stock media packs… all the things people normally don’t buy. Like for example, those three widely-ignored ‘3d level / app creation’ listings where I make a 3d environment based on someone’s rough sketched layout or batch of still photos? The ones where I agree to work for just over ten hours doing that, at a pay rate of under $3 per hour for my work in texturing and 3d and gamedev level design? Yeah, it is going down to just under a single dollar per hour of my time working. I am still pretty sure nobody will pay $10 for it, because if the public still hasn’t done anything with these listings by now they likely never will. Even the cheapest one, the gallery one that takes me 4 hrs. work to do, and goes on sale for $2 or $3 now and then… I don’t think anyone will ever buy it. Please SOMEBODY prove me wrong and demonstrate that you actually realize how insanely good that pricing is given the work involved!
I will post several new paintings on Etsy this month, They probably will sit there unpurchased for years. I know they’re kind of loose and impressionistic, I do get that, but at 60% off my paintings are about $1/hr pay for work involved on my part once materials are factored out. So again, ridiculous underpricing that nobody takes advantage of.
I am likely to attempt jumping into some niches that are already present on Etsy because every time I attempt selling a thing that’s truly unique and exceptional value nobody wants it. So for some reason that includes paper flower stuff (at max. $8 per mini bouquet) and pop up cards (gift tags) and so on. Still, being me I couldn’t help wanting to push each category closer to realism. So the petals and leaves of my paper flowers have photorealistic printed textures on the paper, and the gift tag pop ups are going to look unexpectedly richly detailed.
And a new niche that nobody has been messing with. 3d photos. I can take family photos and convert them into 3d extruded scenes using layer after layer of cut chipboard and printed photo material, to give the scene realistic depth. The depth extraction begins with AI depth map solver software and some common sense manual edits and refinements when needed, followed by a splitting of the grayscale map into roughly eight tonal sections, each with the corresponding portion of the photo separated using that depth mask. Then several hours printing, cutting, layering it all in a box. I will likely price each photo at about $8. You know the drill though, it is a thing nobody online will really ever realize is available, nobody understands it, probably nobody will ever buy it. That’s how this goes!
Yes, I am going to add more papercraft kits soon, starting with a Coastal Greek kit. Think ‘Santorini’ plus a few modular ruins and you get the idea. Granted, papercraft kits have sold but my most profitable one to date has never actually turned a profit, it always costs more to promote it than the sales that result.
Anything earned this December sale will be focused on setting up Christmas gifts for young children, family members that at this time I have no idea how to cover gifts for.
Family and friends and scattered acquaintances in fairly large numbers may all be gifted something truly odd this year beyond typical gift items. As in: 80 or 85 % off coupons, one use only, applicable to any item on my Etsy shop ASIDE from the printing services. If that works out it could trigger a batch of sales in Jan. 2023 and perhaps some subsequent reviews, resulting in momentum finally (I hope?) for the sort of items that thousands look at, hundreds favorite, and nobody actually ever buys. Because – sometimes – the only path to getting something moving is when the price is dropped to the $1 range or lower.
I still only have six listings which are typically profitable. Six of the 50+ listings are what keep the shop viable at all. You might think with Star Seller and 275+ sales it is going well but it has the potential to expand and become popular far more broadly in 2023. And if that starts soon, it helps in other ways too. I would *love* to net $750 in sales this December to cap off the year. It would result in $200-250 in pay which would be enough not just to make the holidays better for the nephews and niece, but beyond that could push things to a stable enough start in ’23 that maybe, just maybe, you will find all those long delayed gamedev things completed and launched on Steam earlier than you now expect.
This is not over yet… indeed, I get the sense it has all barely started.
More news and an updated site design will arrive soon, but for now just know that the project is making massive progress.
Vivid Minigolf – winter course, WIPMain menu – Vivid Minigolf free version, feature limited [WIP]Vivid Minigolf – first hole of the first [flower garden] course in the free demo.
I used to *still* be renewing some of my domains through HostGator still (because those jerks won’t let me transfer them, and now their system’s so broken that the ability to renew the domains no longer exists in any functional form.)
So the reality here is that many of my domain names will be expiring over the next few months.
New (replacement) domain names will be announced here later but for now I’m keeping the new names quiet until they’re successfully registered. Keep in mind though that some of the core domains remain, including HornbostelProductions.com, HornbostelVideos.com, and TriumphantArtists.com. Those three I can guarantee will not change.
