The Ultimate Guide to How to Start Selling Furniture on Etsy

So, you’ve decided you want to start selling furniture on Etsy. You’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of how-to articles in good old Google, and now you’ve landed here. Welcome, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s give you a sneak peek at some of the tips you can find in the pages of my new e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Selling Furniture on Etsy.

Is Etsy the Right Place to Sell Furniture?

In the last ten years, Etsy has established itself as the place to go when you’re looking for something handmade, vintage, or unique to gift either yourself or a special friend in your life. Most people will seek it out to find small home decor items or vintage clothing. However, that doesn’t mean you should be sleeping on Etsy as a place to sell painted furniture.

Etsy offers you:

• Over 2.5 million sellers a place to sell and advertise their unique wares.
• Top sellers make more than $10,000 a year. Not a number to sniff at!
• 45.5 million people purchased items from Etsy in 2019. That’s a lot more buyers than sellers, so don’t let people tell you the market is somehow oversaturated.

Opening Up Shop

Have you decided Etsy is the right place for you and are ready to blow the competition out of the water? Excellent, now it’s time to set up your shop. Click Sell on Etsy and let the Etsy selling tutorial walk you through all the steps to setting up shop and adding your first furniture listings.

Watch out!

• Catchy Shop Name: you’ve got 4-20 characters to play with to your heart’s content. Make them memorable and make them count!

• Etsy Plus: when you sell on Etsy, you only ever pay a listing fee and a small commission. If you’re ready to take your shop to the next level, you may want to invest in Etsy Plus for advanced customization, restock requests, and access to discounts.

• Dashboard Advice: Etsy wants you to know exactly how to sell furniture on its platform. Please make sure you listen to the recommendations on the dashboard. They’re set up to help get more traffic to your shop. More people looking means more people are buying.

Listing Your Way To Success

Setting up an Etsy shop won’t get you very far if you haven’t added any listings yet. Quick, click on the handy dandy Add Listing button and make sure to upload pictures of your painted furniture in their most flattering light. Since Etsy thumbnail photos are 570 x 456 px in size, it’s good to have your first photo match those measurements. Include pictures from all sides, detail shots, and any close-ups of vintage wear and tear.

Top tip: Don’t just throw your beautiful Swan Lake foyer table in front of a white wall and call it a day. When you’re selling painted furniture on Etsy, you’re also a set dresser and interior designer. Get your thinking hat on and make your pictures stand out from the crowd.

How to Write Furniture Descriptions

Ah yes, the dreaded furniture description. Not a copywriter? Not a problem. My Ultimate Guide to selling Furniture on Etsy includes a handy list of questions to go through whenever you’re stuck on what to write. My essential piece of advice is to pretend you’re describing the item to someone who cannot see it. What would you consider especially beautiful or incredibly functional? Put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes and write how they’d want to be written for. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Avoid!

Language like refinished, refurbished, and upcycled has no place in your description. You’re selling a unique, premium item, not trying to get rid of something at a yard sale.

Shipping Furniture

Many buyers do not like seeing a separate shipping fee next to the cost of the item. Enter free shipping. Do you want to know a secret? Free shipping is never free. It’s simply been included in the price of the item. When shipping something as big and bulky as furniture, do not use Etsy’s calculated shipping option. It may be tempting, but it’ll cause more hassle than it’s worth due to its tendency to underestimate costs vastly.

Remember to be as honest as you can on delivery times. Do you have another job or children that may interfere with packaging everything up? You may need to find the perfect company to deliver large pieces. There’s no need for you to try to compete with Amazon. You’re a unique business worth waiting for!

Etsy Statistics

Are you a total data nerd? Me neither, but your shop statistics are worth getting acquainted with. Here you’ll find a line graph that shows the traffic to your shop for the last month. That may not mean very much to you, but contextualizing that line graph helps you understand how effective any shop changes or marketing campaigns have been.

You can also see where traffic to the site is coming from. Are your tags working? Is your social media on point?

Next up, you can see how individual listings are doing. Do you have a most viewed item that hasn’t sold for months and months? It may be time to re-evaluate the price or the listing description. Remember: data is your friend, not your foe in the quest to be the best Etsy seller possible.

Eclat Designs by Crystin

If we haven’t met before, hi, I’m Crystin, and I have been selling my eclectic furniture online and on Etsy for many years. As an artist, I want to delight my buyers with furniture that makes their spaces come alive. As a businesswoman, I want to share everything I’ve learned about making yourself a success on Etsy via my blog and e-books.

Are you still feeling a little daunted and overwhelmed? That’s precisely why I created my e-book. It is the perfect guide on getting you up and running, one step at a time. Start making a profit on your furniture today.