Fail-Safe Tips for Selling on Etsy – Using Vela to Boost Sales on this BFCM

11 min read

Quick one: BFCM stands for Black Friday, Cyber Monday… You’re welcome!

If there is one hack that you must learn as a print on demand seller, it is making the most of holiday seasons.

Honestly, I find these times my personal favorite. And I mean, who wouldn’t?

You wake up one morning and it suddenly seems like every single buyer has been programmed to purchase one single type of product. Regardless of the price hike, buyers keep coming in.

And so does the money too! 🤑

I would tell you without mincing words. The worse thing that can happen to any POD seller is being caught unprepared in a holiday period.

Whether it is Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmas day, you must have the right marketing preparations in place to make the best of sales.

And this is what we’re here to do today – to teach you how to boost your sales during this BFCM and other upcoming holidays.

If you’re game, I’m game!

FIRST THINGS FIRST…

Let’s cut to the chase!

It’s a no brainer. You cannot make sells when you’re invisible to buyers.

For you to be able to maximize these *special sales* moments, you must first ensure that you are in a position where you can be visible to Etsy buyers.

The more visible you are, the more your chances of making a sale. So, you can imagine the horrors of having zero visibility in a highly competitive platform like Etsy.

But don’t worry, I’m here to the rescue! 🧚‍♀️

What you need is not a magical wave of a wand. What you need is to get your ETSY SEO done right!

It is practically impossible for me to overemphasize the importance of optimizing your digital presence by optimizing your ETSY SEO.

Here’s the thing. I once said that “SEO is more or less like the holy grail of selling on Etsy”. And to date, I’ve not had any reason to retract that statement.

Day in, day out, millions of buyers visit Etsy for one product or another. But if you’re are not visible to them, how would they be able to buy from you in the first place.

I often recommend that POD sellers pay attention to the Etsy SEO at the early stages. Once you get it right, there is no going back again – literally.

The more you can get a higher ranking on Etsy SEO product search results, the more buyers are likely to purchase your items. So, first things first, GET YOUR ETSY SEO RIGHT!

If you missed the previous anchor link, you must not miss this. Check out my previous post where I demystified the rudiments of Etsy SEO.

GETTING PREPARED FOR BIG SALES

When you’re working on your Etsy SEO, you must pay close attention to the kind of keywords that you use for your product listing.

Especially when we are getting closer to the Q4 with a long lineup of special holidays.

Here’s one thing that you need to know. When people are running search queries on Etsy, they are most likely to search using the keywords related to the holiday at hand.

On Black Friday, there will be more search with the keyword “Black Friday”. So, you are more likely to have keyword searches like “Black Friday Mugs”, “Black Friday Gifts”, and so on.

The same thing applies to Cyber Monday and other holidays.

With that said, it is important that you insert these keywords into your product title, product description, as well as tags. This would boost your visibility chances and largely improve your opportunity to make some cool cash.

You see, the festive periods have always found a way to stir up eCommerce activities year in, year out. This high-spirited hype is often at its peak during festivals like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

They seem to have a special vibe of their own. But without the right marketing strategies, you might never make the number of sales that you want to or ought to.

In 2019, Black Friday sales across the major eCommerce platforms in the US were averaged at $6.2 billion while Cyber Monday sales were at $7.9 billion with Amazon, Google, Etsy, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy amongst the top earners.

For the last couple of years now, the figures for sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been increasing exponentially. For instance, Black Friday and Cyber Monday had a 23.6% and 17.9% increase respectively from their 2018 figures.

Source: https://cedcommerce.com/blog/black-friday-marketing-strategies/

Come November 27th to 30th, 2020, we expect history to repeat itself more favorably.

INTRODUCING VELA: WHAT EXACTLY IS IT

There are a lot of great apps that can help you sell well on Etsy. But where exactly do you start from?

For me, I believe that consistency is one of the sole principles of Etsy’s success. However, spending an unreasonable amount of time on product listing edits can be a source of incessant headaches.

Trust me. I know! 😰

This is where Vela comes in.

As of the first quarter of the year, Etsy has about 2.8 million active sellers.

Source: Etsy, Inc. Reports First Quarter 2020 Financial Results

This poses a great sense of challenge and competition. And this can be really tough. So, you need all the help that you can get to make your product stand out from the crowd.

I won’t be surprising anyone if I say that managing an Etsy store is quite difficult. But what if you can solve your listings edit problems in a single second? Would that make things a lot better? Sure!