As far as the web network in general, I intend to redesign pretty much every single site in it over the next month. I’m already starting that process with what will be the replacement for RedeemerDocumentary.com, RedeemerChurch3d.com [domain acquired, site not all there yet]. This site will now be focused less on any history I had with that or other churches, and more on the 3d reconstruction project related to the church structure.
HornbostelVideos.com will be reworked with WordPress and will look a lot more YouTube-y with a far more modular layout that will make it simpler for me to integrate new video content there periodically over time.
Many of my domains will soon face other changes as well – more consistent and faster-loading banner ad code for example, integrated into [nearly] every page of the network with only a few exceptions. I’m well aware that despite all odds, some of my sites, this one included, are in the top 2 million most visited on the entire internet, according to the likes of Alexa, and should [in theory] be generating a few dollars/day per site, just by existing, and having a few ad slots on them. And as much as I dislike that, I’ll be going along with it, though I will try to minimize the disruptiveness of such ads. No pop-ups or pop-unders, just an embedded banner here and there. If this succeeds to any reasonable extent, it might be key to making the likes of HornbostelVideos.com viable. I have a plan in place for releasing almost my entire past video library there, and that plan should finally be live later this month [here’s hoping, anyway]
Other key updates?Etsy has stabilized nicely, and the shop there continues to gain ground with over 80 positive reviews, and I’ll be posting a few new paintings and other things there soon even though it’s obvious that the affordable printing services are mostly what is successful there. Itch.IO is starting to boom but the July 4th promo did not have the viral impact I hoped it would – I had $25 worth of gift cards ready to hand out and… people didn’t do what was needed to claim them. All the same, the core campaign did draw a few hundred people to the shop and resulted in a small number of sales. So hopefully, things will continue to grow there, and I do have three ratings/reviews there now so the shop is developing a positive reputation finally instead of the ‘no reputation at all’ it had for years. I’m still trying to get a list of things out there by end of summer, including two new VFX packs and a texture collection, more 3d assets, maybe even a game or two if things go smoothly enough.
My Etsy shop from 2011-2018, zero sales. 2019, one sale and a positive review which I was quite grateful for. 2020, nine sales. 2021 prior to November, 16 sales. Then came this month, seven sales just this month! And ten reviews now too, all of them glowing five-star reviews!
Now, given enough time it could still unravel due to unreasonable behavior by enough buyers like my eBay shop has. On eBay circa 2020 I pretty much gave up on that… eBay by 2020 I spent hundreds of hours working and was losing money doing so, due to a combination of a flawed and overly generous and too trusting, business model and an alarmingly high proportion of unreasonable customers who were essentially trying to scam me. They would order a personalized artwork, when it arrived they would claim it was damaged or that it was not what they wanted, and threaten to give a scathing review unless there was a full refund. I kept my 100% positive feedback score but only because I was caving to all of these people. It sucked and it has caused me to make three clear determinations – one being no more time consuming personalized art for buyers in most cases unless the buyer has proven exceptionally reasonable through a series of previous orders. Two, is that eBay’s become too much of a cesspool and I don’t want to be an art seller there anymore, though occasionally I still use the platform to buy and sell other things. Three, that I need to enact refund policies that are not excessively trusting and generous, and price just enough profit margin in to survive and still profit despite the few who do still somehow manage to exploit me.
I still believe most buyers are genuine. I still charge less than a typical vendor, and my effective pay per hour remains well below minimum wage doing this. But it’s now not so low that it can be entirely cancelled out for the entire year if a few sales go sideways!
I was not convinced to set the current boundaries because of my own greed or any such thing. Actually, what finally convinced me to do it was the well being of the customers, who wanted timely response and delivery, wanted a growing roster of promising new products from me, wanted my venue to survive and grow because that was good not just for me but for them! And if the shops don’t remain viable that all goes down the tubes so… there is good reason to do what I need to do to make this all sustainable and able to expand.
I have a TON of new things I want to do in the near future. Not all of them make sense as Etsy products but many do. Some – digital games and gamedev asset packs, mainly – are going to be launched mainly on Itch.IO instead, or even Steam. But Itch.IO, despite longstanding efforts to gain reviews and sales there, has yet to really be viable. My Itch.IO profile still lacks the key first review or reviews which is perhaps necessary to get momentum going there.
So here is the plan for late 2021:
-games, a few of my small or midsized projects, will launch on Itch and Steam by end of year. That will likely drive activity to my Itch profile more than asset packs ever could. And it is something I’ve been working towards for an awfully long time regardless.
