On the 25th October 2020, exactly a year ago, I opened my Etsy store Botvinka Studio. Born from a classic case of pandemic hobby renaissance, it was supposed to be a way to get rid of heaps of masks and scrunchies I kept on producing. There came a point when everyone in my family including cats and toddlers were set for masks and scrunchies. I had no choice but to venture out into the world of the small business Etsy sellers. Read on if you’re interested in some insights I’ve put together from a year of data on running a business on Etsy.
📊 Results at a glance
In the period between 25th October 2020 and 25th October 2021, I’ve had:
- 6573 shop visits
- 252 listings sold
- 179 orders
- The average conversion rate of 2.7%, which is pretty standard.
Customers
In general, I’ve had 143 unique customers. 15 of them bought at Botvinka more than once. My absolute super star top customer has placed 10 orders for a total of 13 listings (you know who you are – thank you for your continued support! ❤️)
Top five cities people ordered from: Edinburgh (23), London (16), Glasgow (14), Dundee (13), Oxford (7).
Top five countries people ordered from: UK (160), US (6), Spain (6), Germany (3), France (2). In total I’ve shipped to 9 countries on 3 continents.
Purchasing behaviour
The average number of purchased listings per order (a listing can consist of a single item e.g. a mask, or a couple of items like a set of 3 scrunchies or a mask + a matching scrunchie) is 1.4. 74% of the time customers ordered one item at a time.
The most popular day to place an order was Sunday, followed by Friday and Thursday. The least amount of listings was purchased on Saturdays. This is based on the amount of orders for each weekday. However, the statistics for the number of listings sold differed slightly, which you can see in the graph below.
Products
🛍 Top 5 most most bought products:
- Hacker print face mask – 17 orders
- Reflective hi vis mask – 12 orders
- Celestial calculations face mask – 9 orders
- Sushi print mask – 9 orders
- Galaxy constellations mask – 7 orders
Conclusion? I need to invest more time and resources into sourcing the geekiest possible fabrics. In fact, I’ve already started:
A sneak peek of what’s coming to Botvinka next
🔎 Top 5 most viewed (visited) products:
- Reflective hi vis mask – 415 views
- Hacker print face mask – 235 views
- Circuit print face mask – 192 views
- Hacker masks mega set – 166 views
- Celestial calculations face mask – 163 views
❤️ Top 5 most favourited items:
- Reflective hi vis mask – 63 favourites
- Flaming heart earrings – 19 favourites
- Celestial eye print mask – 17 favourites
- Celestial calculations mask – 12 favourites
- Polish folk floral print set – 11 favourites
Traffic
As I mentioned already, Botvinka had 6573 visits in the past 12 months. 42% of them were brought by Etsy and 58% by me.
Out of the visits I’ve driven, 1292 came from Twitter, 110 from Instagram, 62 from LinkedIn and 41 from Facebook – so there’s a clear leader. It is not surprising as I have not done much advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn, however the Instagram number could ideally be higher, given the amount of time I spend creating and posting content on there.
Among the social media traffic the most popular product to click on was the Rick and Morty printed mask. However, this will obviously be dependent on which products I’ve had posted on social media the most, how often, etc. I did not control for this so not much can be inferred from this apart from maybe that there are some folk on Twitter who are really into Rick and Morty.
When it comes to Etsy-brought visits, the most popular search terms were botvinka studio, bona, feminist face mask and celestial mask. I have no idea what ‘bona’ means and why it directs people to my shop; if you do, please do let me know.
An interesting outlier to all of the above is the traffic brought in from search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). where an unquestionable leader was the Highland cow print face mask – a gorgeous (in my opinion) pattern which haven’t been that popular among the customer though.
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If I was to decide on what’s the best thing about running Botvinka, it must be the happiness I get from seeing people rocking and loving their masks. Click here to see some of Twitter posts my lovely customers have made. Thank you to each one of you for choosing Botvinka and here’s to another successful year 🥂
Kinga
Kinga Kieczkowska // #tech #dfir #infosec 