How to sell on Etsy for free

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When I was new to crochet pattern selling,

I always heard people talk about Etsy as the place for all handmade goods,(well all the big sellers anyway).

and my goal was to sell on etsy.

So you can imagine how crushed I was to hear that there was a listing fee to the package, and to make it

worse, it expires every 4 month meaning I have to renew the listing with another payment.

It was devastating.

Bear in mind, this is not as bad as it sounds if you have a booming business, i mean if you are listing your product for $25.99 and you already have a line of customers you are sure about,

then the $0.20 cannot be that devastating for you.

I am not even sure if the listing fee is truly $0.20 because I have NEVER PAID IT hehehe( sunglass emoji). So anyway, you can imagine my joy when I heard I could sell on THE Etsy for FREE. I did my research and I was over the moon.

How it works

To sell on etsy for free you will require a referral link from someone who is already selling on Etsy, you will use that link to register your new account and in doing so getting yourself and the owner of the referral link, free 40 listings. You may be thinking 40 free listings is not a lot, that 40 can be turned into 400 if you generate a referral link of your own, the more people that register on Etsy with your referral link, the more 40 free listings you get.

A quick disclaimer, this is not for crochet related people only, you can use the link i am

going to provide to start selling anything you wish. Tell a friend LOL!

So now that you know how it is done, let’s get deeper into the dos and don’ts.

Just to point this out before we go any further,

i was devastated at the $0.20 listing fee because by this time i had been selling on Lovecrafts and Ravelry and my crochet patterns had been there for a month or 2 without a single sale considering it was new and i was new to the whole thing,

so hearing about the expenses on Etsy, i was crushed. Enough of me, let’s get you some free listings !

Registering on Etsy

So now that you have access to that referral link, sign your account up. Enter all the required details and all that boring stuff.

Take note that Etsy is not available in the every country which sucks, if i am not wrong, it is only available in one african country ( South Africa),

i speak about african because i am one african girl, i worked my way around selling on etsy though which praise be to God, it worked. I

i hope this changes over the years because I know there is so much talent to be shared in the world. Anywho, back to business,

So now that you have registered your account, it is ready for listing. This is where you want to be extra careful.

How To List on Etsy for FREE

Opening your etsy shop you will click on the listing icon to add a new listing to Etsy, whatever your listing is, add all the fancy images and the title, tags, all that ,

i am not really gonna walk you through all of that because we are not here to learn how to list an item on etsy, but if you are an absolute beginner to ety and would like to know how, then watch a video or 2 on youtube that should walk you through every step.

So now that you have your listing in place you have added the fancy pictures and the fancy videos (which they recommend by the way) the title has been added, the about the listing section is all done and complete together with the category (i am saying this is their order by the way), we then come to the important part.

You don’t want to miss this part or else you would have given me 40 free listings and just ended up paying the $0.20 anyways. PS: i went to check and its actually $0.20 LOL.

So, now your page should be looking like the picture below.

Screenshot 2021 10 26 08.28.28

The renewal options. Please, i repeat, please!! This is the part that will allow your listings to be absolutely FREE of charge. When you are listing your product/file/item, the renewal option is already set to automatic which tells you that this listing will renew as it expires for $0.20 USD each time, that is each and every 4 months.

But we do not want that (obviously). So be sure to select Manual, the button right next to it. Always check that you have it on manual before publishing.

And just like that, your etsy shop is up and running.

If you have read this far, then i might as well give you a few tips on selling on etsy. Learn from my mistakes, note that i started selling on etsy June 28th 2021 and made my first sale the next day, nobody heard the end of it trust me,

i had already started building my dream house in my head and taken several holidays from a $2.50 sale LOL, the joy in me was indescribable. So my learnt lessons thus far:

Lesson #1: Consistency is key

List new listings as frequent as you can, and yes i know we only have 40, but like i said earlier (i hope i did) the more you share the referral link, the more 40 listings you will get. So the more you are adding new listings to etsy the more etsy will push you higher in search.

However, you will notice that other people always rank high in the search, some have really good etsy SEO (i am still looking into that hopefully i can have a post on that very soon) and others have etsy ads, that will lead to lesson number 2

Lesson # 2: Etsy ads

So you get to pay for etsy ads so you can rank higher in search because lets face it, there are a lot of people selling similar products to yours.

However, as a new seller to etsy you dont want to spend money on this just yet, the ads come in different packages ranging from $1.00 a day to $25.00 a day, i think $25.00 is the most they go, this works well for some people, and at the same time, it does not.

So as a new seller you do not want to waste money on something that may work or may not. Give it 6 months before you can, at that 6 months you may be sure how well your shop does monthly, and obviously have accumulated some sales by then, so spending a bit may not be

as painful.

Lesson #3: Take good pictures

The people buy what they see. You may have good quality material that you are selling, but if your picture angles are bad, then nobody will want to click on your listings. So learn a few photograph skills. And trust me, each new listing will be better than the previous because, it is a learning process.

Lesson # 4: Pray

I am a christian so everything i do, plans and all that are checked with God first, try it out, you will see tremendous results. Hehehe

So incase you missed the referral link, click here