What is a Good Conversion Rate on Etsy?

Reading time: 12 minutes

Confused about the what, where, why, and how’s of having a good conversion rate on Etsy? Well, then hello! I’m Kim; you may know me from eRank’s Facebook community. I’ve noticed that questions about conversion rates come up often in our group. I run four Etsy shops which have a range of conversion rates. More about that later but first, let’s cover some basics.

Q: What is a conversion rate on Etsy?

A: Your conversion rate is the percentage of visits to your shop that result in a sale. Put another way: your conversion rate reflects the number of sales you get per 100 visits to your Etsy shop.

Q: How do you calculate it?

A: It’s the number of sales divided by your number of visits, then multiplied by 100 to arrive at a percent. (Percent is Latin for “per 100.”) For example, if your shop had 5 sales in a month and received 200 visits, your conversion rate would be 2.5%. (5 divided by 200, then multiplied by 100). Here’s the formula:

Number of sales ÷ number of visits x 100 = your conversion rate

Etsy does this work for you, and so does eRank. Etsy provides your shop conversion rate. On eRank you can see the conversion rate of any active listing. Let’s take a look at eRank first.

Q: Where are listing conversion rates shown in eRank?

A: In eRank, you can find the conversion rate for any product listing that’s active. From the Main Menu, select Listings, then Active Listings.

Click on any product title or just hit that orange Listing Audit button. Doing so will generate a new page about that listing, as shown in the sample below. In the top row of the Listing Statistics section, you will see “Est. Conversion Rate.” (Note that this is your listing conversion rate, not your shop conversion rate.)

Q: Where on Etsy do I find my shop conversion rate?

A: Go to Shop Manager, select Stats from the side menu, and then specify a time frame. You can view data for any given time period – per year, month, week, yesterday’s or you can select a custom range of your choice.

Conversion rates on Etsy vary!

In the past year, the four Etsy shops I run have had conversion rates ranging from 1.4% (printable art) to 4.8% (tools for Etsy sellers). But what is typical for Etsy sellers? First, let’s look at the latest industry average available. According to drop-shipping app Oberlo:

“… as of April 2021, average conversion rates across ecommerce businesses was at 2.12 percent, falling slightly from the previous month. It was also a 0.19 percentage point fall from the previous year.”

Oberlo, Average Ecommerce Conversion Rate [Jun 2021 Update]

And if we go to straight to the source, here’s what Etsy has to say, albeit derived from less recent (2019) data:

While the global average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is 2.9% (including a wide range of larger online retailers)*, a “good” conversion rate on Etsy looks different for every shop, and varies significantly across categories and price points. In general, sellers should expect a conversion rate between 1–5%.

*Via Monetate’s Q2 2019 Ecommerce Benchmark Report.

**Based on internal analysis of Etsy orders in 2019.

Etsy Seller Handbook, How to Get the Most Out of Your Shop Stats

Why are conversion rates important?

Conversion impacts revenue

If you can increase conversion even by a small amount, you increase the revenue you get for the same amount of work you do to attract visitors to your shop. (Revenue being the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods.) Therefore, if conversion rates for Etsy shops range from 1-5%, let’s imagine the following scenario. It’s exaggerated to better demonstrate how impactful conversion is on revenue.

Let’s say there are five Etsy shops. Every product is priced $1000. Each customer buys one item per visit. For every 100 visits to each shop:

The shop with the highest conversion rate (Shop E) makes five times the revenue as the shop with the lowest conversion rate (Shop A). Now, we all know that a lot of time, effort, and money goes into driving traffic to your shop. So, you’d need to factor in that investment. But this illustrates how improving your conversion rate by what sounds like a small amount (e.g., 1%) can have quite a significant impact on your revenue.

Conversion helps you gain keyword “authority”

The goal of Etsy’s search engine is to find the most authoritative, the most relevant sources to match the shopper’s query. Each time you make a sale with a given keyword, it signals to Etsy’s algorithm your listing is “good” for that keyword. Your listing gains authority. While you might not be able to rank high for a broad keyword due to too much competition (e.g., pet art), you might be able to find a niche and dominate that keyword (e.g., personalized pet ferret art).

Help! Many of my listings haven’t sold!

Your shop is not hurt by having listings that haven’t converted yet. In most Etsy shops, the bulk of sales come from a small percentage of listings. That said, if your listing hasn’t generated sales, over time it will rank lower and lower in search results. (This is measured by eRank’s Visibility Score. I’ll link a good article about that and how to use it under Resources.) Therefore, if your listing renews once or twice without selling, you might want to look at revamping it – changing photos, keywords, etc.

You might have a listing that has lots of visits but no conversions. This might indicate there’s something that needs to be revised. Or it might mean customers are landing on that listing but buying something else in your shop. Personally, I leave those listings alone (or A/B test). Instead, I focus on revising listings I think have potential but have both low views and no sales.

But hang on: do you even have enough data yet to assess conversion rates effectively?

