Etsy showcase - does it work?

[spmamma]

I recently opened my Etsy shop : and have been looking for ways to drive traffic to my store. Does anyone have any experience with purchasing a showcase slot? Did it drive traffic to your shop and increase sales?

Thanks for your insights!

[spmamma]

bump...

Anyone?

[Molliejo]

I do showcases regularly. I really think that is what helped me get my foot in the door. That is a pretty unpopular opinion on Etsy, but it has worked for me so far.

However, I only do the main showcase. I usually do Thursdays or Fridays. I have never done a weekend showcase b/c I figure that's when people are out and about and away from their computers.

[savannah smiles]

I'm recently opened an Etsy store but I spent about a month poring over information and reading the forums there beforehand. The general feeling I get from sellers there is that showcases aren't worth the money and that they may lead to more people looking at your stuff but not more sales. I don't know how many items are in your shop but a common piece of advice is to work on adding items to a new store (thus keeping your stuff in the first few pages of a search) until your first page is full and *then* promoting via showcases and the like.

I don't think there's a wrong or right way and what works for one person's shop won't for another so maybe doing a showcase and seeing what difference it makes in your store.

Good luck!

[fek&fuzz]

Another estsy question: when you register, is your user name your store name? Should it be? Or can you make a different store name after you sign up?

[savannah smiles]

Originally Posted by fek&fuzz

Another estsy question: when you register, is your user name your store name? Should it be? Or can you make a different store name after you sign up?

You can make your store name anything you want but the user name you register with will be what your store address is. For example, my shop is called Pony Pretties but I was a buyer before I was a seller and used bergen74 for my username. Thus, my shop address is: bergen74.etsy.com.

If I had a shop idea before I had signed up, I would have made it something different. You can't change your user name once you have it.

[brightonwoman]

Ditto--I've heard that showcases are pretty much a waste of money .
One thing I DO recommend is joining the MDC etsy street team (PM me for details!) we are planning on going in together to buy some advertizing here on MDC this fall probably, possibly also a print ad in the actual magazine. We also have a team blog with everyone's links on it and it gets quite a lot of traffic--all the team members here who have advertizing siggies put the link in their sig, so even people like me who can't affort the ad sig can still benefit because i'm on the blog. I just try to send people there other ways since I can't do it this way.

As for usernames, Savannah smiles is correct, your username will be your shop address, so I STRONGLY recommend making it your shop name, or at least some variation on it. My original username was davejenni1203 and after two years I just recently deleted it. i'd been switching things over to a different shop for some time, and finally had built up some feedback on the new shop so I deleted the old one. If you have a funky (not easy to remember) username, or your username is different from your shop name, and ESPECIALLY if you don't have a ton of feedback yet, i think it's worth the trouble to start over. If people can remember your shop name/address that's a really good thing for sales!!!

[fek&fuzz]

Cool, thanks!