Why have my Etsy sales suddenly dropped?

Usually because of something you didn't do and couldn't have done, which is both the good news and the actual problem. A sudden drop in Etsy sales is hardly ever a punishment for a mistake, and most of the time it quietly rights itself before you ever find out what caused it.

I spent years staring at that stats graph myself, back when quilts and bags made from cotton I'd imported from America were the whole of my income, trying to work out what I'd broken. Usually I'd broken nothing at all, and I'd have saved myself a lot of evenings if somebody had told me that a quiet fortnight is far more often weather than it is a verdict.

Did I do something wrong?

Almost certainly not, and I want to sit on this for a minute because the panic is the expensive part.

The moment sales stop, every maker turns detective on herself. Was it the photo I changed, the price I nudged up, the week I didn't list anything new? And because you're searching for a cause, you'll find one whether it's real or not, and then you change something that was working fine, and now you genuinely have altered the thing Etsy had already ranked.

A drop is rarely feedback. Feedback needs a message attached, something you can read and act on, and a quiet fortnight arrives with nothing attached at all. Etsy doesn't send a note explaining what moved, you just get the silence, and you're left to write the story yourself. The stories we write about our own work in a panic are never kind ones.

What actually causes a sudden drop in Etsy sales?

Usually one of these, and I'd read the whole list before deciding which is yours.

Seasonality gets forgotten first. Every product has dead weeks that come round every single year, and hardly anyone checks what last year's graph did at this exact point before panicking about this year's. If the same weeks were slow last year too, then what you're looking at is a season, and seasons do this on schedule.

Etsy changes how it ranks things, regularly, and doesn't announce it in any way you'd notice. A tweak on their side can move you 3 pages down without a single thing changing on yours.

Competition moves with the calendar as well. As a new season approaches, more sellers pile into your niche, and a search result that had a handful of shops like yours in it suddenly has hundreds.

Sometimes one listing has been quietly carrying the whole shop, sitting high in one search and bringing everyone through the door, and when it slips a few places the whole shop's numbers sag with it. You never knew it was doing that job until it stopped.

Edits take weeks to land, too. A title or tag change you made a month ago can be showing up in the numbers only now, which is one reason the detective work rarely finds the culprit... you're examining the wrong fortnight.

Your shop metrics count as well, dispatch times slipping, a run of late orders, a couple of hard reviews. Etsy's ranking notices those before you do.

And sometimes fewer people were shopping that week, and there is genuinely nothing more to it than that.

If you've been through all of those and you're still convinced people simply can't see you, the mechanics of titles, tags and photos are their own subject and I've covered them properly in why am I getting no views on Etsy, so I won't repeat them here.

What do all of those causes have in common?

Every single one of them is something that happened to you.

Read the list again. The season turned, Etsy changed something, more sellers arrived, a listing slipped, an old edit finally landed, buyers stayed home. There isn't one item on that list that you decide, and you can respond to every one of them while holding a lever on none of them. I sold for years before that properly sank in.

Which is why "what did I break" is such a cruel question to keep asking yourself. Most quiet weeks were never yours to prevent. The harder question, the one I'd rather you sat with, is why a thing you cannot influence is allowed to decide what your month looks like.

When I ran my fabric launches, the listings went live just before payday and my customers knew the date. I'd trained them to wait for it, because the run took time to photograph and list and get into stock, so there was a real reason the date existed. Some of them bought in the run-up anyway and then came back a day or two later when the launch actually landed, which cost them a second lot of postage, and my shipping system would flag the double order so I could refund it.

I mention the refund rather than the waiting because the refund is the honest half of the story. But the part worth noticing is that none of it depended on where anything of mine ranked that week. Nobody searched for me and stumbled in. There was a date, I picked it, people were waiting for it, and the algorithm could have done whatever it liked in the meantime.

That is a different kind of week from the one you're having. Not a busier one necessarily, and not a bigger shop, just one where the thing that decides how it goes is sitting on your side of the table.

What should I do this week?

The boring checks first, so you're not imagining a catastrophe that isn't there.

Pull up last year's stats for these exact weeks, because there's a decent chance the shape matches. Check nothing in the shop has actually changed, your dispatch times, your reviews, any messages from Etsy you filed away unread. Look at whether you edited titles or tags a few weeks back, since that could be what's landing now.

If everything comes back clean, the honest reading is a quiet spell that isn't about you, and the shop will most likely drift back on its own.

Then, while it's quiet, start the one thing that makes the next quiet fortnight matter less: a way to reach the buyers you already have. Someone who bought from you once is the most likely person on earth to buy from you again, and right now Etsy is the only one who can contact her. An email list of your own changes that, and I've written about why a maker needs an email list at all if you want the full argument.

I won't pretend a list appears in a week, it grows name by name. But a quiet fortnight is precisely when you have the time to set one up, and every name on it is a future sale that no ranking change can quietly take off you.

If you'd like somewhere to start, I've put the first steps into a free email course called 7 Days to Shift Your Shop, one short email a day for a week, walking you through the move from waiting to be found to launching to people who already care. It's the exact move that took me from staring at stats graphs to picking my own launch dates.

The next quiet fortnight is already sitting somewhere in your calendar. The only real question is how much of your month it gets to decide