I’m one of those folks who never wins anything — no luck, I suppose. So I was extremely skeptical when I got an email saying I won something recently.

Since I’m pretty new to being an Etsy seller, I’ve been trying out a few plugins that are supposed to help you improve your listings. One of my most recent free trials was an Etsy plug-in called Alura, which bills itself as “the all-in-one platform that empowers you to launch, manage, and grow a successful Etsy shop.”

I hadn’t really had much time to play with it yet, but then I got this email from someone claiming to be one of the co-founders of Alura who had apparently selected my new Etsy shop for a random “deep-dive analysis.” My first thought was that this was spam… except, just from reading the first line, it was clear to me that “someone” (AI, an assistant, an intern — someone) had actually taken the time to visit my Etsy shop and knew an awful lot about my listings, my socials, my website, etc. The kinds of things you would only know from actually looking at all that material. 

They said I should sit down with a coffee, because they had a lot to tell me. And to my surprise, they actually did share a lot of intel with me — with no need to buy anything to find out what they thought about my nascent Etsy store. It was actually good stuff, and I will be taking some time over the next few weeks to implement many of their suggestions.

In my day job, I am a marketing manager, and I have been at this for many, many years. So it’s not that my listings were bad; in fact, there was a lot that they liked. But I am new to learning Etsy’s search algorithms, and my current “Listing Quality Score” was only averaging 56.26%, whereas the average score for all Etsy sellers combined is 67%. Clearly there is room for improvement. And then they told me exactly what I needed to do to bring my scores up, including links to tutorials and other good “secret sauce” kind of stuff. I have to tell you that after making just one of their suggested changes, my score went up to 71%. So that’s something worthwhile right there.

When I got their email, I had literally just received an email from Etsy that I had made my very first sale, so this “random audit selection” email was very timely. On my own, as a total Etsy seller newbie, I had set up my shop with 19 listings and it took 33 days to make my first sale (and I made another sale the next day). So that was pretty darn good, considering that all of the Esty seller blogs and forums I have been looking at said it could take several months to make a first sale because I had zero sales, and zero reviews.

So I know that I have a lot to learn, and I am curious to see what happens as I start making the changes they suggested across all of my listings. In theory, the higher my “Listing Quality Score,” the more frequently Etsy will include my listings in their customer SERPs. And the more potential customers who see my listings, the greater chance there will be for someone to either follow my store, favorite items in my store, and eventually, buy items in my store.

Pretty heady stuff. 

I always say that it’s a great day whenever you learn something new. So this was a really great day!