Oh boy! We are looking squarely in the face of Q4 (the 4th quarter of the year). In retail that is your money making quarter. In some years I’ve made double or triple what I’ve made in the first three quarters of the year combined (don’t be too impressed those were really lean years). My point is retailers always prime themselves getting there stores ready for the avalanche of sales (hopefully) in Q4. I always set up more Etsy listings in Q4 than any other time.
I am primarily a retailer after all since I have both an online store and a brick and mortar store to feed during this time.
Enter my 24 hour Etsy Listings challenge!
My Etsy shop is usually at about 200 products at any given time. A respectable number for sure, but this year I wanted to take my store to a higher level. I wanted to get another hundred or more listings up onto my Etsy site.
That’s a lot of work. But hey, customers can’t buy what’s not listed right!
I wanted to get all the listing done quickly and efficiently, so I concocted the brilliant idea of a 24 hour challenge. Well, to be fair YouTube creators have been doing this 24 hr challenge for awhile but they weren’t really doing anything in their 24 hrs. Those challenges were silly like spending 24 hours in my office or 24 hours in my pool. Really kids?
There’s no way I wanted to participate in something that required me to be prune-ee for 24 hours, but being to hyper productive and getting my work done. I’m in!
So I lined up 100 items I wanted to get listed on my Etsy site for Q4 and decided that Labor day weekend was my time for the 24 hour challenge.
The young-uns who participate in the 24 hour challenge stay awake for the full 24 hours straight. I on the other hand need my sleeps so my 24 hour challenge included an 8 hour break to sleep.
How It Went
I decided the best way to proceed would be to bulk my processes. Instead of taking a photo and then listing that item, which is my typical process, all photos would be taken first. So I set out the first day with my light box and a hope that I could get 1,000 photos (10 for each listing) could be completed in the first 8 hours.
Photos went fairly smooth and I completed all of them in under 8 hours so yay! I will say I may never recover from the smell of all the Goo Gone I had to use to remove all the price tag adhesive.
Then it was the “work” part. For me loading an Etsy listing is pure drudgery. It’s the “work” part of my job. Sitting at a computer loading a database is not fun. Still I had 16 hours and I felt confident that I could make it work
So optimistic in the beginning. Until my computer shut down. Twice.
No problem! I had the same photos on my phone on my phone just in case.
Then the app crashed three time. UGH!
Then my internet went down.
Oh lord why?!
Eventually, all the issues were overcome and I was posting like a champ. By the end of the first day (16 hours into my experiment) I had photographed all the piece and listed 41 of them.
The Last 8 Hours
The second day was grueling. I was so bored. I had the television on the whole time but I was still bored. The last day my internet was running very slow. If you watch the daily vlog below you’ll see the listing’s spooling while I was trying to upload.
In the end I reached 91 total listings when I hit the 24 hour mark. I did finish the full 100 that evening so my shop is in a better position. While I was posting three sales came through which was great and traffic to my Etsy store increased those two days and has stayed higher than my traffic was last year at this time.
If I was ever to something like this again, and I probably will next year around Q4, I will break the 24 hours into 3 days. 8 hours each day just so I can mitigate any boredom.
It was worth all the time to have my shop better positioned for the holiday season. Sales are already increasing. I keep reading Etsy’s trend reports to see if I have items that fit the searches that are trending.
What are your plans for positioning your shop for Q4? How are you preparing for the holiday shopping rush? Comment below and let me know! If you haven’t yet checked out my post on promoting your Etsy shop on and offline click here!
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~S
