Top 10 UK Etsy Sellers (and what we can learn from them)

When it comes to creating or starting a new business (be it craft-based or not) it’s always helpful to do some research of the market and your competitors first. It’s not as fun as diving straight in BUT looking at what other businesses in your niche or are doing well and seeing if you can replicate those aspects can help get you started off on the right foot and save a lot of hassle at a later stage.

I’ve compiled a list below with the current, as of June 2020, Top 10 UK Etsy Sellers based on their total number of sales so that we can look at what they sell, how they are selling it and what we can learn from them to implement into our own Etsy businesses.

Top 10 Etsy Sellers

No1. NicoleDeBruin

What do they sell – Jewellery Supplies
Price Range – £0.17 – £14.07
Total number of items – 13,933

No2. HappyCuteStudio

What do they sell – Planner Stickers
Price Range – £0.50 – £9.50
Total number of items – 1,108

No3. HoorayDays

What do they sell – Party/Celebration Supplies
Price Range – £0.35 – £29.90
Total number of items – 2,472

No4. SarahBurnsPrints

What do they sell – Personalised Prints and Cards
Price Range – £0.50 – £15.00
Total number of items – 760

No5. Petershams

What do they sell – Millinery Supplies
Price Range – £1.00 – £80.00
Total number of items – 2,725

No6. KatieAbey

What do they sell – Gifts/Homewares/Accessories
Price Range – £1.70 – £25.50
Total number of items – 323

No7. SERENITYproject

What do they sell – Jewellery
Price Range – £2.95 – £26.95
Total number of items – 249

No8. AmyLucyDesigns

What do they sell – Personalised Gifts
Price Range – £0.97 – £48.47
Total number of items – 986

No9. Punkypins

What do they sell – Enamel Pins/Accessories
Price Range – £0.51 – £18.50
Total number of items – 468

No10. ThePersonalWeddingCo

What do they sell – Personalised Gifts/Wedding Favours
Price Range – £2.50 – £38
Total number of items – 184

What can we learn from these top Etsy sellers?

So, what can we learn from the above sellers and what can we adopt as our ‘best practices‘ in our Etsy business

Photos

According to Etsy’s customer research poll, 90% of shoppers stated that having high-quality images was the top factor when deciding to purchase products – based on the images above we can see that consistency in the photos is key.
When Etsy first came about it was recommended that you use a white background for your photos but nowadays it’s more helpful to use your photo backgrounds as an opportunity to include your company branding be that with a consistent colour palette – AmyLucyDesigns uses a lot of pastel colours and wood grain whereas KatieAbey is very bright colours and she uses sweets as a prop in a lot of her images, or themes – SerenityProject has various styles of models wearing their pieces but the theme is always similar in that its muted colours and repeated textures such as hessian. Even if you are using product mock-ups, like HappyCuteStudio or Sarah Burns Prints as using, it’s worthwhile investing in a set or bundle of product mock-ups files that are similar in styling.

The only time I would probably still suggest using a white background is if you are a supplies shop (like NicoleDeBruin) as the only thing you want people focusing on is the supply item itself. It isn’t always easy to get a perfectly ‘clean’ background on a photo but websites like Canva have tools that can do this for you!

Number of items

It’s often suggested that there is a ‘magic’ number of items to have listed for sale in your Etsy shop and when you hit that you will start gaining more traction, some suggest it’s 50 others say 100 but either way, the more products you have listed on Etsy the more opportunity you have of getting seen.
All of the shops above have at least 150 items listed, that might seem like a daunting number but it’s worth remembering that if you have an item that comes in a variety of 6 colours for example, you could list it as 1 item with a drop-down to show the 6 varieties OR you could list each colour variety as it’s own separate product creating 6 products for your shop in total. Granted it makes a bit more work for you when you’re just starting out but it all helps to get you seen in the searches.

Pricing

Pricing items for Etsy can be tricky, you don’t want to price too low because you need to cover your costs and time but you also don’t want to price items too high because you want to be competitive with other shops selling similar items. There is a lot of info floating about on the internet about how to price items on Etsy (and I think I’ve read most of it over the years!) but this post is by far one of my favourites for how well it explains stuff and this Etsy pricing calculator is a good starting off point if you want to see if your

Looking at the data above it shows that a lot of the shops have a wide price range – is that something you should look to do too? Well, yes…and, also no…
What I mean by that is, don’t push yourself to add lower-cost items to your shop if your craft or talent doesn’t lend itself to lower-priced items – if you make hairbows that are fairly straight forward to make and can be done in batches then, by all means, looks at maybe having a lower-priced range and then some fancier higher priced items but if you do hand-painted custom pet portraits, don’t worry about having to offer smaller less detailed pieces just because they can be priced a bit cheaper –  it’s not worth your time to do so and it’s not your target audience/buyer. Don’t undersell your talents or time.