-asset packs shifting to become accessible outside Itch.IO, including Unity Asset Store submissions and a big complete asset pack collection on DVD and digital download, posted as a product on Etsy.
-Etsy things that are working will be built further if the prints continue to sell well, more print product options, like glossy photo prints, prints on normal weight copy paper, more size options, etc. Likewise, even more colorful and charming miniature papercraft kits based on even more architectural styles.
-sales will continue on Etsy. November 17-30 is now a planned sale range and all the papercraft items will be 40% off, all the other items 25% off, so should be pretty amazing. And there will be another sale leading into Christmas, if you want to cut shipment of things that close! (Dec. 10-18, 2021)
-sales also on Itch.Io. As in… Nov. 20-30, and Dec. 20-Jan. 2, 2022. So that is also going to happen.
As before, please bookmark this page and keep an eye out for updates if this event is of any interest to you. We’ll have a lot of artworks, original ones, in the $6-14 range. Plus a ton of different, cheap house plants grown by my grandmother, and some other items. And even a couple dozen little bags of freebies for those who show up, maybe, if I can get all of that put together in time. Current location is: 118 Queenswood Drive, Cranberry Twp, PA.
I am not sure why I kept misremembering this as ‘wildwood’ as that was clearly inaccurate, there is no street or road named ‘wildwood’ in Cranberry Twp, and having checked it, my grandmother’s address is on Queenswood Drive.
Time keeps shifting around but we are, finally, looking at doing this on Oct. 23, from 1-4 pm. Temperature is expected to be about 54 degrees, overcast, mild winds, possibly a bit of light rain. No guarantees it won’t get pushed back again if the forecasts change but this very well could be what happens. Seems like it is actually moving forward for the 23rd now.
There are some issues ongoing with my Etsy shop that should be fixed any time now, worst likely case that will be back up and running in 4 days (Oct. 19). Best case, it will reopen sooner than that. I have quietly continued to make new artworks so if the shop reopens and you see one or two you love, you might opt to grab them right then instead of waiting until the garage sale (which would be a cheaper option, especially given the total absence of shipping costs. But some items might get snapped up before then, maybe.)
The weather keeps messing up our plans. We’d considered a possible garage sale on October 9th, or 16th, in Cranberry, PA at my grandmother’s home on Wildwood Road.
But… looks like a forecast of rain keeps hitting us on every Saturday. At the rate things are going, the next credible timeframe for this is October 30th [the 23rd is looking likely too busy for us, and if we’re set on a Saturday it would be then at the earliest.]
Please – if you’re curious about any of this – bookmark this page and I’ll try to keep it up to date as we figure out what we’re able to do.
The upside of this: More artworks, plants, and other items will be available at this sale when this finally does happen, and things will be better prepared in other ways as well. I also will be able to make a box of freebies available there. Little stuff, mostly, one of each item per visitor. Stickers, booklets, and other such things in a stack of smallish packets. Maybe other surprises in some of them?
Downside: All the uncertainty definitely does keep this a bit confusing. And it may be cold by the late October or possible early November timeframe. So… dress warmly!
In the meantime – check the post below this one for more pics from a past similar event [2019], and a gallery of artworks on sale – plus the link to the Etsy shop which you can visit basically at any time, even if you do miss this garage sale!
The first of a long string of new additional artworks made in the days leading up to the sale. This one in particular was sold very quickly on Etsy, but there are many more new paintings on the way, and all of the ones unsold online will be at the garage sale for under $15/item!
The Etsy Labor Day sale was not super successful. Indeed, the data-recovery efforts mentioned earlier – getting new external hard drive storage media and downloading cloud backup files back to local storage where they can again be used… plus some other assorted work, costs and issues resulted in delayed payment of a few bills and certain things going down visibly, including the Etsy shop itself for a few days post-sale, and the website MiniatureMultiverse.com which hit its expiry date but was still well within the ten-day grace period when I renewed the domain. Both bills have since been covered and things have indeed stabilized around here.
While customers online have continued to buy things at a gradually growing rate, the really key thing here has been the support of family and in-person connections. I am being paid by my sister Katie to do videography at her upcoming wedding, for example, and am assisting my dad with illustrations on his workbook (a church small-group workbook he’s putting together based on the Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard, I’ll show some of that later…) and all of that I’ve been really trying to do well. I’ll show more of that material soon. In practice, that means over $300 made in the past week between those things and a few sales online.
