Has The Holiday Shopping Season Begun??

I don't really pay much attention to the financial news, but I've been told that the economy is turning around a little. People are beginning to re-invest in the stock market and retail companies are doing better...that's what the latest financial indicators are saying .

Well it might be true! My indicators seem to be mirroring what the financial markets are saying. In my last entry I blogged about how the last show I did exceeded expectations. During the week, I noticed a little bit of added traffic to my Etsy.com store and over the weekend, my numbers (according to my shop analytics) hit a couple all-time highs for visits and page views, with Sunday's numbers going over 1,000 visitors for the first time.

Another indicator for my store is in the "hearts" I am receiving in my shop. I have always found that a positive indicator was to see buyer-only hearts and the last 10 shop-hearts I received, 5 of those are from buyers-only. So buyers are visiting Etsy and surfing the site. (when I refer to "buyers" I mean registered Etsy members that do not have a shop on Etsy) A couple of my individual items have also been "hearted" recently by Etsy buyers.

One of my upcoming craft shows has a blog that includes the vendors and those with websites are back linked. My Etsy shop analytics have shown visitors from the shows blog to my site, and this weekend, I received a handful of visitors from the blog.

Maybe last weekend's show was than just a better than expected show. Perhaps people are beginning to purchase gifts for the holidays earlier and spreading out the cost of their holiday shopping over a few months, rather than a 5 or 6 week period of time. Maybe we are just beginning to see a light at the end of this horrible economic tunnel.

It is certainly something to consider as I start getting my inventory geared towards the holidays. The "indicators" seem to be telling me I need to step up my plans for the remainder of the year and try to take advantage of what seems to be many buyers coming back to Etsy.com.
Hopefully the worst really is over and we all get to finish the year off with a couple solid months of sales.

'til next time...

R