Hi, do you want to figure out how you can make money selling stickers on Etsy? If so, read on!
Table of Contents
What is Etsy?
Etsy is a place to sell homemade products. A lot of people sell candles, cards, drawings, slimes, bath bombs, printables, etc on Etsy.
You can list an item on Etsy for $0.30 cents and it’ll be up on Etsy for 4 months or until it gets sold. If you want to replenish stock before the 4 months are up, you can at no extra charge.
Etsy also takes 5% of the total sales price.
Click here to learn what 10 things you can easily make and sell on Etsy.
Click here to learn how to sell slimes on Etsy (Step-by-step).
Click here for the step-by-step guide on how to make printables to sell on Etsy.
Click here to learn the 23 different types of printables to sell on Etsy.
Tim Koa’s success story
Tim started selling stickers on Etsy in October 2020 and within just 5 months he made $2328. That’s a good number considering that it’d typically take most bloggers 2+ years to see that number in revenue that is if they make any at all.
In total, he made over $45,000 in 1.5 years.
His revenue on his sticker store continues to grow. He only sells stickers on Etsy.
This is how much he made in his first 1.5 years broken down by month.
You can check out his video here.
On his YouTube channel, he talked extensively about how he did it.
He got his family and friends to buy his stickers in the beginning and have them leave positive reviews.
He also included some free stickers to give customers a nice surprise and a good experience.
He said that a lot of customers do expect some freebies in their packages so that’s what he did to make sure he doesn’t disappoint anyone.
It also helps him get positive reviews.
Step 1: Research competition and inspiration
Your first step to starting a sticker business is to research your competition and get inspired by what you see on Etsy. This will help you understand what sells and what doesn’t.
You can then use what you saw to design your prototypes.
Not all types of stickers sell well and not all types of stickers have buyers.
You can sell your design in PDF format in the form of a printable or, you can sell stickers already printed out in neat packages.
Go on over to Etsy.com
Type in “sticker” and sort by “top customer reviews”.
You’ll see a bunch of stickers pop up and you can click on each to find out what styles of stickers are doing well.
For instance, if you realized that stickers with words sell well, you can implement that into your design.
If you found out that bright colors sell better than muted colors, you can do the same with your stickers.
Look at whether the shops have a niche, if so, what niche does well on Etsy?
You can also spend some money to buy some stickers from your competitor to know their marketing campaign:
- Do they ask you for reviews? How do they ask you for reviews?
- How do they package their stickers?
- What size of boxes does it come in?
- How fast did the package arrive?
- Do they have emails that allow you to reach out if you have any questions?
Take note of what you noticed.
Step 2: Create prototypes
Go ahead and create some prototype drawings.
You can create the prototypes with tools such as Procreate. It costs $9.99 and it’s totally worth it. It’s basically the best drawing app out there for iPad and has been for some time.
Click here to find out the 15 unique ways to make money with Procreate.
You can also create prototypes with Canva.
The most common tools used to create prototypes of stickers are:
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Procreate
- Canva
Step 3: Get your equipment ready
The only thing you really need to create stickers is a printer and sticker papers
You can just get a simple printer. It doesn’t have to be the most expensive.
This is essentially the paper that you’ll feed to your printer to print out your stickers/
You can also get a cutting machine if you don’t want to do it by hand
Step 4: Start printing stickers
You may not get everything lined up on the first few tries. It takes time to learn your machines and how to print stickers. Give yourself some time to figure it out.
Once you figure out how to print stickers, you can start printing your supplies.
Step 5: Open up your Etsy shop
You can open up your own Etsy shop very easily when you sign up for Etsy. Once you created an account, you can buy stuff on Etsy. To create a shop, click on the shop icon in the top right corner.
Step 6: Maintain your store
Maintaining your store means you should restore quickly if your supply is low. This keeps customers happy instead of losing customers to other competitors.
If you have social media for your brand, make sure you keep it active. It tells people that you are open for business and won’t just take their money and not deliver the items.
You should also come up with new listings once in a while. For instance, every other week, you release a new type of sticker.
Step 7: Open up your own Shopify store
You make more money selling on your own platform than on Etsy since it costs $0.30 to list an item on Etsy for 4 months (or until it sold out) and Etsy also takes away a 5% commission
The easiest way to open up your own store is on Shopify.
It’s easy to set up shop on Shopify and aside from the money you pay to use Shopify each month which is roughly $40 depending on the plan you chose, you keep 100% of the profit.
Sarah Titus makes $7 million per year selling printables on her own site. You can do the same with stickers as well.
It’s also good to collect customers’ emails so that when you open up your Shopify store, you have customers ready to purchase from you.
You can get customers’ emails by telling them to sign up to the mailing list in exchange for 10% off their next order for instance. It’s quite easy to set up coupon codes on Etsy for that matter.
How to be successful on Etsy
- Start with at least 10 listings
It’s good to start with at least 10 listings. In fact, that’s the number Etsy suggests. Imagine walking into a store and they only sell 2 things, this is why you should have at least 10 items for sale on Etsy.
Your shop is more likely to show up on the recommended if you have more than 10 listings up.
- Get positive reviews in early
Reviews are key. It’s worth making less money in the beginning to get more reviews. You need to give customers a reason to choose your business over someone else’s who has lots of reviews already and that may be having a lower price, having higher quality products, giving free stickers, giving coupons, etc.
You can also ask your friends and family to give you positive reviews.
Something you can say in a card to your customers when they open up their packages is: “Hi! Thank you so much for your order. If you have any suggestions, please email hello@hello.com and if you are satisfied with your purchase, please consider leaving a review”.
It’s important to not have your customers leave their suggestions in the review because that may result in fewer than 5 stars. But if you word it like that, they are more likely to only leave a review if they’re happy with the purchase.
- Ship it out fast
Don’t wait around, ship it the day that they purchased the item. It gives your customers a better experience.
- Give yourself time to succeed
Your first 100 reviews and first 100 orders may take more than 6 months to get but your next 100 may just take 2 months. Eventually, you may see yourself getting 100 orders per week.
The beginning is always tough but this is why you need to push through.
- Give freebies
People like free stuff so if you can give some people free items, you can expect to make more recurring sales, get more reviews, get better reviews, and make more money.
Final thought
Making money by selling stickers from Etsy is a lot easier than most people think. Like with any business, it, of course, has its difficulty but if you can produce stickers that customers are searching for, that fit existing demand, and you continue to improve your store, with time, you will become successful with your sticker business.
The sales will come, give it time, be patient. Good luck!
