EP 19. 5 Ways You're Wasting Time in Your Etsy Shop (And What to Do Instead)

Are you spending time on your Etsy shop but not seeing your shop move forward? In this episode, I'm breaking down five of the biggest time traps Etsy sellers fall into and sharing exactly what to do instead. If you're a busy woman building your shop in the margins of a full life, this episode will help you make sure every minute you spend is actually working for you..

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey there and welcome to the Modern Etsy Seller, the podcast where busy women build, grow, and profit on Etsy. I'm your host, Melissa Carroll, a full-time teacher, a busy mom, and an Etsy seller who's built two successful Etsy shops in the small moments of everyday life. Here you'll find simple strategies, real behind-the-scenes insight, and the clarity you need to stop second guessing and start moving forward one intentional step at a time. Let's get to it. If I gave you three hours this weekend to work on your Etsy shop, how would you spend that time? I want you to think about that for a minute. What would you work on? What tasks would you want to complete? How long would you spend on each one? Time is an issue for so many of us. I started this podcast to help busy women learn Etsy print on demand. Women who want or need extra income but already have lives overflowing with other responsibilities and therefore very little time to spare. Women who are just like me. So I speak from experience when I say that to build a profitable Etsy print on demand shop, you have to be really smart about what you do with the time you have. There are certain tasks that you can do that will directly move your shop forward. Things like getting a listing live, responding to a customer, and creating a new design. And then there are tasks that support the business and make you feel productive. And sometimes they have value, but only up to a point. And once you pass that point, when you spend too much time on them, they stop helping and start costing you. They cost you time, momentum, and ultimately money. So today I want to talk about five of the biggest time traps Etsy sellers fall into, and more importantly, what to do instead. Because you probably don't have more time to give, which means you need to get more out of the time you do have. The first time trap I want to talk about, I call stat stalking. Stat stalking is when you obsessively check your Etsy shop stats. Now your Etsy stats are genuinely useful, and I'm not going to tell you to ignore them. Your views and visits, conversion rate, where your traffic is coming from, your shop and listing favorites. All of that information matters. But there's a difference between using your stats as a tool and checking them every time you have a few spare minutes. Stats talking is super common with new sellers. Your shop is new, you're adding listings, and you want to see if anyone is looking at them. You have your notifications turned on so that every time someone favorites your shop or a listing, your phone will let you know. But even seasoned sellers can fall into this, especially when sales feel like they're slowing down or after they've added a bunch of new listings. And maybe you're thinking, so what? What's the big deal if I check my stats a lot? Here's the thing stat stalking doesn't just waste the minutes you spend looking at the numbers. It messes with your head and has a way of stealing the minutes that come immediately after two. You have 10 minutes to work on your shop. You open your stats and nothing has changed since the last time you checked. Suddenly 10 minutes doesn't feel worth it, and you close the app and tell yourself you'll come back when you have more time. And that's the real cost. It's not just the minutes you spent looking at the numbers, it's the momentum you lost because of what those numbers made you feel. And then the doubt that starts to creep in right behind it. It's like stepping on the scale every three hours. Even if you're doing everything right, the number isn't going to move that fast. All you're doing is giving yourself more opportunities to feel discouraged and give up on your goals. And those favorites notifications, they feel great when they're coming in, but they also make you hyper aware of when they're not coming in. And that silence can make you question your products and your listings and your whole reason for doing this. Here's what I'd suggest instead. Check your stats once a day. I like to do it at the end of the day so that I can see what the day looked like as a whole. Look at the numbers, note what you see, and close the app. Your stats are for learning trends over time. Checking them every hour has zero benefit. Check once, note what you see, and move on. The next time trap is competition checking. Researching your competition is important and you absolutely should do it. There is no better place to look for insight into what is working in your niche than through competitive research. But if you are not careful, it can rob you of your time in two ways. The first is that it can lead you down an endless road, similar to social media scrolling. You hop from listing to listing and store to store, and before you know it, your daughter's basketball practice is over, and competition checking is all you have to show for the hour you spent sitting in the car waiting for her. The second way it can steal your time is similar to what I talked about with stat stalking. It is when competition checking stops being about research and morphs into comparison. Comparison almost never leaves you feeling motivated. It usually leaves us feeling behind. And feeling behind has a way of stalling our progress. Here is what I want you to do instead. Limit your competitive research to 20 minutes a week. More than that is likely going to create overwhelm rather than insight. And if possible, do it during the times when you can't really do anything else in your shop anyway. When you're waiting in line at the grocery store checkout, or when you're sitting in the doctor's office waiting to be called in. And then if you see something you want to remember, take a screenshot or leave yourself a voice note. And when comparison starts to creep in, I want you to remind yourself of something. You don't know that seller's story. You don't know how long they've been doing it. You don't know if they're doing it full-time or part-time. You don't know if they have a team, what their margins look like, or what is really going on behind the scenes. When I catch myself going there and I do, I try to reframe it. I remind myself that their success means that this is all possible. And I'm gonna get there too if I keep working. And then I close the tab and start creating because one new listing is worth more to your shop than an hour of watching someone else's. Okay, third time trap is what I call constant content consuming. This one is especially common in the early stages, either before you officially open your shop or during the first year. And it makes sense, right? You're trying to learn, so you spend hours watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts and scrolling through Facebook groups and reading blog posts and searching for answers. The problem is you're getting advice from dozens of different people. And a lot of that advice often contradicts itself. It becomes information overload and it's a huge time drain because it feels productive, but it's actually keeping you from taking action. Here's what I suggest instead: find one or two people whose approach really resonates with you. People who teach in a way that makes sense for the kind of shop you want to build. People who have done what you want to do and then stick with them. I'm actually doing this right now as I build the podcast. There are a lot of people out there teaching podcasting, and I could spend all day consuming content from dozens of different experts, but instead