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Hi friends! Let’s get down to business.
If you follow my cookie journey at all, then you’ll know I started my venture into the cookie world last February (2020). Not long before that, I had my son in September of 2019, and was working as a Property Manager/Realtor. Like most of us, I 100% thought I would be a rockstar mom and take him all the places and do all the things. I was SO wrong!
My entire world changed in an instant. I no longer wanted to deal with the stress of broken security systems at 3am, running background checks or chasing down late rent payments. Instead, I began thinking of ways I could earn money to help support my family from home! I began making cookies as mentioned earlier that February, but that is another blog post for another time.
Flash forward to August 2020. After a whirlwind of a CRAZY summer/year (with a heaping serving of pandemic thrown into the mix) I doubled down on wanting to find even more ways to make money from home without needing to rely on what was happing outside in the real world.
I began researching different things I could do, ideas that would correlate to stuff I already had some sort of experience with. Transaction coordinator? No, too much stress. Virtual assistant? Well, I didn’t really want to work for someone else either! Digital prints and files? That sounds doable. But what could I sell?
Enter printables, stage right!
I opened my Etsy shop right then and there! Well, not necessarily. I had actually opened an Etsy shop to sell hand knit scarves in 2014, but ended up not moving forward. I switched names over along with my selling category and got right down to it!
Now, with me saying “some sort of experience” does NOT mean I am a graphic designer by any means. While in real estate, I always had an eye for design and I will say i’m pretty crafty! I hopped onto Canva and tried my hand at building a printable geared towards my niche. I realized fairly quickly that I would need Canva Pro because of my limited design experience. They were offering a free trial, so I signed up to see if it would be worth it long term.
Guys, so much stuff was available! Instead of paying a dollar per graphic I wanted to use, everything was up for grabs. How awesome is that?!
Once I had my first printable ready and in PDF form, I went and did some recon to see what other people in my niche were selling for. Que Kim Possible theme music here. $2-$3. $2-$3?!? That’s nothing, how am I supposed to make any money?! Then it hit me. It really isn’t much at all! What would stop someone from buying more than one because they are so cheap, especially when they can print as many as they need? So two dollars it was!
My first month I only made $40.
I believe I started on the 9th or so, and only had a few files uploaded. Not bad I guess, as I was still figuring things out with proper tags and marketing. My only expenses were the $14 charge from Canva Pro I decided to keep, and the 20 cents Etsy charged me per listing. I wasn’t in the red, so I decided to make a few more files and upload those as well.
September: $142.40
A hundred dollars more than the month before! Heck yes! Still wasn’t really doing anything crazy income wise, but hey, that’s our electricity bill. I’ll take it. I started an Instagram account for posting my pictures of my mock-ups. Then, I started following others I thought would be interested my products.
Helpful Tip: If you are making anything seasonal geared towards a specific holiday, don’t pick Automatic Renewal when you are creating your listings. I forgot to turn mine off and got charged 20 cents on every single listing that expired, and they do NOT warn you it’s going to happen.
October: $222.00
Another month with more income than the month before! Did I mention I was literally doing no work after making and uploading the original files? A few times I had some messages to answer or people inquiring about custom files (I sold those for $5 each), but other than that, NADA! No inventory to track, no labels to print, no product to ship.
It became so much fun to wake up in the morning and see notifications that I had made $8, $10, $12 in my sleep doing basically nothing. I added more files to the shop. There was no stopping me, I was addicted!
November: $917.50
Excuse me, what?! I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. That much money by just playing around on my computer making files and then selling them for TWO DOLLARS?! Amazing. The internet is such a powerful tool, and it blows my mind that you can put literally anything online and there is a person willing to pay for it. I am going to insert a picture of my dashboard so you know it happened!
You can see all of your visit trends, and if you’ve had your shop open for previous years (which I technically had but with no listings), you can compare to the year before. I had made a few custom listings, and gave a discount or two in thanks for repeat purchases, which is why I have the extra 50 cents.
December: $897.00
Not as much as the month before, but still almost $900! You can see things drop off because of the holidays and then start to climb again. I will insert December’s dash as well.
So that’s basically it! I do have some Etsy tips and cons however for full disclosure. This is just my total revenue, but not what I got deposited in my actual bank account. As stated on Etsy’s FAQ page, “As of 2020, Etsy charges $0.20 for listing fee, 5% transaction fee, and 3 % + $0.25 payment processing fee.” I will post a few pictures here so you can see exactly what I made in 2020 from August-December and what was taken out.
Breakdown:
Here you can see from August-December I made $1918.08, but was charged $375.86. It is a BUMMER for sure to see how much money was taken, but here is how I look at it: I still made money and did very little work for it! I didn’t have to make ads. I didn’t spend any money out of my own pocket other than Canva. The money was also direct deposited into my account every two weeks automatically!
You can see that I was charged $2.60 for my auto-renews that expired. Oops! That was my fault, so make sure you choose manual like I mentioned earlier.
I was charged $32.00 for listings. This is made up of the 20 cents for every listing I created.
20 cents for renews sold, and $215.40 for auto-renews sold. This means that I was smart enough to make ONE listing manually renewed, and the others were all on auto renewal still. Each sale I made cost me 20 cents as well.
$14.70 for marketing. This is another Etsy con. They have a feature called “Offsite Ads”, which basically means they advertise for you on other platforms such as Google, but you don’t pay a fee unless someone purchases through that specific ad. Again, I choose to be positive and hope that buyer will come back another time! From my understanding, you cannot opt out. I believe the fee is 15% per transaction, up to $100 per order. This doesn’t really bother me too much as my products are digital, but I definitely see why other artists and small businesses on Etsy could really take a beating from this!
Last but not least, $110.96 was taken out of my revenue for transaction fees. This is composed of the transaction fee, and 3 % + $0.25 payment processing fee I mentioned earlier.
Some final thoughts:
I just wanted to add here right at the end that I did make some money from affiliate marketing as well that was not part of this income report. I also made income from my regular cookie sales which is a full-time job in itself. While this extra money isn’t enough for me to kick up my feet on a yacht in Maui, it definitely took some burden off of our family during the craziest year ever!
What could you do with an extra $500-$1000 per month? Tell me below!
Also, what do you guys think about a series on Canva that goes into greater detail of building the printables and formatting them to go online? Let me know what you guys want to see! Ta-ta for now!
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