Vela or GetVela is one of the apps recommended by Etsy that can be used to edit thousands of product listings in a very short time. It is a bulk product listing editor app that can be used to make edits on Etsy listings.

With Vela, it is much easier to put up or take down a sale, edit product descriptions, add or remove tags, and much more.

Here’s the icing on the cake. Using Vela, you can manage Etsy and Shopify at once. This makes it easy for you to sell on multiple channels and keep track of your shops from one dashboard. But you’ve not heard it all.

Vela is completely FREE!

Yeah, you read right. This time-saving bulk editing app is totally free for use by Etsy sellers.

Sure, you can still make bulk edits for some things on Etsy. However, not all things can be bulk edited. This is why we need this tool to bulk edit your products as quickly as flash!

WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH VELA?

So much actually!

Vela has so many useful features that can be used to bulk add information into your Etsy product listing.

For instance, you could write a paragraph about Black Friday or Cyber Monday and have it added to the first paragraph of every single POD product in your shop. No sweats! Similarly, you can also take it down as easy to add new content.

It helps you to make bulk edits for all your product listing features such as your product title, keywords, tags, product descriptions, and product category.

With Vela, you can get this done one at a time, instead of trying to edit thousands of products one after the other.

A task that you cannot complete until hell freezes over! 😂

So, if you want to make bulk edits on 100 listings, you can do it one task at a time and quicker too. You can first of all perfect the product title to your befitting taste, then move to another task.

This, would in no small way, boost your productivity level, and speed things up. It sure is better than you have to chip and chop things over and over again – for hundreds of listings.

For me, I majorly use Vela to edit the product description for my face mask product listings.

Once the face masks from Gearbubble have been updated, the description must be changed. This used to take me a whole lot of time before.

Sometimes, I might even hire someone to get it done for me. But ever since I found this tool, I can personally edit the descriptions very easily using its find & replace function.

Vela is built for Etsy users. It can also be used on Shopify. So, if you have a Shopify shop, you can easily make edits across various sales channels at a go.

With Vela, you can typically make bulk edits on your listing titles, descriptions, categories, photos, tags, materials, sections, price as well as SKU (Stock Keeping Unit).

When it comes to getting prepared for special holiday sales, Vela can come in handy for helping you tailor your listing to suit the occasion, festival, or the right holiday attribute.

So, instead of going through all your product listings to add a single new keyword, you can just make a simple edit across all listings.

Works like the wave a magic wand!

Also, it is noteworthy to mention that PODTurbo can’t help with these updates. You cannot bulk edit these attributes through the API, so I found that this tool can solve this for me quite easily.

Vela is also good for SEO. This is because it allows you to make quick changes upon gaining new knowledge on how you can make your Etsy SEO much better.

It also goes a long way in boosting your ability to create a buyer-focused listing from time to time. You can hop on trendy keywords and tags quite easily now, knowing that all it takes to join the bandwagon is a few clicks.

Vela is a powerful tool that you should consider using if you want to make good sales this year’s BFCM.

HOW TO USE VELA TO BOOST SALES ON THE COMING HOLIDAYS – The BFCM

The BFCM for 2020 has been slated to hold from November 27th to 30^th.

After Thanksgiving, the next couple of days are considered the biggest sell-out days in online shopping and revenues. People want to buy it! Whether it’s face masks, mugs, or other items, there is a huge sense of purchase on everyone.

And with Vela, your job as a POD seller just got easier. Hopefully, your pocket grows bigger.

Here are three major ways that you can make use of the bulk editing power of Vela to your advantage in preparation for this year’s BFCM:

1. Use the right keywords

You see, keywords are not just another fancy word for cool-sounding phrases or catchy string of words. Technically, they are words that describe the product on your listing. It is also the search term that buyers use when trying to find products or services.

If you happen to rank well for a particular keyword, it means that whenever anyone searches for that word, your product would appear on the first page of the search result.

With this said, during the BFCM, the chances of keywords or key phrases like “Funny Dog Designs for mugs” trending these days are very slim.

It doesn’t mean that some buyers might not search for this. But there would be rather insignificant compared to the millions of people searching with the keywords “Black Friday”, “Cyber Monday”, “Black Friday Gifts For Dog Lovers”, “Cyber Monday Dog Mug”, and so on.

So, you might want to use Vela to bulk edit your product listing before that time. Add holiday-based keywords to your product title, tags, product description, as well as every other part of your listing that needs to be tailored to that demand.