I’m even doing 3d-animated menu stuff for Katie’s wedding DVD and BluRay, based on what her wedding and reception sites look like:
Reception hallSanctuary in 3dAnother view of the sanctuaryAnother view of the reception hall
It’s not enough pay to be outright transformative, but it absolutely did get things back on track a bit and it did allow me to cover some new stuff which will result in some things moving forward a bit more. I’m optimistic now, for example, that the stock-media packs I’d planned will be available by Halloween 2021, along with an initial launch of Panoramic Worlds. I’ll also have the first asset pack of mine on Unity’s Asset Store by then, assuming they actually have enough sense to see that it’s good, and approve it.
I am actively making more artworks, listing them on Etsy. Don’t be surprised if there are over 45 listings total on the shop by November 2021… and over 60 by the end of 2021.
That will be not just MANY paintings but also a LOT more papercraft listings showcased with some lovely new dioramas – the urban inspirations for the new sets are Venice, Paris and Amsterdam, so that gives you some sense of what’s planned by end of 2021. I may even have a couple of Greek sets up by the end of the year with both modern Greek structures and ancient Greco-Roman ruins and structures. In case you wanted to make an ancient Rome or Athens and not just stuff from the medieval or later eras. There are a bunch of mini supplies inbound largely for this purpose and a number of those materials may yet find secondary use in wrapping up the physical assembly of remaining areas in ‘Miniature Multiverse’ as well.
Lighthouse artwork -this painting sold within just four hours of being listed.Hummingbird painting – also on stretched canvas
Basically, things are improving for me. And despite some depressing missteps a few days ago, and my opining that I might never have a career success at all given the risk of climate-change related collapse over the next 25 years, right now things are looking up. And while I still believe environmental issues could cause a massive wave of volatility and instability in the coming years, for now I’m feeling like the end of 2021 and the start of 2022 might not be terrible. I might actually have a shot at some sort of success here, and I’d love it if that meant I were able to help people struggling with lack of access to food, medicine, education, etc – all the people already on the brink in this world, who’ll face tremendous adversity as things start to unravel. These people will need our help. Nature, too, will need our help. We will have to dig deep and make sacrifices for everyone and indeed for the planet itself, if the world is to hold together in the coming crisis. And I want to believe that America and Americans can show global leadership, instead of petty tribalism, greed, short-sightedness, and self-absorption. To that end I’ve begun giving more to charitable causes this month than I was even earlier this year… raising the giving level from around 11% of my monthly budget to 23%. I want to make the world better. And I’m hoping that I can do so while also still making creative work that you all will love, at a rate that’s unprecedented. If things continue improving, there’s no reason I couldn’t continue to push my giving upwards as well, which I would love to be able to do.
If you like that idea please continue to support my work – buying on Etsy, Itch.IO, etc – and ideally also reviewing what you’ve bought. Next sales are Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and I think you’ll be excited to see what will be available during those events. Or – you know – you can also buy things quickly at full price if they show up and look interesting. Like what a recent buyer did with the lighthouse art – they saw something they liked, a one-off unique item – and they immediately grabbed it instead of waiting and running the risk somebody else would claim it.
Etsy: All original handmade artworks at 25% off Papercraft printed kits 50% off. All digital items 70% off. New items posted.
Itch.IO: Everything available at 45% off [individual asset packs] and 90% off [bundle deal]. Note that for various reasons most planned new content won’t be there at time of sale. I’ll explain that in the next paragraph.
Why some items are delayed: It’s not just the fact that attempts to bridge the buyers on Etsy and Itch.IO with a cross-incentive in August failed utterly. (They’re two very different audiences of buyers!)… or the fact that I can’t afford to shoot any new, high-quality VFX 4k stock-media elements packs just yet. No, it has more to do with a deluge of hardware issues on my desktop PC. I’ve had three external drives run into issues in the last two weeks. So that is a huge distraction. It would be heartbreaking and an utter disaster, except for the fact that it is all backed up in the cloud by this point [using Backblaze, which is an amazing service for that kind of thing.] so it’s just a matter of getting new drives as needed and downloading over 11 TB of data back onto the new hardware. I’m struggling because I am focused on that entire process and covering the new costs, and it inevitably has also stalled some projects critically dependent on files which were on those drives. If you want the new collections or anything digital of mine to move forward faster – as usual, buying things from the above shops DOES help keep my work going. There’s a tendency for many of you, an understandable one, to wait until a cool thing is done before buying it – yet somehow be unaware of the practical reality that those big projects like Panoramic Worlds or Miniature Multiverse or whatever else, are often limping slowly along and that financing them in some limited way before launch will in fact help get them wrapped up faster. Buying a thing from me does generally push me to make more like that thing you bought. So if you want more stock media, buying my existing stuff will encourage further work on that. Same with art or miniature papercraft on Etsy, or gamedev efforts, etc. One of the better ways to ‘cast a vote’ for a certain type of project is to buy my entire collection of stock media on Ko-fi for $3.95 – through my Ko-fi shop. You can choose what project type the funds support and I will put them towards creation of content within that category. Same idea also applies to website traffic but to a lesser extent; the more busy a site of mine is, the more it gets prioritized for future updates.
