The Launch Sprint · Three of five · 3 min read
Why fixing your listings never fixes it
Underneath nearly every piece of advice a maker gets is one sentence. If your listings are not selling, you need better listings.
Better photos, better titles, better tags, more of them. Everything else is a variation on it.
“Just list more.” More listings means more chances to be found, and being found by strangers is the only kind of selling on offer, so of course this is the advice. It also means a shop of 200 items where nothing sells is somehow your fault for not making it 300.
“Fix your SEO.” I have watched makers do this properly, get the traffic up, and still make no sales, and then quietly conclude the problem must be them. Somebody told me exactly that. Fixed the listing, traffic went up, still nothing.
“Post more on social.” Which moves the same treadmill onto a second platform, and now there are two algorithms deciding whether you eat this month.
“Put a discount code in the parcel.” A perfectly nice thing to do, and it walks your own customer back through somebody else's front door rather than bringing her to yours.
“Wait it out, the algorithm changed.” It did. It will again. That is the only part of this advice that is completely true, and it is also the reason none of the rest of it is a plan.
Every one of those is about being found
Tags, thumbnails, keywords, ads, Pinterest, patience. Not one of them is about a person who already knows who you are.
Everybody in this world is teaching you to get found. Almost nobody is teaching you to be waited for.
And being found is a worse deal than it sounds, because the people finding you were not looking for you. I watched somebody get 100,000 views on a single video and watch her conversion fall while it happened, which makes perfect sense once you say it out loud. A crowd arriving at a shop window is not the same as a queue.
And underneath all of it, the bit nobody says
The platform keeps your customer. She chose you, she paid you, and Etsy holds her name and her email address. You got a review.
That is not an oversight and it is never going to be fixed, because the whole business depends on standing between you and the person who bought from you.
Which is why every launch starts cold, why the discount code sends her back through their door, and why fixing the listing was never going to work. It is one mechanism, and every piece of the problem falls out of it.
So if being found is not the answer, the question is what the alternative actually is. There is one, and it is not complicated. It is just not something anybody in this world talks about.
Part 4 of 5. Where the selling actually happens.