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How Many Etsy Listings Should I Have To Be Successful?

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In addition to choosing a niche, one of the most common questions we get about selling on Etsy is “how many listings do I need to be successful?”

Although the true answer to this question depends on a variety of factors, if we define success as being able to replace the income from your full-time job with sales from your Etsy store, we can make this a bit easier.

In 2022, the average American salary was a little over $54,000.

This means we need to generate about $4,500 in profit per month from our Etsy store to replace that salary.

Additionally, we suggest shooting for a minimum of $10 profit per order after all costs and fees and for launching products that sell at least 1 unit per day on average.

That would mean, we would need 450 orders per month to replace the average full-time salary of an American worker.

Although this number may sound high, when you think about this in terms of daily sales, we would only need to average 15 orders per day to reach that goal.

So How Many Listings Do I Need To Be Successful on Etsy?

With this basic math in mind, if you can average one sale per product per day and $10 profit you would only need to launch 15 products to build a successful Etsy store.

Even if you’d like to be a bit more conservative, most sellers could easily replace their income by launching 30 products that sell regularly.

How To Figure Out The Right Number Of Products For Your Etsy Store

With that being said, you may not want or need to make $54,000, so how many listings would you need to reach your definition of success?

Although the answer depends on several factors, the easiest way to figure out your specific number is by using the 10x10x1 method.

This method allows us to start with the basis of earning $100 per day (or $36,500 per year) and it makes the math pretty easy.

Your first step is to take what you want to make in a year and divide it by 365.

This will give us How much profit you would need to make each day to reach that number.

Our next step is to divide your daily profit by $10 (our suggested profit per sale) to figure out the number of sales you would need each day.

Because our goal is to have a minimum of one sale per day per product, the number of sales we need to generate daily is equal to the number of listings we would need.

If our goal was to make $100 per day and we were making $10 profit per sale, we would need 10 listings to reach that goal.

If you have a specific number in mind or have a different profit per sale number in mind, you can use the calculator below to calculate your expected number of listings by filling out the three fields and clicking the calculate button.

How Many Etsy Listings Should I Start With?

Now that you have a better understanding of how many listings you will need to have to reach your goal, you may be wondering how many listings you need to launch your store.

The simplest answer to this question is to launch your store as soon as you have your first product ready.

Even if your goal is to have 500 listings, we all have to start somewhere.

Although some gurus claim that you should wait to launch your store until you have several products, there’s no real logic behind this.

If you happen to be selling print-on-demand products inside of Etsy, you should be able to easily add multiple products to your store once you have your first design done.

Additionally, you should set aside a little bit of time every day or every week to be in “product creation Mode”.

Setting aside this time will help to ensure that the product you launch won’t be lonely for long.

Does Etsy Prefer Stores With More Listings?

Even if you only need 10 listings to reach your goal, should you launch 100, just be safe?

The answer is maybe.

There seems to be a common misconception that Etsy prefers stores with more listings.

The theory goes, that if my store has five listings and your store has 10, you will automatically rank ahead of me in the search results.

Although this may sound good, in theory, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Etsy does not prefer stores with more listings, they prefer stores with listings that sell.

Yes, every time you create a listing it makes a little bit of money(20 cents), but where they really make their money is when they’re able to take a percentage of the sale once it’s made.

At the end of the day, Etsy is a search engine.

The job of any search engine is to provide the person searching with the best result for their search.

Since Etsy is an e-commerce platform, the best result to show to a customer is the one that has the highest chance of selling.

Simply having more listings in your Etsy shop, does not necessarily mean that any of your listings have a higher chance of selling.

Where most people seem to get confused is that there is a correlation between having more listings and having more sales in your shop, which can result in stores with more listings ranking higher in the search results.

Your goal should never be to create Etsy listings, simply for the sake of having Etsy listings.

Rather, each one of the listings you create and place inside of your Etsy shop should be something designed to sell.

As I mentioned above, our minimum expectation for every product that we place in our Etsy store is that it will sell an average of one unit per day or more.

This goal makes it very easy to understand how many listings you need and know that each listing you create will help boost your shop overall.

How To Increase The Number Of Listings in Your Shop Without Going Crazy

Just like everything in life, our goals will change.

I wanted to quickly cover two different ways to be able to add more listings to your Etsy shop to help you meet your goal, without pulling out your hair. 

Finding additional products can be one of the most stressful parts of being an Etsy seller, especially if you’ve already maxed out what you think your niche allows for.

Re-Use Your Existing Designs

The first and simplest method is to reuse your existing designs.

If you are in the print-on-demand space, one thing most sellers overlook is their ability to reuse their creative designs across multiple different products.

If you have a design that’s selling well on a t-shirt or a mug, visit your print-on-demand provider (like Printify) and see other products to which you can apply that same design.

We used this design reuse strategy when we completed our 30 products in 30 days experiment a few months ago and the results have been outstanding.

Although this method doesn’t as reliably result in our goal of one sale per day per listing, as researching new designs to launch, when these reused designs work, they quickly turn into some of our best-selling products.

If you are selling digital products, don’t be afraid to create bundles or break your bundle digital products into individual listings or smaller packages.

Although this may seem counterintuitive, the person who wants every financial spreadsheet ever created will end up buying your big bundle, and someone looking for something more specific we’ll find their way to your listing for the exact spreadsheet they need.

Don’t be afraid to experiment a little!

Add A Shoulder Niche

A second way to quickly add new products to your store is by adding a shoulder niche.

As we’ve discussed at length, in other articles, we are advocates of being a niche-based store rather than a general store.

That being said, many niches have what we refer to as shoulder niches.

For example, if everything in your store is related to bass fishing, you can add products related to other types of fishing and still be in the fishing niche.

Using shoulder niches this way allows you to quickly add an entirely new line of products and customers to your store, while still keeping all of the advantages of the niche-based approach.

Quick Recap

At the end of the day, the number of listings you need to be successful on Etsy is entirely up to you and your goals.

Throughout this article, we’ve given you a few different ways of calculating that number, including the calculator above, as well as some ideas on how to add more products to your store when you think you’ve run out of steam.

If you made it this far in the article, chances are you’re fairly new in the Etsy ecosystem.

Do not get overwhelmed, focus on niche selection to start with and then think about, create, and launch one product.

If you can start by launching that first product to learn the process, you’ll quickly be able to reach your goals.

Chris Shaffer

Chris lives at the intersection of business strategy and growth tactics. Having consulted with dozens of different businesses (as well as building several of his own), he brings a unique perspective on what’s working across the eCommerce world in businesses of all shapes and sizes.



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