Another Bird Necklace Pendant | Etsy Tips For Your Jewelry Business

The 20 cent strategy for getting your handmade jewelry pieces noticed on Etsy.com:

Yesterday I wrote about a popular trend to do with polymer clay bird pendant jewelry. Today I would like to talk more about how to use Etsy to conduct online research for your hand made jewelery making business.

Plus I thought it would be fun to show another of my 'Little Green Bird' pendants in a completely different style than the one in yesterday's post! You might have noticed that the handle from the silver spoon in yesterday's polymer clay pendant was used as the bail for today's bird jewelry piece. Resourceful Eh?!

So anyway… I have been speaking quite a bit about Etsy.com lately because I feel it is an excellent research tool for the jewelry artist. Perhaps you have looked at Etsy in this way before.

Sure you can buy and sell handmade jewellery, beads, pendants and other artistic goods on etsy. But I'm not sure how many jewelry artisans have thought to use it as a research tool for their jewelry business. Even if you never plan to sell online, the information you can gather there is very useful!

For example you can search for sales price information like I did in this post: Pricing Jewelery Focal Beads on Etsy

You can also discover funky trends like I did in yesterday's post. Or, find out if you should consider adding polymer clay beads and pendants to your already successful jewelry business, like many artisans have done already!

Today at the etsy site, I gathered a bunch of interesting facts and figures I'd like to share with you! For example, did you know that out of their 590,898 jewelry listings, that 24,341 are for Polymer Clay Jewelry? And the prices of those poly clay listings range from a $900 beaded polymer clay necklace to a 20 cent pair of Fimo earrings?

Or did you know that over half of those polymer clay jewelry listings are for pendants? Do you see a trend there? Those pendants range in price from $450 to 20 cents?

And about those 20 cent items! Who can afford to sell at 20 cents when the listing fee is 20 cents + a 3.5% sales fee on top of that? Turns out, lots of people!!

Those 20 cent listings are called a 'Pay-It-Forward' (PIF) item. Let me explain how this works.

You see, shoppers can view listings on Etsy in several different ways… High-to-Low-Price; Low-to-High-Price; Recently-Listed; and Least-Recently-Listed.

If there are 12,707 listings for polymer clay pendants, your pieces could get 'lost in the pile' if you don't think creatively. A strategy that some Etsier's use to get seen, is to post a 20 cent loss leader item that will show at the top of a lowest price sort.

When buyers click on these 20 cent listings, they also get to see everything else that this seller is offering. They 'come into their store' so to speak. Really when you think about it,  20 cents is not a bad price to pay for some business exposure!

Buyers are usually only allowed to buy 1 'Pay it Forward' (PIF) item from a seller. This loss leader strategy is referred to as doing a good deed, and buyers are asked to 'Pay it Forward' by doing someone else a good deed in return.

I think a few sellers have done a similar thing by overpricing an item to get visibility at the beginning of a High-to-Low search listing sort. However, this strategy can backfire and tarnish your reputation very quickly if the item is obviously not worth the price it was listed for.

Hopefully you can that Etsy offers lots of opportunities to conduct online market research for your jewellery business. In the past, this type of research was much harder to do because everything was offline. You had to attend a lot of craft fairs, take lots of notes, and do lots of guessing.

The quick online research I did yesterday and today on Etsy, provided some good indications that my bird necklace pendant ideas will probably be well received! Did this article give you any ideas for your jewelry business? There's a comments section below where you can share your thoughts. I'd love to hear from you.