My shop is a total mess. Why you may ask? because I was ill prepared for the rush of the holiday season. I could easily have looked at the sales trends leading up to thanksgiving and at the very least made a few extra of my biggest selling items. To prevent that tragedy again, I am checking out all my stats for the last year and taking advantage of the downtime.
I started at Etsy. Etsy provides all the stats you need to know what you have been selling. Go to your sold orders page and scroll all the way down to the bottom. click on the link to download the CSV. This will create a Excel chart with all the data etsy has collected on your sales. Sadly, you must do that for each page, but it is nice that the info is so readily available. I am on Mac so mine opens in a program called Numbers, very similar to Excel.
Once you have collected all the information, you can organize it based on a number of criteria. I started with sorting my sales by date, then by title (to view how many of the same item i sold), and lastly by price. You can print out these chats if you wish or just look them over on your computer.
As you can see, I had quite a busy December, but it is hard to see what sold most over the course of the year from this chart. When i sort by title (column B) I could see that I sold more Yoda golf club covers then any other item. It would have been smart for me to make a few in advance during the quiet months. When I sorted it by price, i was quite pleased to see that my golf club covers at $27 sold more then many of my lower priced items, and that the price increase did not effect my sales.
The next stop for me was Paypal. I do all of my transactions through paypal. It protects my shop and my customers from fraud, plus i can print shipping labels with postage calculated right there. To download your chart from paypal, go to your account overview and click on view all transactions. On that screen, you can select the dates you wish to see, say Jan 1, 2010 to Dec 31, 2010. When the chart is complete, click on Download CSV on the upper right side of the chart. Again, you can open this in Excel or Numbers and sort in a bunch of ways.
The Paypal chart i sorted differently then the Etsy chart. This time I sorted only by Type, to seperate incoming and outgoing transactions. This chart made it easy to see how much i spend on postage and fees, and how much I am actually bringing in at the end of the day.
What did I learn from all this? Well, first i learned that numbers are not so scary, the computer did all the work for me. i also learned that this is a VERY important thing to do more then once a year. Had i done this in September, i would not have been so ill prepared for the holiday rush.
What did I learn from all this? Well, first i learned that numbers are not so scary, the computer did all the work for me. i also learned that this is a VERY important thing to do more then once a year. Had i done this in September, i would not have been so ill prepared for the holiday rush.
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