Lessons

Lesson Info

Setting Up Your Etsy Shop

Where do you start looking for all of the information that you need in order to do your bookkeeping and run your shop effectively um I'd say the first place to start is your etc dashboard um you khun get to this just by clicking on the your shop lincoln the very top um this will be the very first thing you see under there and this is kind of your overview this is only part of the dashboard there's mohr information further down there um but it will show you it starts with your stats how many people have been looking at your shop? How many people have favored it? How many orders came in and you can choose what you see the stats what you see the stats for up here this is showing the last thirty days on git compares it excuse me to the previous thirty days on will also compared to the previous year if your shop has been open long enough which is kind of nice eh? So you can see over time how that's been this is for this is the dashboard for my sweetmeat shop um so you can see that over the ...

last month this is way down compared to last month which was christmas season and it's down compared to a year ago I don't think I have it is part of this presentation but in the bookkeeping for crafters class I showed a chart of my entire sweetmeats business not just on etc and it's a big hill with the peak around two thousand nine, two thousand ten and then it tapers off, which matches very well sweet meats are meet shaped pillows and plush toys. Sadly, they no longer exist. I shut that business down in twenty thirteen I have a new business will look at that later um, but I wanted to show you this because it has a lot of past data in it. It's the shop that I had since two thousand five on well, you'll see it very closely follows essentially the bacon trend. I started making these meat shaped pillows in two thousand four before there was even an indie craft trend, let alone a bacon and the mustache and of our old trend um and I had this company in this business for several years, and then all of a sudden bacon became the thing right? It was one of just it was everywhere um and when I saw that, I thought, well, that's it I'm not going to be able to keep this business forever now that this trend has gone huge in the indy craft world and then the year after in the broader world in general, people are going to start getting big and overload it's going to fizzle out um, it's time to estimate how many of these I'm going to be able to sell in the next few years and plan accordingly? So luckily because I was using a really good bookkeeping system I was able to fairly accurately predict how many toys I was going to need in order to sell out on not have to, you know have a bunch leftover sitting in a warehouse that I'm paying rent on while at the same time still filling all the orders for the people who are going to want them um so that's one really good reason to do bookkeeping is that you know, if there is a huge outside change in the world that affect your business if you've had a bookkeeping system that's really thorough up until up until that point you can use all of that information to make very deliberate decisions about what to do about it um in my case I knew that a you know, novelty meet pillow line was not going to be able to last forever so what did I want to do instead? Did I want to move into more service side things? Did I want to start up a totally different plush line? Um and I did a combination of those things and it allowed me the time to look at what I really loved about what I had been doing and figure out an alternative way to keep doing that in a more profitable way um any questions about the dashboard so far? This is just an overview um it also shows you your sold orders your listings how much is currently in your payment account and I we talked about how it generally automatically deposits to your bank account every monday here there's a button that says schedule earlier deposit for some reason you want to take all that money out earlier than monday you can totally do that it's your money it's your prerogative you do what you want with it you're in the boss of your money right here in the boss of your bank account that's also true on etc all right, so let's move on to the bill uh when you get to your bill um it will show you your current statement balance um you can sign up to pay your bill automatically. Um I have not done that yet. I'm not sure if I will or not uh it doesn't really get me anything, but I do want to point out and we'll talk about this in a couple of slides, this tiny little link you can't see it on the screen. Really? Um but when you sign up to pay your bill automatically, your card will be charged on the first of the month or when you reach your fee threshold the heck is a fee threshold um I'm going to show you in a minute but let's open up the december statement um this is for my current shop ah this will show you your listing fees ah I didn't have any december your transaction fees that's that commission that cut that as he takes off of everything you sell um private listing fees if you wanted to put up a custom listing for a customer and you didn't want someone else to be able to buy it uh edit fees that's if you go in and you edit like the quantity of something um renewal fees if you were new listing um renewing expired fees pretty self explanatory renewing sold I don't know why they break out the renewal fees until all these different categories like do you really care whether you renewed it because it expired because excellent maybe maybe you want to track that search ads and promoted listings on then shipping labels which is always the bulk of my bill right um and that got up to seventy dollars and seventy nine cents and then I have a payment of sixty two dollars in thirty nine cents and that gets into um the fee threshold thing so normally my bill just has a bunch of fees on it and then I paid at the end of the month and that's the end of that but because it was december and I was selling all kinds of stuff and shipping them out by december seventh really early in the month I hit my quote unquote fee threshold on all of a sudden I couldn't buy shipping labels anymore I was like what the heck is this? What do you mean? I can't buy shipping labels anymore why can't I buy shipping labels? There's hundreds and hundreds of dollars in my shop account from all the things I've already sold if you are worried about me paying my bill like why don't you just take some of the money out of there like what's the deal let's see, I don't understand so I made a bill payment for fifty one dollars in eight cents you know the amount that I had accrued so far on my bill s so that it could start printing shipping labels