My Etsy Shop Made 1,000 Sales!

I’m SO excited to share that my Etsy shop, Bitter Lemon Digital, made its 1,000th sale last night!

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter how many sales my Etsy shop makes, but the shop has come such a long way, and I’m always recognizing the small wins (and the milestones).

This is actually my second Etsy Shop. The first one I started sold physical items that I made and shipped. While I enjoyed having that one, it was very difficult to keep up with orders; shipping them was stressful, and I don’t think I was making much of a profit.

So, I closed it and opened my current shop, which sells digital-only products. This means I only have to make one product, but I can sell it an infinite number of times, and it’s emailed instead of dealing with shipping.

This makes things so much easier, and outside factors (such as shipping) rarely affect the shop.

But that doesn’t mean growing the shop and reaching 1,000 sales was necessarily easy. While I’ve had the shop open for five years, I didn’t make many sales until late 2022 and into 2023.

While Etsy is a platform that supports small businesses, it’s also a search engine. This means that when a seller posts a new item, it has to compete (digitally-speaking) with thousands — maybe millions — of other items.

The two main things I did to start seeing more sales were: 1. Creating a lot of listings, and 2. Utilizing all of the tools Etsy offers.

Creating listings takes a lot of time. Of course, you’ve got to create the item you’re going to sell, then take pictures of it, and actually create and publish the listing.

I currently have 200 listings in the shop! It took me a very long time to get that many; although I have ideas for hundreds more, it happens one listing at a time.

I did a lot of research to figure out how to be “successful” on Etsy so that the listings would succeed. You know all of the articles you see on Pinterest? Those were the ones I was reading, writing down their tips, and putting them to use.

And it worked! I made videos for each listing, wrote descriptions, and researched keywords.

Of course, there’s more to running a successful shop than just having items to sell and knowing how to satisfy a search engine, but those were two things that changed the course of my business.

I’m really grateful for everyone that’s visited the shop, purchased something, or left a review. All of it means so much!

Not only do I enjoy creating the items for the shop — it’s all so colorful, fun, and different from the joy that writing brings me — but I also love seeing what people buy.

The part of the shop that I didn’t expect is hearing from customers. Whether it’s via reviews or messages, customers are SO creative in how they choose to use the items.

They use them in their planners, gift them to friends and family, frame them in their homes, and use them at work. I love it so much!

So, to celebrate my 1,000 sales, the ENTIRE shop is 15% off!

Thank you, as always, for your support 🙂