New website: Certificatebuddy.com

Just a quick note to say that I have a new website which may be of interest to Etsy sellers (or anyone else who has a small business, online or bricks-and-mortar). It's called certificatebuddy.com and it lets you print and track gift certificates for your business. It's free to sign up, so if you're thinking of adding gift certificates to your Etsy shop, take a look.

Craftweasel on Etsy Success

It looks like craftweasel has been featured in the Etsy Success email - welcome to all our new readers and users!

Halloween tags

We know that Etsyians love their holidays, so with a month to go, what are we all making? If we put the tag halloween into the Tag Finder we can take a look.

Tags are in bold. Numbers in parentheses are the number of items from the first 1100 results for Halloween that also had the tag in question.

• All the usual categories are represented - accessories (220), jewellery (216), art (201) and clothing (96)
• Etsy sellers are making both costumes (157) and decorations (141)
• Many common symbols of halloween are being made, including skulls (108), witches (76), skeletons (73), pumpkins (72) and cats (64)
• The items have a big range of average prices from $154 for sculptures (20) to $3 for stationary (10)
• The traditional halloween colours of black (112) and orange (75) are represented far more often than red (49), blue (22), green (30) or white (26)

Maybe I'll do this search again in a month's time and see if the results are different.

Article on the Etsy Storque blog

Very exciting news - craftweasel is featured on the Etsy blog!

Using the Shop Stats tool as a tag bank

This post on the Etsy forums got me thinking about an interesting way to use the Shop Stats tool - as a handy way of seeing all the tags you have used in one place. Several sellers commented that they keep a list of tags they've used in a file or on paper. Using the Shop Stats tool you can get a list of all your most-used tags which is always up to date, and you can even sort them so that the most frequently tags are at the start of the list.

Using Tag Finder to pick a sale theme

This is an interesting use of the Tag Finder tool that I hadn't though of before - picking a theme to use for a promotion.

Tag Finder write up at mada's place

Etsy seller Mada's place has a nice write up on the craftweasel Tag Finder tool - click here to read it. I think that this is probably the most common use for the Tag Finder - coming up with a set of tags for a given item.