SO, considering THAT LOGIC – obviously we’ve got a problem:
mTurk microtasks and freelancing for others, constitute the SOLID MAJORITY of my online earnings and that pushes me to pursue those more than I’d like. Even though they result in no new creative content of mine usually visible to the public.
In distant second place, Etsy, which has gained a lot of ground over time. Third, eBay, even despite my rarely listing things there lately. And fourth – Itch.IO – indicating exactly why I’m struggling to justify gamedev and stock media as major priorities so far. Limited response to a category slows it down usually, and big success somewhere pushes that category faster. And then there’s the last-place category, ad revenue on my websites. Clearly not a ton to be gained from posting a lot of frequent website updates. Nonetheless, I am going to be pushing forward on that a bit as it seems the sites do drive some 15-20% of the activity and sales to Etsy and Itch and eBay so… in that sense, worthwhile?
And it’s not like earnings are what matter most to me. But they are needed to make better creative work and even to keep things online consistently. My websites went down for a couple of days a month ago… my Etsy shop has just gone offline as well THIS MONTH. And all of that is me scrambling to cover hosting bills, shop fee bills, etc, while also dealing with the cloud backup, local hardware issues, etc. It’s a mess and if things were to go badly it could all easily come crashing down. That’s why I’m having to prioritize some things like mTurk that in a better world, I maybe wouldn’t have to.
Not that I am starting a crowdfunding campaign or any such thing, but… I’d like to see a few of you do simple things like buy something cheap on one of the existing stores during the sales I am going to run, and also rate the item you bought fairly. Maybe leave a comment on the Itch page or an Etsy star rating or something? The more people see feedback from existing buyers, the more they’ll feel safe buying something. Which means your review of an item on my Etsy shop or Itch.IO shop might be an immense positive factor as far as funding goes and thus completion of additional content and updates. Look at what happened on Etsy. My Etsy shop ran from 2015 up to early 2019, no sales, tons of views and no sales. In late 2019 a brave person bought an item, loved it, reviewed it. That was the start and the more reviews were posted the more of the viewers and visitors on Etsy would actually buy something.
From 2015-mid 2019, 0% of visitors on my Etsy shop bought something. This is what happens when a shop has no ratings or responses or comments or any sort of engagement from the customers. My experience on Etsy was that the percentage of visitors who buy anything has gone up by 0.25% after each additional review, so far. Now that four ratings exist, it means 1% of shop visitors will buy an item. Four reviews took the monthly sales level from $0.00 to a new record of over $50 in August 2021. And that sort of thing tends to snowball once it gets moving, so I am asking YOU to look through the items I’ve listed and to find something you like, buy it, review it, and get things accelerating dramatically here.
I realize that every review dramatically increases the odds of any given visitor later on, making a purchase.
I recognize that both my Etsy and Itch shops have thousands of visitors every month now.
I recognize, finally, that if the rate of purchases increase as they have so far on Etsy, in response to reviews – that an added 10 reviews on each platform will mean an added 20-30 sales a month likely in months that follow.
So I can pretty much promise that if a few of you post reviews of things you bought, and looked at once they arrived (either digitally as downloads or as physical items) that those reviews will be transformative in my capacity to get everything moving forward faster and on a larger scale in the near future. I hope this goes well.
Heck, I almost made an offer to donate a certain sum for each review posted, to an array of charitable causes but I did the math and cannot be sure it wouldn’t cause a cascade or collapse of my entire web network. So… no specific numeric promises there but I will be donating whatever I can reasonably spare because as much pain and frustration exists in my life, and yours, there are others even worse off in the world and they do need our help. I can pledge this: If my total earned income ever somehow climbs above $7k a year, which is well above the current level, at least 50% of everything above that, will be given to others who really need it.
I’ve been trying to make things work for 20-odd years now. I’m closing in on my 35th birthday. Really hoping for a breakthrough.
