Top Shop: Stats Analysis (part 2)

If you read my first top shop article on stats you already know how to use etsy stats and paypal to get a better look at how your shop is really doing. I have discovered yet another way to get a better idea of how you are doing. This time it is especially for your blogger blog and your facebook fanpage.

I had no idea that blogger had all this information readily available. Sign into blogger and look at the tabs under your blog name. The last tab on the right is called Stats. DUH! They have collected some great information there. You can see how many people have checked out your blog in the last day, week, and month. I found the most popular posts to be very helpful, it gave me a better idea of what people really like. Almost 500 people have come to read my DIY article on recycled art postcards. That is far and away the most views for any one of my articles.

Now lets talk about that Facebook fanpage. I know they send you some basic stuff in an email every week, and they have that cute little box of basic insights in the left-hand column of your page, but did you ever think to click on see more? I have never done that as I am assuming many of you have not either. It is full of useful info on who is frequenting your fanpage. Some of which could be very helpful in finding your demographic. While looking at the insights, I found out that the vast majority of people looking at my page were in their 30's to 40's and female. In fact, I had barely any male viewers at all! There were quite a few people who looked at my page but did not comment on my posts. I am hoping to change that shortly. I could use this information for facebook ads, which I am sure they would like, though I will likely use it to discuss topics that are closer to my audience's heart.

What do ya think? Were you surprised by any of the things you found out?

Top Shop: Organize your Space (Part 2)

If you want to read how the saga began, be sure to check out Day 1 here. And so we continue...

Now that the floor was (mostly) clear, and the room next door was filled with stuff, it was time to start finding places to put it. I came up with this idea to "display" my golf club covers and hats rather then store them away in boxes after a customer ordered something I had in stock and I proceeded to re-knit it, only to discover the item on completion. Not a huge deal, but certainly a waste of my time during the busy Christmas season.

When i did craft fairs this past year, I would hang this light weight plastic fencing from my tent and pin all of my club covers and hats to it for display. i have loads of extra, so i thought that would make a great bulletin board type way to hang things in my room. As you can see, i still have plenty of space left. I also took an old foam core sign and put it on my currently unused easel with pushpins to keep track of important papers. Note that it is blank, i have not gotten to that part yet.

Next was the stuff i have not used allot recently recently, but I am not ready to part with; my painting supplies. i was able to consolidate the mess and get everything into one cabinet. i stacked all the paintings in their respectively sized shelves, including those unfinished ones I left out in hopes it would remind me to get to work.

Still there was so much more to be looked through, and this was only the stuff that I DIDN'T use on a regular basis. The last cabinet I worked on that day was full of yarn, but not the yarn I use for my shop, this is my personal stash. It also houses my collection of knitting needles and unfinished projects collected in their individual bags. I decided that i was much better off stacking coloring books high up and making my yarn more accessible in hopes that I will get to use it more often. i also used a recently cleared chest of drawers to organize my total mess of knitting needles, scissors and random tools.

Fortunately, this was Friday, and I was able to get a nice relaxing weekend in before I would tackle the next day of work on "The Room". i discovered through this process that as usual, the areas that were the most out of control housed the things that were not mine at all, they belonged to my children. I made the mistake of keeping their art supplies in this room as well. But that challenge came on Monday.

Top Shop: Organize your Space (Part 1)

Can you believe this mess? How can anyone work in chaos like this? Yarn all over the floor, paintings leaning on the wall, bits of paper and candy strewn about. I had this room built so I could leave my art out in mid-project without fear of my children getting into it. What it became was a storage space where I go in, get what I need and leave; often throwing things in there when I am in a rush.

This January 1st, my New Year's promise to myself (because resolutions just don't work for me) was to organize this space in a way that would be usable. Just so you know, i am not organized OR neat by nature so this was going to be quite a challenge. And so the quest began...

Day one i took pictures of the mess. It was amazing I was able to get in to take pictures! My plan of attack was to get everything off the floor and in bags based on what is used together. There were bags of yarn, stacks of frames, finished and unfinished projects. At first it felt like I was moving garbage from one room to another; which is exactly what I was doing. However, as I moved it, i was sure to put it with its mates in either bags or stacks. I decided that there was no reason for empty frames to return to the room, so they were stacked in our storage space with old mirrors.

As you can see, there is a floor in this room. I even decided to change the painting on the wall on day 1 to bring a more positive vibe to the space; it is a basement for god sake!

Top Shop: Inventory at work

Now that I have a list of items that I make over and over on a fairly regular basis, i can start preparing in advance. So i sat down with my list of sales from the past year (check out stats analysis on how to do that) and made a list of all the colors of yarn I used for each one. Some used less, some more, but most had an overlap of one color or another. On the left you will find the names of many of the covers I knit. On the top, a list of the colors of yarns used in all the projects listed. i filled that chart with little checks.

What did I learn? Well I learned that I better stock up on tan because it is the number one color of choice. After that, the primaries and black and white. Now i know when yarn goes on sale, those are the colors I should definitely grab.

Top Shop: stats analysis

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.