Hey @Scooby Doo first I want to say congratulations!!!
When my daughter started her store, she had just had her son. She went back to work after her maternity leave for 3 months before deciding she just didn't want to be away from him for as long as she was. They did offer her part time work but the least they wanted her to work was 25 hrs a week and with traffic that would be around 30 hours. She just wanted to make enough to pay for groceries to be honest. Neither she nor her husband were expecting what a success it would be within her first 6 months. Her first year in business, after taxes she made a substantially more than her old job. I think it was around $15k more.
I want to warn you though, owning your own business is not a walk in the park. If your life gets busy or you have stuff going on, you cannot slack off. If you get irate customers Etsy does not play. They will shut you down. She got the idea for an Etsy store from a friend who had one. Her friend later went through a tough period when she found out her husband was cheating on her. She was stunned and in shock and just couldn't function for a good 2 weeks and she didn't answer emails or send out any packages for a little over 2 weeks and Etsy would not allow her to take money for 4 months. Her store was still opened but her views went from about 500 a day to about 5. While she could technically still sell stuff she wouldn't receive that money until her 4 month waiting period was up. I just wanted you to know that.
My daughter got a Dyno printer to print USPS labels and that goes through Etsy. Not the printer but the USPS. At first she used her regular printer but that is a pain especially when you start to get a good amount of orders. With the Dyno printer she can just click each of the labels that are going out and it prints them all at once. She just puts in the weight and whether it is a padded envelope (which is what she uses) or box and what size box it is. She orders her padded envelopes and boxes through a vendor on Amazon and Mailers USA. When she started her store, this was one of the things she didn't think of at first and when she started getting quite a bit of orders she took one whole weekend to search for the cheapest. She gets bright pink padded envelopes because it went with her "brand" which she started to establish a little later. Those things can get expensive so it is in your best interest to really do an extensive search to find where you get your supplies. You want to be very sure to find the lowest prices with supplies like this (including bubble wrap if needed, etc..) because those things add up quickly and of course take away from your profit. Now of course with priority, she gets those at the post office and when she drops off packages she makes sure to get plenty of priority boxes and envelopes so she is covered. I can't tell you how many times in the beginning where I was helping her package stuff and we realized we were out of boxes or envelopes. It really stinks having to take the merchandise to the post office and have to do that there. She takes a daily inventory of those now so she doesn't have to worry about that.
She did set up a different bank account for her store. That is necessary in keeping everything separate and especially with taxes, you don't want to intermingle those at all.
Her husband works in computers so he helped her set up a lot of stuff. He helped her make up Thank You cards and other cards that needed to go into mailers like cards that explained how to apply the decals, how to care for cups/tumblers. You can order that type of stuff from printers, but again you want to keep those costs down. She just presses a button to print those off and buys card stock to print them on. How you package your products is important. People notice the care that you take. Many of her over 3,000 reviews (she has 4.9/5 favorable reviews) comment on how nicely package her products are and how cute the packaging is. I have not only noticed those comments on her reviews but other Etsy reviews too. People notice that. You don't want to be resending items because something broke during shipping.
One thing also that she started to get really good at was taking pictures of her product. The difference between a good picture of your product and a great one makes a big difference in your sales. She had a nice camera but believe it or not she uses her Iphone a lot of the time. You need good light and she uses a room that has lots of natural light and even has a table set up for shooting. She bought rolls of different color paper including white and uses that table with the paper as back ground. She keeps that up all of the time because she is constantly taking pictures of new products along with different colors of the same product. I don't know the name of it but she bought one of those large round light reflectors, one side white and the other foil. I can't tell you how many times I am sitting there listening to her direction of where to hold it as she shoots the product. This is one thing she learned AFTER she started and she actually took a couple photography classes after she started so she could learn more because she noticed a lot of other vendors had really great pictures and she didn't feel hers were on that level. As an example of what she learned that front lighting de-emphasizes texture while below, above or side lighting emphasizes it. She picked up lots of tips in those classes. I cannot tell you enough how much the photo of your products make a difference. We look at pictures of her products she took before her classes when she started her store and after and the difference is huge. Once she started taking those classes, the money she made and the views she started getting was significantly more.
Another thing you want to do is along with the pics is to write down as much as you can describing the product. She makes sure to include measurements both length, width, etc.... Despite doing this there will always be the occasional bone head who orders and leaves a bad review for something that was very clearly in the description. Here is an example my daughter just told me yesterday when I was there. She was reading a review someone wrote for a vinyl monogram. Very clearly on the description it says 3 inch monogram and the person wrote I love the way it looks but I was expecting it to be bigger. Duh, she gave height, length and width in the description. You not only inform the customer with your description but you also cover yourself. That was clearly their fault and she wrote them back at their personal email telling them that the measurement was in the description and the buyer apologized.
Finally there are things you will not be able to foresee until you just get started. That is unavoidable. What I have mentioned is just some little stuff and really the bare minimum. I will try to think of more things and even talk to my daughter and ask her if there is anything she can think of. I hope this will help in some small way and most of all good luck and congratulations and enjoy it!!
Oh, she does not insure her packages. She does not have the type of expensive inventory that would require that. I do know that even some girls who do have jewelry do not either unless it is over a certain amount.
Also thank you to @dooBdoo
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
JFK
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