I have found two people whose style and approach have really clicked with me. And so I made the decision to learn from them and tune everybody else out. I listen to their podcasts, I read their newsletters, I buy their products, and most importantly, I actually implement what they teach. And that part is really important because learning by itself isn't enough. You have to do something with what you're learning. You have to apply it. I see this all the time in the classroom. I can explain a concept to my students, I can show them examples and model it for them, but they don't truly learn it until they start doing it themselves, until they make some mistakes and figure out what works and what doesn't. And learning how to build and run an Etsy shop is no different. You can't watch your way to a successful shop. You have to do the work and learn as you go. So find your one or two trusted sources, learn from them, apply what they teach, and see what happens. Then come back with questions based on what you actually tried instead of what you're wondering about in theory. Trap number four is design dwelling. This is when you spend way too long in the design phase. Here's how it happens you sit down to work on a design, and then you just keep tweaking. You try 25 different fonts, 14 different colors, seven different layouts, and then think, hmm, maybe this needs a graphic. And then once you finally deem it perfect, you hesitate and try just one more font. Before you know it, you have been in Canva for two hours and you've listed nothing new. In fact, you're not even sure you have a complete design. Or there's another version. You make one design, then you adjust it a little and use that to make a second design. And then you get a new idea and you make a third design and a fourth design. You're being productive, you tell yourself. You're creating. You love creating, right? That's the fun part. And it becomes what you do every time you sit down to work. But none of those designs are listed. Your shop looks exactly the same as it did two weeks ago. Here's the thing: a design sitting in Canva is not making you money. It can't. It only works for you once it is a live listing in your shop. Until then, it's just a file. And the market is the only thing that can tell you what is connecting with buyers, not your eye. So all that tweaking, you don't even know if it was worth it. The only way you're going to know is when the market weighs in, and they can't do that until it's a published listing. So when you find yourself design dwelling, you need to take action in order to get back your time. If you are worried it is not quite right yet, remind yourself that you can always create a slightly better version later and then list it. If you can't decide between with or without the graphic, or whether it would be better with the flowy cursive font or the sans serif print font. Make them both and then list them both before moving to anything else. I get caught up in design dwelling too. Both types. Endlessly tweaking my designs and creating multiple designs, but listing none of them. So there are a couple of things that I do myself that I am gonna suggest to you that have helped me. So one thing I will do when I find that I'm in this perfectionist mode where I keep tweaking and tweaking, there's actually two different things that I'll do. Sometimes I'll give myself a deadline, like, okay, 10 more minutes, and then whatever you have after that 10 minutes, you have to go list it. And then other times I'll be like, okay, I have to list this right now, and then after it's listed, I can go back and tweak it. When I do that one, I have never actually gone back to tweak the listing that's already been created. At that point, it's kind of like, okay, it's up there. So I let's move on to the next one. And for the times I find myself with a lot of unlisted designs, I make sure that all the time that I have carved out for working in my shop is spent listing. And I'll give myself a goal with that too. Like, okay, you can move back into creating or whatever it is I'm trying to do after getting up 10 of these listings that have just been sitting here as designs. Remember, done is not settling, done is the whole point. Okay, the last time trap I want to talk about today is systems skipping. Now, there are a lot of different areas within your Etsy business where systems will help you save time. The one I'm talking about here is a system for getting your listings created and published. The more listings you have up, the quicker you are going to learn and grow. So if every time you sit down to create a new listing, you are starting from zero, then you are system skipping. If each time you create a new listing, you are creating a new Canva file, hunting for the right mockups, adjusting the mock-ups to fit the design, researching all 13 new tags, modifying your listing description. Or if you are simply spending too many precious minutes getting it live, then you are system skipping. And we need to fix that. Valuable time is wasted when you reinvent the wheel every time you list something. What you need to do instead is invest that time at the start of a new product type. Or right now, if you already have listings up but still don't have a system, then you want to stop and do this right now. I promise you that the time you spend doing this will pay you back over and over again as your business grows. So before you create your first listing for a product, you need to build out all the pieces that get used in every listing for that particular product type, your listing description template, your informational images that explain the product, the personalization process, your turnaround time, a saved list of your core keywords, your mock-ups already organized and ready to go, your Canva template already sized and formatted, your shipping profile, your attributes. You build those pieces once, and then every listing after that, you aren't starting from scratch. You are instead plugging in the design images and the unique details for that listing and you're on your way. This is why I really push starting with just one product and then creating 50 to 100 listings for it before adding another one. I actually have a whole episode coming that goes deep on exactly what those pieces are and how to build them out before you list, so stay tuned for that. But for now, just know that if you are creating every listing in isolation with no reusable system behind it, that is time you are leaving on the table. Okay, so let's bring this back to the question I asked at the beginning. If you had three uninterrupted hours this weekend to work on your Etsy shop, would you spend them differently now? Would you spend less time obsessing over your stats, less time checking out your competition, less time consuming content without applying it, less time tweaking designs that never get listed, and less time starting every listing from scratch? I hope so. Because if there is one thing I want you to take away from today, it is this. You don't necessarily need more time. You need to get more out of the time you already have. Every hour you spend working on your Etsy shop is an investment. And just like any investment, you want the best return possible. That doesn't mean you can never check your stats or look at your competition or spend time on a design. Those things all have value. The key is knowing when they have stopped helping and started getting in the way. So this week I want you to pay attention to how you are spending your Etsy time. Notice which tasks are moving your shop forward and which ones are just making you feel busy. That awareness alone is huge. If this episode helped you think differently about how you spend your time, I would love it if you would take a minute to leave a review. It helps me reach other busy women who want to earn extra money on Etsy. Thanks for spending this time with me, and I will see you in the next episode.