If you can’t answer these three questions about your own shop in two minutes, your customer won’t be able to answer them at all. And if they can’t, they won’t buy.
The three questions:
Who is this for?
What changes in their life after they buy it?
Why should they buy from you and not your competitor?
If you have an Etsy shop, treat this as an exercise. Two minutes, all three. If you can do it, you pass. If you can’t, you’re guessing and hoping the guesses work.
Here’s why each one matters.
Who is this for
If you’re selling to everyone, you can’t answer this. And if you can’t describe the specific person who buys from you, their situation, what they care about, why they spend money, then you also can’t know what your product changes for them.
What changes in their life
People don’t buy products. They buy a change in their situation.
Think of a bathroom cleaner advert. It doesn’t open with the bottle. It opens with a dirty bathroom and a frustrated woman who is tired of scrubbing. The product isn’t cleaner. The product is her not being frustrated anymore.
Your Etsy listing works the same way. A wedding invitation isn’t paper. It’s a bride who wants her wedding to look how she imagined it. A fitness planner isn’t a PDF. It’s someone who has tried and failed three times and wants a structure that finally holds.
If you can’t name the change, you’re selling an object.
Why you and not your competitor
You’re not the only person trying to solve this problem. So what’s your reason?
It doesn’t have to be a better product. It can be narrower. Instead of wedding invitations, wedding invitations for small home weddings. Instead of fitness plans, fitness plans for people with twenty minutes and no gym.
Same product category, but suddenly you’re the obvious choice for a specific person rather than one option among two thousand.
That’s the job. Not making something better than everyone. Making something that’s clearly for someone.
So before you ask how to get more sales, answer these three. Most shops that aren’t selling fail at question one, and everything after it depends on getting that right.