Stephanie's Guide to Setting Up an Etsy Shop

We're going to back up here and take a look at what you should do when opening an Etsy shop.

So maybe you've been thinking about opening an Etsy shop, there is a lot to do when you decide to do this.

Having set up 4 shops, I wish I had a list like this for the first 2

Here's the list broken down into steps.

#1 The most important: Find out what laws you have to abide by for your area. go to your local courthouse or SCORE office, they will have all of the info you will need. Each municipality is different, and each type of work is different.

#2 Have product. I'm assuming you already have this.

#3 Take awesome pictures of said product, search the Etsy forums, there's tons of awesome picture advice there.

#4 Use one of these pics as your avatar (optional) and write yourself a profile, shop policies, announcement. again, there's tons of advice about that in the fora as well.

#5 Look up shipping. if you are in the US, go to postalcalc.usps.gov, and find the pricing for 1 oz, 2 oz, etc (use whatever weights you will be using) to the US, Canada, Mexico, and Australia to start, you can add more later. But Australia's prices generally are the same as the rest of the world. Not always though. 

#6 Make shipping profiles with the shipping information you just gleaned For more on shipping, there is a really good thread started in business topics about the subject, (written by GoTo) here's the shipping thread

#7 Read up on SEO, basically, you want the beginning of your announcement, your "shop title" (which is the words under your shop name when you are looking at it as a buyer) your titles, tags, and beginnings of your descriptions to be descriptive of what you sell, again. This is SEO at it's most basic. Karen has been writing up some good stuff on this blog recently about SEO too.

#8 Start listing! make sure your tags are accurate, your descriptions are descriptive, etc.

The reason I say listing last is because you want everything else in place first- I made the mistake of not having it in place.