Etsy sellers: the number 1 mistake I made my first year in business was saying yes to custom orders. I think all newbie Etsy sellers (and even some experienced sellers) go through that phase where you feel like you HAVE to say yes to anything that can earn you a bit of extra money. But the fact is: accepting custom orders is doing your business more of a hindrance than a help. Just because you sell on Etsy doesn’t mean you don’t have a ‘real’ business – and doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat your Etsy shop like a business.
Pros and cons of custom orders
Pros
- Can charge more than you normally would for a similar product to cover the extra time involved in creating a non-typical product
- Customers can give you product ideas you may not have thought of
- You can use the template from the custom order to create more products (which customers can’t customise – i.e. are sold exactly as you’ve designed them)
Cons
- Time intensive
- More expensive if you have to order in a special color or material to complete the order
- Usually a tight time-frame
- No economies of scale as you’re creating the product once
- A lot of back and forth emails with the customer
- Demanding customers – they are usually perfectionists!
- Customers may not be willing to pay a fair price, you could price too low and end up making very little (if any profit)
As you can see – there are definitely more cons than pros!
Why you should stop accepting custom orders
1. Usually under-price
I think all creatives do this – we under-price our work because we’re scared no one is going to buy from us if we charge a fair price. So we tend to price below what we should be charging for fear of loosing the sale. The problem with this is (especially for custom orders), if you price low, your competitors are going to price low and that’s a race to the bottom. it also creates a ‘free’ culture that NO sellers benefit from – pricing low is not a sustainable or profitable way to run a business.
Related: Thinking about opening a second Etsy shop? You should read this post of pros and cons first!
2. Customers have little appreciation
Customers don’t really understand everything that’s involved in a custom order. They just think, oh I want that changed, and the size of that reduced, and the font changed to this etc. and they think it’s just a quick 5 minute change. They often don’t realise how much is involved behind the scenes and that, you know, you do have other customers to serve and other products to make etc.
Obviously not every customer requesting a custom order is like this – some people that I worked with on customer orders were nice, lovely to work with people 🙂 but unfortunately from my 4 years of selling on Etsy, 90% of customers that request a custom order have little understanding or appreciation for the work involved in a custom order.
Related: Printable Craft Show Planner for Handmade Markets and Trade Shows (Editable)
3. People who request custom orders are not your ideal customer
Don’t waste your time on stingy people that don’t want to pay the true value of your product.
Don’t accept a custom order if your gut is telling you it’s going to be a waste of time just so you can make a bit of extra money. If you think the person requesting that custom order is likely to flake on buying the custom listing, don’t do it – TRUST YOUR GUT.
Some signs that should be a warning indicator to you that they’re going to flake:
- Too many back and forward emails
- Asking you to reduce the price
- Agreeing with on a price and then requesting additional changes after you’ve agreed the price
- Requesting (or sometimes even demanding) to see a proof before they’ll purchase (these customers are THE WORST they’ll usually want more changes made after you’ve made the proof and are those sort of people that are really hard to 100% please – if they can’t get exactly what they want 9/10 they’ll just not buy the custom order and stop replying to your messages. This is obliviously very disheartening if you’ve spent a lot of time making a proof (which in some cases, especially for digital products, basically involves making the entire product).
You’re not obligated to accept a custom order just because you have the ‘request custom order’ feature enabled in your shop. It’s your business and you don’t have to do that custom order (or any custom order for that matter).
Have you noticed that the shops with thousands of sales don’t accept custom orders? Don’t let customers ‘bully’ or ‘guilt-trip’ you into accepting their custom order (yes I have had this happen to me on numerous occasions, I even had to go so far as to place a sticky note on the side of my laptop that says NO to remind me). If the customer really likes your products, they’ll respect that your time is limited, and you need to use your time to create products that everyone can enjoy and so you can run a sustainable business.
I keep the ‘request custom order’ button enabled for me shop because some customers will come to you with suggestions for products you’ve been thinking about making and their request (especially multiple requests from different customers) ‘cements’ that you should definitely make that product. If you turn off the enable custom requests option, then customers are likely to think you’re not approachable and won’t bother messaging you with their ideas – which could be your next bestselling product!
Related: How to quickly & easily run a Black Friday sale for your Etsy shop
4. You lose economies of scale
The problem with custom orders is that once you do one, that customer is going to come back again and want you to do another custom order. And they’ll keep pushing and pushing you with as many changes as they can get you to make for as lower price as possible. You’ll find yourself going round and round in circles with a million emails going back and forth and so much time going to pleasing one customer with no time to actually focus on creating products that can be sold again and again, or on other tasks that will actually help grow your business.
Related: How to effectively use and make an Etsy shop banner (step by step video tutorial)
5. They always take a lot longer than you think
If you don’t already have a workflow set up for your business, I highly recommend that you do one. I have this workflow chart you can use, or the habit tracker pages of the Plum Paper Planner also work well, or you can hand-draw your own (I shared how to set one up in week 1 of the 52 planners in 52 weeks challenge).
