SHIPPING + ICP DETAILS

Q: Priority shipping + Does ICP ship outside of the usa?

A: ICP Automatically ships with priority shipping (determined by weight), when you have 5+ skinny tumblers in an order, 4+ frosted cups, or 5 ornaments. If someone orders with priority shipping on orders with these numbers, I wouldn’t select priority inside of ICP, since it’ll automatically be sent with priority. // ICP only ships inside of the US, so set your shipping profiles accordingly.

CALCULATED SHIPPING

80% or more of your orders will be single unit orders, so the margin will be there for these. When you do get a bulk order, your margin will go down if you’re using calculated shipping. On your listings where they do order in bulk, you may need a backup pricing structure in place there with the fixed $5.99 price point and different costs for your products. Also, international sellers will be unable to use calculated shipping.

ICP sellers sold thousands of these now with calculated shipping set to priority and have not had any push back from customers regarding the orders shipping ground (you, as the seller, not selecting priority inside of ICP). Jesse said it’s really up to you as a seller to decide the best route, and if you do start to receive any sort of push back from customers you can re-evaluate from there.

If you want to check your shipping expenses at bulk, go into a separate browser or log out of Etsy, go to your shop, add your item to your cart, increase the quantity to 6, 7, 8 etc. See how much the shipping will be. Go to ICP. Add the same quantities to your cart, cost compare to see how much you’ll be making.

Jesse still thinks that calculated shipping on the 40s is the best route. The pros outweigh the cons because if you cap out at 5.99 you will have to increase your price, so that impacts your click through rate and it will hurt your conversion.

other pod gurus advise launching 10-15 designs per micro market, why do you not?

First off, they’re going to be roughly the same SEO. The keyword real estate you’re landing on is going to be the same. What happens if you divide your clicks, your favorites, and your sales across 10 or 15 listings? What happens then? You’re going to get a 1/10th of the rank driving power. Also, from a prioritization standpoint, if I was to spend time launching 10 listings in the same micro market, I could have gotten more listings up in other micromarkets. Your entire business is based on search volume. If you’re sitting on the same exact search volume over and over, you’re wasting your time. I’d rather take one micro market (search volume), compartmentalize it, maximize it with an optimized listing, and move on to the next.

SEO for ornaments - it’s a lot of overlapping terms right?

Ornaments is a product type where there’s a lot of stacked search volume that intermingles across the whole product type. 150-200 micro markets that will be worth your time. Likely closer to 150. New home ornament, first Christmas married, etc. Main micromarkets where there’s a lot of search volume. We do launch multiple listings for those large micro markets, because we can take different angles with designs and keyboarding due to the sheer abundance of search volume that sits there.

slack - how do I access channels?

Click the dot dot dot on the left bar, select Channels & join any product category channels or other ones you find pertinent!

sHOULD I MAX MY AD BUDGET?

Yes and as soon as possible - before Q4. Watch the ads section of the course, but you want to limit the changes you’re causing with the Etsy algorithm, so max it now so it doesn’t go into a learning phase right when we go into a big season. Etsy will have to relearn how to index you and how to spend your dollars across your listings. You’re going to be turning off your poor performers anyways, so don’t worry about that.

EFFICIENCY TIPS

The least efficient way to do the process is to design, mockup, seo, list. It’s much more efficient for most people if you take a few days to design say 20-25 designs. Then do all the mockups. Then do all the SEO research, then list them all. This is batch working, and it’s allowing your brain to stay in one lane for a while and get in a groove before moving onto the next piece of the puzzle. With that being said, some people prefer to work linearly, you just have to figure out what’s the best method for you.

You also can get into a groove or flow with a category. When you craft your sprint list, sort it by category such as professions, or names, or animals etc. There will be overlap with those kinds of designs that are similar and it allows you to get more done. Hand select ahead of time what you’re going to tackle.

Sunday Resets - for most it’s Sunday night, but it can be any time during the week where you map out your week very thoroughly. For your sprint list, you would write down exactly which micro markets you planned to design for / mockup / seo / list for that week. In order to pull this off what do you need to accomplish on each day of the week. You can also do a mini version of this every evening before the next day. It helps to glance at the micro markets you plan to launch the following day. Your brain will start processing through them before you even start.

