I have had an Etsy store for about a year now, and I recently decided I should make more of an effort to sell here again. I spin and hand dye wool and alpaca fibres into yarn for knitting and other fibre arts. I have had some sales, but the response was not as great as I had hoped, so I lost interest for a number of months.
I will not ever make a fortune selling yarn, the time it takes to create one skein (one unwound ball) of wool can range from 3-6 hours. That means I may make $5 an hour if I am lucky. However, this is a hobby I enjoy, so my goal is to support my hobby by earning enough for more supplies. I also like to knit, and sometimes I can sell enough yarn to allow me to purchase other specific yarns (something I can't spin for example) for a project or two.
My goal for the store is to boost my sales in the next two months. Items on Etsy are posted chronologically (the newest items first), so if you do not sell new items on a regular basis your items get further and further down the list of similar items. I am going to try to post one new skein of yarn each week and drive new people to my site, where they may mark me as a favourite and come back more often. One skein a week is not be an unreasonable goal, especially since my grandmother is also spinning for me and I have several skeins almost ready to go.
I offer free shipping to the US and Canada too, which is an incentive for people to buy my yarn. Sometimes shipping costs can be expensive, even for lightweight yarn. I factor the shipping costs into the yarn and then find the cheapest shipping method possible. Most yarns have arrived within 7 days of shipping by this method, even to the US.
Etsy is an amazing concept. I tried a craft fair last year with not much luck. Etsy promotes handmade goods to a much broader audience than ever would have been possible before, and is very simple to start yourself. The costs for posting are 20 cents to post, and 3.5% commission on sales. On a $20 item that works out to 90 cents to Etsy, not unreasonable at all.
Dropped by to say hi! I congratulate you on your path to financial health and the steps you've taken to achieve this goal. One of the goals of PF bloggers (yours truly included) is to figure out concepts for a side business. Well, it looks like you already have one! Small steps first but good luck to you on bringing it back! You're on my blogroll as well!