again because I was all annoyed um and apparently the, uh the fee threshold um it's something that they set at twenty five dollars when you first open your shop just period um and actually do I have this a little further down? Yeah let's cover the threshold now. Um so they have this, like really fancy set of graphs that they used to explain your feet threshold uh if you're a new cellar, it starts at twenty five bucks if you're an existing seller, they take the last three months of your bill and then they put it in one of these categories so if you're bill was if your average bill over the last three months was thirty five dollars you would fall between the twenty five and fifty the level so they would bump up your threshold to fifty bucks if it was a sixty five dollar bill they would bump it up to one hundred dollars so at the time my feet threshold was apparently fifty dollars um now it's been bumped up to one hundred because I triggered one of those bill payments um does he may have any questions about the fee threshold elect was asking five people voting on this does he have a standard percentage that they take us the direct check out order that very depending on the price of the goods um there is a direct checkout fee structure which I have a link to in the um resource sheet that's part of the bonus material so that is all laid out you can also search for that particular piece of information on the etc site yourself there is a hole a whole feature for the direct check out. Um I believe for the commission's it's generally a flat three and a half percent and very often for the merchant service fee for the direct check out it's also around three and a half percent so you're you're looking not including the listing fees um at seven percent right off the top that s he takes um which you know to be fair if it were sold online anywhere else someone else would be taking three percent here in three percent there. Uh so it's not, you know it's not really very different in terms of the amount of money that as he takes versus other merchant service providers or other online marketplaces it's just that they keep it all in house as much as humanly possible. Um that's a good question. All right, I want to go back a little bit because at the bottom of this bill page it was too long to show because it was december december bill so he's really long november kind of two there's a link to download your bill as a csp comma separated values document which basically means downloaded as a spy freshii so this will show all of the items in that bill in a spreadsheet which is really nice. Um if you want to see it all you know in a copy and paste herbal form for your ledger first of all, this is also the kind of, uh, file that you would be able to import into other bookkeeping software. Um and again on the resource is cheat I have a list of bookkeeping software that is especially good for handmade artists um these air programs that most people on etsy like to use either because they integrate directly um, with etc, which is nice, because then it just downloads all that data for you don't even have to go this step. Um, or because it handles your inventory and your transactions pretty seamlessly. Um, that's not to say that. You know, everyone will be able to use a particular piece of software, and it will work for everything, especially if you have different businesses or different income streams. I have a friend, um, rosalie gayle. She makes shower art. Um on etc. I think her story is called ugly baby it's really funny, she's a comedian, and so her art is really funny, too. And so she has the etc store she sells at craft fairs. She has a retail shop that she co owns with another person, and so for the etc stuff. She uses one bookkeeping software, and then she uses a spreadsheet for the stuff that she sells, uh, through her store that she co owns. And then I think she imports or, like, manually enters her craft their stuff into one or the other's of these, and then combines them all into one monthly report. And so it may be that you have to use a couple different systems altogether and kind of put the pieces together, but, um bill's resource is or a good place to start and of course the ledgers that I have put together for you guys as part of the bonus materials is also a really nice place to start. I built those from scratch for my business it includes both etc and my own online shop and craft fairs um so those air basically made four crafters already it includes that crafters chart of accounts already in it which of course you can alter to suit your business and we'll talk more about that in the next segment. Um but that's a really good place to start if you haven't used any kind of bookkeeping, software or system yet um and then once you understand how all that stuff works together, it's really nice often to graduate to one of those programs that does maybe hook directly into etc and download all that data for you so that you know that everything is going in the right places and so you know that you're getting the reports that you need and finding all the information that's necessary um so let's keep going. We talked about, uh, fi thresholds let's look at orders um so when you visit your orders page, it will list of again this is that sweetmeat shop um, I'm showing you my very earliest orders because I think it's fun this is the first sale I ever made on its eve november twenty fourth, two thousand five um I didn't shit why didn't market is shipped until december thirtieth um because I didn't know that you had to do that I was new to etc um and at the time it didn't send like automatic shipping notices to the buyer you had to send an email this is on your way here is your tracking number it was all very, very manual back then um you could not buy a shipping label through it so you had to go to the post office like I don't think you could even buy a shipping label online yet period I think you just had to go show up with your package be like here it is it's a dress I need this much insurance and delivery confirmation and how much is that? And then sort of guess how much to charge people for shipping um it was a whole different world back then it was like the wild west of online indy craft everyone just sort of making it up as they go along and doing it all about him and which were used to anyway, right? We're all about d I y um this was back in the day when you reviewed your buyers and gave them feedback it wasn't just that they reviewed you, um and that was always a pain in the butt at the end of the month said, like, go into your feedback and it's silly. Okay, so I have to send feedback about this cellar, and I mean, this buyer and how they paid on time, and we're a good communicator, thank you very