Renewing on Etsy

I've always thought if something didn't sell on Etsy in 4 months why renew it? Well, something happened yesterday that gave me a new perspective. A successful seller in the Etsy chatroom says he renews from 5 to 7 times a day. That keeps him on the top 3pages of his main tags. So I've been doing some personal research. I picked one of the busiest categories on Etsy, which is jewelry. I renewed a necklace and waited about 5 minutes for it to show up on the lists. The first time I saw it and it was already on page 3. It never hit page one at all. Then within 3 minutes it was on page 6. Now five minutes later I'm on page 14. It's like putting a leaf in a fast moving stream.

His theory was no one is going to scroll through more than ten pages on the search feature to find something. So if I haven't listed or renewed anything in a week, much less a month, it's like I don't exist at all.

The good side is that people haven't been staring at my item for 4 months and no one bought it. After the first week no one saw it anyway. Unless someone put it in a blog post or featured it on twitter or something. Or posted it in a chatroom.

Now in his case, he sells stained glass, so it's not so glutted and all his listings have the same tags. That won't work for me because I make 20 different things. I can't expect to stay on the top 3 pages of paintings, knitting, crochet, amigurumi, steampunk and jewelry, now can I?

But he budgets $45 a month for listing on Etsy and rolls that over into his prices, so I'm going to try it for a month, but maybe with $30. I don't have a lot of money to gamble right now.

My boyfriend said it was the definition of insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over again that didn't work to begin with. So I said, "That's why I'm doing something different". And he said, "No, it's the same, it's still Etsy."