It is no lie that Christmas is not my favorite holiday. That honor falls to Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, my chainmail does not lend itself well to Thanksgiving decorations, although, I do keep threatening to make a chainmail cornucopia complete with chainmail fruits and vegetables. Maybe one day, but today I am getting my shop ready for Christmas, Yule, Kwanzaa, etc.
Halloween is pretty much over when it comes to mail order. Anything you would ship out right now would be hard pressed to get to someone by the weekend. So, it is time to start changing some of your items out for the Christmas holiday season. I set up a section just for holiday items. That helps me to organize them along with making it easier for people to find them in my shop.
Etsy frowns on people using certain tags during the holiday season. They do not like for you to tag your items "Christmas Gift" or "Stocking Stuffer" even if they are perfect for that. So, one way to get around this is to put those terms in your title and most certainly in your description. No, Etsy does not look at your description but Google most certainly does. You know who else looks at your descriptions? Your customers.
The description should convey the many uses of your item. Using it as a stocking stuffer is something that perhaps your customer had not thought of and that might be what puts them into the buying mode. When writing your description be sure to use action words and phrases. "Put this in your loved ones stocking this Christmas." has much more weight than "Makes a great stocking stuffer." It calls the customer to the action of putting it in the stocking. It is subtle but it works.
For the next couple of weeks I will be talking about ways to increase your holiday traffic and ways to convert that that traffic into sales. If you have suggestions please feel free to share them. If you have questions ask! Let's make this holiday season the best that it can be.
You know, this post brings to mind a question I have with my descriptions. As a writer, I have found that the more specific I am, the more vivid the writing. But I've been wondering whether my descriptions get too specific.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I would never write "put this into your loved-one's stocking," because it's still too general--from a writer's point of view. But I wonder whether saying something like, "This would be perfect for the gift exchange at the office party," is just a way of giving an reason to anyone NOT shopping for the office party to reject my beautiful item and move on. Thoughts?