much for your purchase by they didn't even have batch feedback. You had to go in individually to every transaction, had the feedback. Um, but it was still so much easier than anything else that was out there yet. Um, so, uh, you have here the price that you charge, plus the shipping and the quantity on dh? Then you can if you want to open up the whole receipt that, like the buyer would see, you can click on the receipt to see that, um and that's sort of useful for being able to check on just one order at a time. Uh, but in general, when you're doing your bookkeeping, you're not going to want to scroll down in this, you're not going to want to click open every transaction. Um, so before we get to what the full orders page looks like, I just want to go through what it looks like, order port border per order if you have open ones, of course, um it will show you if you're sold out first of all you need to re listed it shows you the price of the shipping plus the total appear on then it gives you the option to purchase your shipping label right there which if you do that we'll take you to a page like this excuse me uh where um it will show you that this was paid via direct check out it's available in your shop payment account with links to all of that stuff and it will also show your actual shipping label like here's you charged eight dollars for shipping but you paid three dollars and forty seven cents for your label um so you'll see that you'll be able tio sort of track if you're charging enough for shipping based on how long it took you to put that package together how much did it cost to print out the label how much was it in the packing tape that you you know used to attach it how much we're the padded envelope of the box and all the other packing supplies eso when you add up that postage the three forty seven plus all of those other things including your own time to put that package together and then take it to the post office and ship it was eight dollars enough did that cover it? We're going to look more it at shipping in detail uh when we get teo ah future segment and then this is what it looks like when you've actually paid for that shipping label right here could see it a little bit bigger payment records are available in your shop payment account when it was paid et cetera so uh here again further down on the order pages you're shipping label details I don't think we need to go through that um here's the page for your shop payment account that we just talked about so this is where the money goes when you're taking direct check out payments that is etc is processing the credit cards the user chose direct check out as opposed to paypal or some other method like on a money order check um if you accept those things many people do not and this hold on to all of your sales all of your income until every monday when it sends you a deposit and it takes out its own fees quietly in the background and doesn't really say anything about and you have to you know, look at it later and realize what happened um so I love this you've got in your payment for order such and such you have the amount they show you the fees they show you how much it's he took out of it right for their commission a dollar twenty one this is your net payment um and then you've got three, seventy nine here um so then this thirty seventy nine not three seventy nine is what ended up in your bank account on our run ins with in my bank account hon january twelfth which I believe was a monday yeah um so when you are downloading your data in order tio uh phil stuff in and you can get to this from multiple places uh this is within your um your shop menu the your shop menu and we can look at that uh institute a little later uh you need to download two different things you don't have all your data in one place unfortunately um I mean you can download your currently for sale listings I don't find that personally terribly useful I just look at what I have up there but if you are managing a ton of listings at any given time like hundreds of them um and you need a quick way to sort them or figure out what's happening up there for an inventory check that's probably not a terrible idea and then you have all of these choices about other spreadsheets that you can download so you can download uh in order spreadsheet which looks like this um where it has all of the it has the number of items it has how it was paid um it has where people were located I mean has the actual names and addresses on here obviously I did not put this up here but what's most important to note especially if you're in the u s is where you're shipping to because that will determine the sales tax that you have to charge slash pay on this um I made a mistake and I didn't charge sales tax of these two people in california, but that doesn't mean that I don't send the sales I still need to send the sales tax in I'm just now eating that cost because I made that error on we'll talk about how to figure that out in a upcoming segment um it's got your card processing fi over there hey, now it shows me where it is now I can see how much they took out for that um how much they the customer was charged for the actual products how much they were charged for shipping what the total was and then the net order uh what this is not showing you is which products these were afraid that's a little annoying um but that does show you in the two to do so here on your etc bill, this is totally counterintuitive to me and one of the reasons why this was so confusing to me this is your etc bill this shows you the actual things that you sold so you can keep track of which products it was right and then in the in the spreadsheet for your orders it doesn't actually show you what you sold. It just says you sold one thing, he sold two things. So on here, um, you're actually seeing all of the stuff on your bill and all of those fees? Well, not all of your fees, your transaction fees, you're shipping labels and your commissions, and then the actual orders is what shows you not what you sold because that would make too much sense. Uh, but it will show you how many items, and then this is where you find that merchant service fee. So you need to download both of those or at least look at both of those in order to get the full picture of what you're making and where what fees you're paying? Um, I found this so confusing. What? I started doing my bookkeeping and they introduced this whole direct check out payment thing on day started taking over the shipping too. Suddenly, I didn't understand why things were showing up on orders, but not bills and vice versa. And it didn't seem to make sense how things were labeled. Um, but we're going to use thes we're gonna look at him. Um, so stay tuned for that.