Reviewing International Etsy Stores: Spotlight on HMgrafikerteam
What's up guys? So today we're reviewing International Etsy stores, and these are stores outside of the United States. What we're going to do is go through what the stores are doing well, what are things they can improve upon, and then what could they do in order to grow their sales beyond what they already have.
So starting here with HMgrafikerteam.
Alright, uh, 71 listings is really good—that's a good starter point. Good number of sales; you've obviously been taking care of your customers over here with speedy replies. Being a star seller gets you higher in search rankings. If I was making a critique, I would recommend simplifying the logo to just the H&M. That gives a lot more focus on that, so it's more distinctive, because from a distance, it's tough to see what that thumbnail is.
Do use this header, which you're doing excellently—that's great! If you guys are ever looking to make headers, you can use things like Canva and other sorts of items to create these things. But what are the products we've got?
Ah, multicolored name scapes and pencil holders and that kind of stuff. Oh, these are cool! Very good photography for the most part. Like this is a really, really good product photo right here. Let me get that up where folks can see it a little bit better. Uh, but that's a really good product photo because you have really good contrast around the outer edges, but it's nicely prominent right there. This could be improved, or you need to change your product photo because I don't know what that item is from that preview image.
So either make sure that your home photo inside of the listing is square. And yeah, this just seems to have some limited photos. Do make sure that you have about five photos for each product listing, and they can be simple, like just around the outer edge. But do make sure that you take one photo that is perfectly square so that when you get to these thumbnails, they're not cropped off because it's an excellent picture, but the thumbnails make them look rough.
Uh, because Etsy is jacking with you. Etsy should update themselves to show the full photo, but then they would end up with white space above here, and it would mess with the look of their site, so they probably won't. These photos are okay, but they are kind of out of place with how good these ones down here are. I mean, they're fine, but your store just isn't very cohesive, so I would recommend having the same photo style for most of them.
Inside the product listing itself, like we say, take a square photo of them all. This is a good product photo; I mean, it shows contrast, shows what the item is, shows it very honestly. So since these are 3D printed parts, you can see the layer lines on a few of them, and that kind of stuff, and that's good so that people aren't surprised by what you're going to get.
What are the options we have here? Oh, excellent pricing by letter! At first, I thought you might have been a little bit too low priced, but no, that is a good way of doing it. And about 15 bucks for that—that's pretty good pricing. You could probably go all the way up to—oh, you do price at 19 on sale. Good! You guys do want to use sales whenever you can because sales can not only put it on sale so people want to buy more, but every time you put an item on sale, all your followers are notified of it on Etsy.
So it's kind of like an email ping that, hey, this item is still available. So if they had followed and liked it in the past for like a birthday in the future, if you remind them on the regular, then they will be able to go and purchase it when they're actually ready to purchase. It's a custom item. Custom items are kind of tough to scale up, but they're scale up in that if somebody ordered a hundred of them from you tomorrow, your lead times would extend a really long time.
Um, also, I would recommend putting videos into this. I know that these aren't very videograph items, but videos will really help because Etsy can then promo these on TikTok for you. And for these items, like these pin cups, it is easy to do videos because you can drop some pins in there and do some really good stuff.
Good number of photos, good outline of what the item is—all good stuff. Okay, um, as far as other improvements and ways to grow the store, obviously you've gone into wall decals before, which are a good way of expanding out your products. And yeah, you're going for kind of the gamer motif; that's all good. A good number of products are here.
Okay, this is interesting. Why is this one so expensive? Is this large? Is this a really large item? Doesn't look too much large. I'm curious as to why this is so much more expensive than the multicolored names.
Um, 16 cm across, so about yay big or so. Interesting. I'm curious to see why. I would expect this isn't common, but I would generally expect something like this to be in the $20 to maybe $30 range normally because I'm curious as to how that would be, why it's priced differently than the multicolored item, which is more effort. It may just not sell very regularly, so it hasn't gotten that attention.
Um, but other than that, oh yeah, more decals—that's good. The decals may or may not have worked for him.
Okay, well, other ways of growing. Right now you're focused on the multicolored prints because, yes, they're absolutely the thing that is getting the most sales for sure.
Okay, so obviously you want to, with multicolored, if you wanted to expand to more listings, that could create like a version of this. You could do single colors and then you could plug them into like our plugin, and then that would give you US distribution. We don't do multicolor right now, so that is a challenge. But if you could create a single color version of these that's kind of targeted towards the US market, you wouldn't have to put in more printers; you would get free shipping to the United States for those items because it's produced here inside the United States.
So that is a way to easily expand if you just want to add more products and add more reach by adding more audience rather than being restricted to Germany, I believe. It's Germany, um, yes, Germany.
Um, you would have the entire United States as well and Canada and Mexico, of course. Uh, so your customers there get them cheaper, more quickly—not have to ship across an ocean, so there's benefit there. The other ways of expanding—this looks like you've got a really good batch of items, uh, as it is already, so I don't want to make too many tweaks to it. But the multicolor does restrict you because since they're custom items, they're a little bit rough.
What you might do is go through the store and instead of creating the options for custom names, just go through and start creating all the names. A way to do this is you can go into OpenSCAD and use ChatGPT to write OpenSCAD docs for you, and then it could create these types of custom items from text for you.
And it's a really good way to create many different variations of the same item, and that way you can also have 500 listings that can all link to each other. And then you have like a listing for Dan and a listing for Ben and a listing for whatever, or inside the single listing, just have all those names listed out. That way you can get a lot more options without people having to put in custom options, and then you have the file ready to go and you don't have to create it each time. So it can also be less effort that way and is an easy way to grow. That way you can also ship more quickly.
Uh, right now how long does it take for these items to arrive? Uh, about a two to three-week lead time—that's quite a bit. Uh, this is obviously international shipping. CU, I'm here in the United States.
Uh, another thing you might be able to do is give free shipping. Free shipping pushes your items up in search again, so integrate that cost into the cost of the item itself, and then your free shipping can go out there, and then you will get more sales. Customers won't have to make as many decisions, and Etsy will like you more. Free shipping is a really "all people win" kind of a situation.
But other than that, this looks like a pretty darn good store. Congratulations on the success! 400 sales is really, really great. Um, but yeah, if you want to upscale it a little bit, I would say make the photos a little bit more cohesive, make sure they're not cropped by creating square versions of them. And then if you want to expand it out, consider single color options that can be printed through like a print-on-demand plugin like ours. You can just plug into your store, upload a file, and then when somebody orders it, we print and ship it to their customer for you.
Um, so that's a way to expand to the US without having international shipping. And then instead of having people spell out a name, just create a lot of name variations. Start with the top 10 most common names by Google in it, and then just create those listings, and that will reduce the amount of work for you. But other than that, great job!
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