When I opened my first Etsy shop, I spent hours looking at my stats and worrying about daily visits and favorites. I was seeking feedback for all of my hard work. But looking back, I now know that was a waste of time and energy. It’s not just that Etsy’s same-day visit/view information is inaccurate. Mainly, it’s that analyzing one day’s or week’s worth of visits is meaningless for most Etsy shop owners. There just isn’t enough data yet. Visits, views, and sales build over time. Without enough sales history, your conversion rates aren’t statistically significant.

What is statistical significance?

Statistical significance occurs when you’ve had enough sales/visits history to establish that the ratio of sales to visits isn’t random, but predictable. In general, the more visits you’ve had to your shop, the more reliable your data is. I wouldn’t be thinking formally about my conversion rates until I’d had thousands of views. Why wait? Because conversion rates based on too few views can be misleading. Here’s an example that works at the shop or listing level:

On the 15th visit, you get your first sale. Woo-hoo! Your conversion rate is 6.7 percent. That’s amazing! But wait. On the 55th visit you get the next sale, so now your conversion rate is 3.6%. Hmm … On the 75th visit, you get another sale and now your conversion rate is 4%. By 150 visits, you’ve had no additional sales, and your conversion has fallen to 2%.

With this number of visits, the stat isn’t meaningful. But let’s say you had that 2% conversion rate after 500 visits. If the same pattern continued, the conversion rates after each sale would be 2.1%, 2.2%, 2.3%, and back to 2% by the 650th visit. The less random and more repeatable your results become, the more statistically significant they are.

If you’re thinking, “Boo! I wasted my time reading this since I don’t have enough visits to my shop,” hang on! Even if you don’t have a lot of visits yet, there are plenty of things you can do to influence conversion.

How do I increase my conversion rate?

Listings

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The better targeted your keywords and tags are, the more your listing will appear in relevant search results. To improve your aim at your target market, use search terms Etsy shoppers are currently using. This is where using eRank’s Keyword Explorer can give you a competitive advantage. Just enter a broad keyword. All the keywords in the Related Searches table are search terms Etsy shoppers have typed into Etsy’s search bar. And a glance at the keyword’s trend graph shows you both current search volume and for the past 15 months.

Conversion and ranking are correlated. You need visits to convert, and in order to get visits, your listing needs to rank high in search results. The more targeted visits you can drive to your shop, the more sales you’ll get.

Targeted keywords will help you get found, and rank. But you need to have other strengths in order to maintain that ranking over time. With more listings, customer interactions, and sales activity, Etsy will better understand your shop and drive more qualified traffic there. (I’ll have more about “qualified traffic” in just a bit.)

Product photos

Once you appear on the first few pages in search, your main (thumbnail) photos are the next key driver of traffic. If customers don’t click on your listing, it can’t sell.

Listing Titles

Make sure your titles contain your superstar keywords, are easy for customers to understand, and are free of errors. Look at how your listings appear on different devices, because listing titles are truncated on some devices. So lead with your strongest keyword phrases.

Analyze the competitive landscape

Assess demand

You can’t sell what no one is buying. eRank’s keyword tools are useful to ascertain what customers are looking for. If no one is searching for your product (your keywords), then your item won’t convert.

Market saturation

Niches are becoming harder to find on Etsy because of the sheer number of shops. According to Marketplace Pulse, in June 2021 the number of active Etsy sellers was 5.23 million. That is up 67% year-over-year from 3.14 million.

As Etsy sellers, we are all looking for the holy grail: areas with high search volume and low competition. Yes, you need to assess the competitive landscape when choosing how to invest your time. That said, don’t be afraid to compete. You’re here on eRank reading this, and you’re learning. Which means you are already ahead of a lot of the competition.

Price

Pricing your item well affects conversion. Now, pricing well doesn’t mean pricing low. If you are having trouble converting views to sales, pricing is one area you could review. Here is where eRank’s Keyword Tool really shines. It will show you the top 100 listings found in Etsy search for any keyword you specify. You can see what competitors are charging for comparable products. Then you can experiment with raising or lowering your prices in response.

Understand and drive traffic

Seasonality

Seasonal fluctuations in buyer behavior and shop traffic are normal. Most find their first quarter and summer are quiet, while fourth quarter is their busiest. If you anticipate and plan for these seasonal ebbs and flows, you won’t panic when lower conversion rates happen.

Some eRank PRO tools I find useful for gauging this are the Competitor tracking tools. When I feel like things have been slowing down, I take a peek at my competition. I track a curated group of shops. They are in the same category as mine, have a similar rate of sales, and comparable pricing/quality. I also track some top sellers. For one of my shops, the top seller pretty consistently sells 10 times what I do in a given week. So I watch that ratio as well. Most of the time, when my sales are slow, so are theirs.

A fair number of shop owners drive their own traffic through social media. When shop conversion rates come up in eRank’s Facebook group, some report rates 10% or higher for a given month. That is exceptionally high for Etsy – or for online sales in general. If they’re converting at 10%+, they are driving qualified traffic to their Etsy shop from other sources. “Qualified traffic” arrives at a shop having already shown interest in its products elsewhere. Accordingly, these shoppers tend to be more motivated to purchase.

Repeat Business

Developing repeat business increases purchase intent. That is, the probability that a shopper will buy. And return to buy from your shop specifically. To get customers to come back, make sure your customer service is on point. Have good policies, clear communication, and meet deadlines.