Quick Tip #11 - Start Getting Ready for the Holidays

I know it's only August but the holidays are busy both for selling and personally so if you get prepared well in advance you will save yourself a lot of stress.

❄ Ramp up production. My personal goal is to reach 200 items in my Etsy shop by mid-October. This includes making seasonal items now.
❄ Stock up on supplies. You don't want to run out around the end of November.
❄ If you get priority mail boxes from the USPS they usually have a deadline for ordering more boxes before the holidays. Do it now and you don't have to worry about it. If you ship international stock up on customs forms as well.
❄ Make a list. If you write down all the stuff you need to do before the holiday season starts and get working on it now you're less likely to get overwhelmed.

About the beginning of the holiday season:
While the day after Thanksgiving is the traditional kickoff of holiday shopping plenty of people start earlier. So don't be surprised to see some holiday shoppers earlier than that (especially important if you offer gift wrapping).

Weekly Inspiration

This is the cutest sewing room and wonderfully organized.

sewing room, originally uploaded by Saídos da Concha.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Link Roundup: Using CSV files

Etsy, Paypal, and other online services you're likely to use in your business have the option to download CSV (comma-separated value) files. These files can make keeping up to date with your accounting much easier. You can use them by opening them in your spreadsheet software of choice.

Tip: Download the CSV for each month and name the file clearly like paypal-01-09.csv for the paypal csv for January 2009.

Links:
Open Office Calc - Open source spreadsheet software equivalent to Microsoft Excel but free.
Spreadsheet Basics - Open Office Tutorial
Google Docs - Online spreadsheets
Streamline Your Records with PayPal and Excel - Paypal specific tutorial, adaptable to spreadsheet software other than Excel

Weekly Inspiration

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, my offline life interfered.

This weeks inspiration is an amazing idea for photographing earrings: using real plants.

Ceramic Earrings with glass green butterflies on leaf, originally uploaded by Pink Ocean / Orrtec Designs.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Weekly Inspiration

This is such a cute tray, the rings just look yummy in it.

Ceramic Rings, originally uploaded by Winchell ClayWorks.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Slow Times

I frequently see sellers on Etsy and other venues complaining about a lack of sales or a dip in their sales. Slow times happen due to just bad luck, the economy, as part of seasonal shopping patterns, or because the seller has become complacent. How you deal with this can have a big impact on your business. Here's a list of a few dos and don'ts for when business is slow:

DO step up your promotion efforts. There are plenty of ways to promote for free or cheap when you don't have the space cash for advertising in the form of blogging, twitter, other social networking sites, squidoo, directories, participating in a giveaway or contest, etc.

DON'T sit constantly refreshing your stats or obsessing about them. Stats are useful but checking them constantly is not productive. No more than once a day.

DO work on new ideas. A new product line or variation can perk things up if people get excited about them. Besides when things do get busy you aren't going to have as much time to work on these things. The last time you want to be working on a new product type is the middle of the holiday shopping season.

DON'T look for a scapegoat. By this I mean don't look for something outside your control to blame your lack of sales on. It may exist, the economy isn't too hot right now, but you can't change some things. Focus on the factors you can control.

DO some homework. Take some time to take a class, read a book, etc. on running a small business. Your local small business association is a good reasource for this.

DON'T be afraid to ask for help. Many sellers are willing to give you some help, Etsy has a whole team full of them http://etsymentors.blogspot.com/

Quick Tip #10 - More Etsy Hacks

A few months ago I did a review of Etsy Hacks and since then they've released a lot of improvements and new scripts. To use Etsy Hacks you need to install the Greasemonkey addon for the Firefox web browser and then install the scripts. Some new or improved scripts that I love are:

• Buyer Notes - This hack extracts the "message from the buyer" (if any) from each order and displays it on the Sold Orders page, underneath the order's section, so you're less likely to miss important requests from your customers. *I love this one, notes are very easy to miss in the email notification and on the receipt page*
  
• Contact Buyer - Adds links to email and convo a buyer to the Sold Orders page
• Order Convo Enhancer - When you start a convo from the receipt page (using the buyer info or contact buyer hacks), this hack adds "Etsy order #123456" to the subject, and a link to the receipt to the body of the message. *I convo each buyer so this is very useful.*
  
• Bulk Image Uploader - This hack adds up to five image upload fields to your "create listing" and "edit listing" pages, so you can upload your listing images more quickly.

Make sure you head over to Etsy Hacks and see the full list of scripts, there are so many useful tools there.