This would – in no small way – make your products visible when people are searching with that keyword.

2. Bulk edit the Holiday attribute

When listing your product, you should use the holiday attributes. When you make use of attributes, you are giving your product with a distinctive and organized characteristic.

Attributes take the description of your product one step further. Attributes also boost your visibility and increase your chances of having a higher rank on search results.

Primarily, the choice of your category or subcategories ought to influence the kind of attribute you add to your listing. However, when it comes to making sales for the holiday period, the best attribute to give to your product is the obvious one – ‘holiday’!

Attributes work hand in hand with your tags to further influence the placement of your item of the Etsy search result. While they are separate from tags, they both provide buyers with the most relevant details about the kind of product that they are looking for.

During the holidays, people are looking for holiday items. Hence you can set the attribute to Halloween, Christmas, New Year’s, or any holiday that fits the season.

Using Vela, you can easily change it before the holiday so that your products will be visible when people begin to search for these keywords.

3. Edit Product Price

And by ‘edit’, I mean increase.

If you want to make more money off the holiday craze, you might want to consider an alteration in your price.

This is because the products are selling at a fast rate and most buyers are not concerned about the prices as much as they would have been on a normal day.

Personally, I increase the price of my products every time during the Q4. People will surely look for products and we can make more profits easily.

With Vela, you don’t have to go through all the rigors of canceling and editing. You can get this done in no time.

And when the holiday is done, if you still feel like you want to reduce the price, knock yourself out!

THINGS THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT USING VELA

There are a lot of people who make use of Vela but still have not gotten a grasp of its full potential. Others end up with a series of questions after their first use of the bulk editing app.

So, in this section, I want to randomly touch on the key things that you need to know about using Vela. Hopefully, I might provide an answer to the question that you have.

And if I do not, do not hesitate to leave me a comment!

When you’re making your edits on your Etsy listings, you must move your drafts to Etsy first. This is to ensure that your progress is saved regularly.

Also, because your Etsy listing would not be temporally disabled during the edit, there is a likelihood that a buyer who stumbles on your page in the middle of your edit might find it really weird and strange.

For instance, if you suddenly added a new option in your description but such addition is yet to cut across all of your other listings, buyers will get confused.
Make ‘sync updates’ your buddy! How would you like to work on an edit for over four hours only to hit the “back” button before going live with your edits? That’s all of your progress, gone! You don’t want that. Even the thought of it is agonizing.

So, endeavor to always hit the little button on the top left of your screen that says, “Sync Updates”. This would save your progress and update your live Etsy page.
When you add new listings, they are a high chance that it would not reflect on Vela instantly. So, you need to first open an existing listing, then hit the “Sync Updates” button. This would refresh the Vela system’s information and update your shop listing data with the new listings.
Here is a piece of crucial information! Vela is NOT for creating new lists. It is not a listing platform. It is merely an editing suite used for making changes to already existing listings. So, you cannot create new listings on Vela. You can only edit the ones created on Etsy already.

IT’S A WRAP…!

If there is one thing I love more than sharing all of these juicy secrets and tips with you, it’s seeing you making good use of them. The BFCM is a couple of weeks away. So, you still have ample time to start making your preparations.

Start by getting your Etsy SEO right. Make sure that your product titles follow the rules of thumb for the Etsy product title. Also, ensure that you have the right keywords for the holiday. Endeavor to put all of these keywords in your product description, tags, and every other essential part of your product listing.

With Vela, life as a POD seller can be simpler. You can do more in less time using this bulk editing tool. Vela is free, and it offers great, time-saving features for Etsy product listing editing. Having a working knowledge of Vela will not only help you get prepared for big sales, but it would also boost your SEO and digital presence.

The ability to edit a lot of product listing at the same time sounds like a dream come true. Well, that is what it is. A dream that actually came true! Vela gives you all that you need to put yourself in the right position in preparation for the BFCM slated to hold from the 27^th to the 30^th of November, 2020.

So, you still have time, I guess.

Don’t just close this page and go on with your day. The best way to have a full grasp of the power of Vela is to try it out on your own. That is when you can truly appreciate the cool features of this great application. Impute the speed of technology into your title, tags, and description editing once and for all.

Vela has an easy-to-use interface. So, you don’t need to exceptionally tech-savvy to make use of it. Every man, woman, and even dogs can use it.

If you have any questions or further recommendations, kindly share it in the comment box!

—Bank K.