ORDERS ARE SLOW

July and August are the slowest months, really the time when a lot of people check out instead of pouring into building. The work you do will be amplified in November and December. You just have to dig that well now.

HELLO CUSTOM

If you’re slow now with orders, just maximize your output. Don’t worry about linking to Hello Custom until the end of October or when something starts selling or taking off. Focus on output before that point.

SKUS

Watch the SKU tutorial in the ICP dashboard.

can i put my own twist on jesse’s method

That’s the worst thing you can do. If you sit in the middle or do a hybrid method, it won’t work nearly as well. Go all in on it. Throw everything you knew from before out the window. Relearn. Go slowly. Follow it to a T. You’re playing for the long term not the short term. Slowing down is the best thing you can actually do. Your entire business is based on search volume. Main metrics: click through rate, conversion rate. If yours is higher, you win. Etsy pushes you. If you do everything in full but at the end do a slight pivot, your click through goes down and your rank goes down and you go further down on the page. Don’t cut corners. We don’t want a ton of listings that sit in the middle or do nothing. We’d rather have dozens of listings out the right way and have our business explode. Our business is based on an algorithm. So if we are half a percentage better in any direction, it goes up and if we are worse, it plummets. It will make or break our business. When you do all of these things right, you get a disproportionate reward and outcome. It’s 10x, 100x. That is the difficulty. You can be right ahead of that. You unlock all of your potential. Don’t be in the tedious cycle of not knowing this in full. Do the right things. Once you know it and do it and see the results, you can then replicate it with the next product type you launch. Slow down and do it the right way.

INCOGNITO

To determine true rank (where products are showing up in search) and when you are doing micro market research, you need to use an incognito window. Once you make a click into something, Etsy will start using that data to feed you specific listings, thinking you’re the buyer. So as you continue your research, make sure you open a new incognito page entirely, not only just tab. Exit out > file > new private window.

SEARCH TERMS INSIDE OF ADS - DO I TURN THEM OFF?

We still aren’t 100% sure if turning these off actually does anything because some sellers toggle off terms and later they will go check and the term will still be appearing inside of the search terms and will be turned on. It could still be a trial run for Etsy. So for example, if you’re showing up in search for “birthday gift” or some term that’s super broad, that is wasting your ad spend, you could remove this term from your title and tags and let Etsy resort you in the algorithm. This will likely do more for you than turning it off in the search terms. You can go check what terms you’re ranking for by digging deeper in incognito mode, searching up the term you’re suspicious about, scrolling through the pages to see if your product is showing on the first few pages, and if it is, remove those terms from your title and tags. But ultimately, we suggest managing the ads on a macro level and turning the entire ad on or off. This is why making sure your SEO is relevant and dialed in is of utmost importance. So you don’t become an ad waste machine.

SHOULD I TRY A/B TESTING ON SOME LISTINGS?

Jesse suggests from his experience not doing A/B testing, because we don’t want to compete against ourselves and take all of the super valuable metrics away from my other listings - click through rate, conversion rate, favorite count, even just views and impressions. These will stack over time and we don’t want to divide that. If I lower that, I’ll lower the rank-driving power. I may divide it in half, 3x, 4x, 5x. There’s a massive pie out there, don’t just fixate on a little breadcrumb inside of the pie. New ground, new search volume.

ETSY KEEPS CHANGING THE FORMATTING OF THE THUMBNAIL THEY DISPLAY

Etsy changes things around often. Right now they’re trying out a more portrait oriented thumbnail, similar to Pinterest. It could just be happening for a short amount of time. But the MOST important place you need to optimize for is in search (not your storefront) + on mobile. That’s where most of the shopping takes place. So check how your thumbnails are showing up there. But don’t change everything right now. Hang tight until we see if they’re keeping this formatting or not.

CUT OFF FOR CHRISTMAS?

ICP will finalize this closer to time, but in general think of a 3 day processing time + 5 day shipping window. So about 8 days before Christmas Eve. Also remove weekend days. It’s usually around December 13th or 14th, but we will let you know when we get closer.

HOW TO CONTACT ICP SUPPORT

chat@innercircleprints.com

support@innercircleprints.com

or go through the chat bubble

or DM Support on Slack

Troubleshooting

Impressions but no clicks, something is off with your front photo or design.