Guide to keeping customers in your shop

How to encourage customers to *stay* in your shop.

The various ways of promoting are all geared to getting more traffic (potential customers) to your shop.

I can guarantee you will have more traffic. I can't guarantee you will get sales.

However, here are a couple of tips which might encourage your visitors to stay in your shop and look at other items you have for sale.

The first idea is called "Price anchoring."

The basic idea is that customers see something expensive in your shop and decide not to buy it, but they will decide to buy something cheaper.

I could go into a long explanation of the psychology of how people get fixed ideas (anchors) of a reasonable price in their minds. Here's an example from Apple, discussing new products for which consumers have no clearly established anchor price.

Ariely’s research shows that anchor pricing for such products is quite fungible (interchangeable), and marketers would do well to avoid inadvertently establishing a low anchor price.
If a higher anchor price can be established, then offers involving lower prices will be attractive to consumers.
Apple’s iPhone marketing has done a good job of using anchor pricing to keep demand strong. When they first released the iPhone, it was at a price of $499 to $599, establishing the initial anchor for what the unique product should cost.
To the chagrin of early adopters, they dropped the price by $200 after only a few months - creating an apparent bargain and stimulating more sales. When they introduced the iPhone 3G, pricing was as low as $199, and they sold a million phones in three days.

So you can see that starting with too LOW a price causes difficulties in our shops.

In the Featured section of our shop, try listing one item at a high price, and have lower, more usual prices, for the other two featured items.

I do this, I have no idea if it works. I also swap my expensive featured item.

The second way of encouraging potential customers to stay in your shop is to add enticing, clickable links at the bottom of each entry.
Here are some of mine:

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See another boat themed card:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_list_1&listing_id=1...
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Check out another doll Greetings card:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=28071666
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See another floral Greetings card:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22447767
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Note: whenever you use an etsy link in your listings, it will be clickable!


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This article was written by Linda, of LindaButterfly.etsy.com. Linda is a retired science teacher, using art to express herself, and enjoying creating the art for her two Etsy shops. She is married with one adult son.