Reflecting on 2009

This kind of goes along with my last post. I found a forum post with questions about your etsy shop in 2009 and I thought it'd be good to answer them and looks at statistics of my shop.

New Items

I can't remember every item I listed this year, but I estimated about 60 of my items were listed this year. This was actually my first full year on Etsy. Some new items I listed:

Heart Shaped Zebra Print Card



Postcards from Europe Coptic Stitch Journal



This Little Piggy Bank



Visitors

Looking at my Google Analytics, my Etsy shop got 8,880 visits and 18,874 pageviews in 2009. Most people visited 2.13 pages and spent about 2 minutes on the site. Most visitors are returning visitors. I sold 22 items this year (about half on Etsy and half from craft shows).

I only kept track of statistics for this blog since the middle of the year, but it's got about 1,500 visits and 4,500 pageviews. Most people visit 3 pages. A good thing about the blog is it has a really low bounce rate, which means people actually read my blog and don't just leave the website quickly (the bounce rate is a lot higher in my shop). Most people spend 2 minutes on my blog.

Top Referrers

It's important to look at referrers because it shows where people found your shop from. The top traffic referrers to my site were Google, Twitter, StumbleUpon, this blog and LinkReferral. Some other sites that brought a lot of people were the Craftcult page, the EtsyVeg team blog and Craftster.org.

It's nice to see Twitter is helpful. Even though people don't stay as long as people who might read about a feature of my shop on a blog would, it still helps bring traffic. I did pay advertising on StumbleUpon. It got me a lot of visitors, but most people didn't stay that long and just sort of clicked off the site. I always like seeing that my blog is helpful because I probably put the most effort in to that.

For this blog, most people came from Blogger, Google or Etsy. That makes sense, even though I was surprised that more people came from Blogger than from Etsy (it could be people who are following me reading my blog through their Blogger page). Twitter was also helpful in bringing in traffic. I also noticed images.google.com brought me 76 visitors, which is good because it means my photos are showing up in Google's image search.

Most Viewed Items

These items were viewed the most this year:

Black and White Faces in Crowd Greeting Card



Little Gold Crinkled Address Book



Oversized Envelope Sketch Book



Hearts

I received 175 hearts this year. I couldn't figure out how to see how many items were hearted the most this year, but altogether, these items have the most hearts:

Blue and Gold Marbled Journal



Little Golden Tree Bark Address Book



Rewards

One of the questions was what part of running my business was the most rewarding and what did I dislike the most.

It's always rewarding for me to make items and list them. I experimented with new items this year (e.g. making a heart and snowflake shape journal, making collage style cards and journals). I like hearing feedback about my items and seeing what people like. It was also rewarding to blog, use twitter more, start a mailing list, do my first craft show and get my items in another shop.

There's not a lot I dislike about running my shop. There were periods this year when I didn't get a lot of sales and those can be discouraging when you put a lot of work in to something and nothing's selling. It was also frustrating to try new types of advertising (some paid) and not seeing effective results.

If you have a shop, feel free to use this format to make a post in your blog (or in the comments) to write about reflections in your shop.