So let’s take a look at everything that’s typically involved in a custom order:
- Answering emails
- Establishing what exactly the custom request is for/what it entails (which could take a few emails back and forth)
- Checking on your inventory and supplies to make sure you have enough in stock
- Possibly creating a sample/mockup and sending the customer photos of the mockup/sample
- Setting up a custom listing or invoicing direct
- Checking that the customer has paid
- Calculating cost (materials + shipping + labour + markup + packaging + shipping costs + payment processing transaction fees)
- Ordering in materials
- Creating the product (if handmade)
- Checking/testing the quality of the product and making sure there are no omissions or errors
- Packaging the product
- Going to the post office
- Sending tracking number to the customer
It sounds like a lot when we list it all out like that doesn’t it? The problem is that you’re doing all of this ONCE. Rather than achieving economies of scale by selling the same thing or making the same thing and setting up a production line, you’re losing a lot of time checking on supplies, making the product etc. And then there’s also always the risk that there was a communication breakdown and the customer isn’t happy with the product when it arrives and then they leave negative feedback. Which is very disheartening when you’ve spent hours on their custom order!
And here’s everything that’s typically involved in a custom order for a digital product:
- Answering emails
- Establishing what exactly the custom request is for/what it entails (which could take a few emails back and forth)
- If using commercial use graphics that you don’t make yourself, checking that you have some similar to what the customer is requesting
- Creating the sample/proof/mockup
- Setting up a template in the software program you use – such as the correct margins, custom page size etc. or modifying an existing product template
- Color matching (I found most people wanted a color change to match something they had such as a notebook)
- Checking/testing the quality of the product and making sure there are no omissions or errors
- Test printing (and ordering ink if your printer it out of ink)
- Converting to print friendly format e.g. PDF, JPG
- If it’s a PDF file, adding a password to prevent modifications/protect your intellectual property
- Combining the file/s into a zipped folder (sometimes more than 1 if there are a lot of files)
- Uploading the product to the server that hosts your digital files, or sending the files via a file exchange program such as We Transfer (which is free)
Think of all the things you could be doing in the same amount of time
Here are some things you can do in an hour which have a long term impact and benefits reaped over and over again, not just that one sale:
- Pinning a pin to interest – Pinterest is my number one referrer to my blog and I still get tons of pageviews from posts that have gone viral 6+ months ago (such as this post on how to set up a direct sales planner) drives traffic to my blog and hence my email list
- Keyword research. I shared how to do that using Marmalead and in the Google Adwords Tool to do Keyword & Market Research for Etsy Sellers
- Reaching out to other bloggers for guest posting
- Setting up a giveaway
- Prep for a Craft market or trade Shows (Editable)
- Writing a blog post or 2 – see this post > how to write and publish a blog post in 1 hour (plus a free printable blog post workflow checklist)
- commenting in Facebook groups (while traffic from Facebook is somewhat temporary, it does drive visitors to your site who otherwise wouldn’t know you exist so you’ll likely see an increase in the number of subscribers. If you post often enough in Facebook groups you’ll start to earn the reputation of being an expert in your niche and people will start referring you which in turn, will drive traffic to your Etsy shop or website). if you’re a fellow planner addict, I shared a roundup of 60 Facebook groups for planner addicts
- Learning how to take better photos
- Taking photos and editing them. See this tutorial on how to quickly edit & enhance photos for free and without using Photoshop
- Creating pinnable images of your products
- Book-keeping so you know exactly where your money is going, where to cut back, where you should be spending more, long term budgeting, tax planning etc.
- Work on creating a new product
Related: What Expenses Can I Claim? FREE Printable Checklist of 100 Tax Deductions and simple spreadsheets to keep track of business income and expenses for tax time
Realistically look at the time it will take to make the custom order before you rush to say yes right away. Make sure you take into consideration everything that’s involved, then deduct materials, selling costs etc. How much revenue are you left with?
How much money are you actually making from that custom order?
There are a LOT of things to do as an Etsy seller and online business owner. So custom orders that you make $5 profit on and don’t really enjoy creating? Yeah, not worth your time!
If we took say 10 hours you spent on that custom order and instead invested it in a product, you would get back a far greater return on your time. For example, it takes me approximately 150 hours to create a printable planner. If I accepted 10 custom orders at $40 each then that’s $400 now, but I could make a printable planner, sell it for $20 and keep selling it for years down the line – I’m going to make more money in the long run. And I think that’s the key thing most people miss: that you need to think long term, not just short term, if you want to grow a sustainable business.
Moreover, if you only have 20 hours a week to dedicate to your side hustle – do you really want to be wasting half of that precious time on a custom order?
Learn to say no
If you have accepted custom orders in the past, how did you feel at the end of the custom order, relieved it’s over or excited to do another one?
When you say yes to something you say no to something else.
You know what? It feels GOOD to say no to custom orders. I used to cringe and feel really bad, especially when you get those people with the sob story or the ones that are over flattering that try and guilt trip you into it. You started a business because you wanted to be the boss and call the shots right? So now is the time to put your foot down and say NO.
I maybe feel bad for about 5 seconds when I say no, and then I feel really glad. Because I know that I’ve made the right decision for the long term growth of my business.
Related: How to make a product catalogue/line sheet for your business (selling to wholesalers or retailers)
Some of the benefits of saying no to custom orders
- More time to work on other activities which have a far greater payoff (refer back to that list of more productive things you could be doing instead of working on a custom order)
- Less stress
- More time to teach yourself a skill that can be used later on such as learning how to make printables, write better product descriptions for your shop to convert browsers into buyers, or read a business book. Like my book: 54 Mistakes Etsy Sellers Make 🙂
Want to download a free sample of a few mistakes in from the book? Click here.
So next time you get a custom order request, here’s a script you can use
This is my personal email script:
‘Thanks for your email! Unfortunately I’m not accepting custom orders for the foreseeable future.’
Tips:
- Keep it short, people don’t want to hear your life story about why you can’t do their custom order because of xyz they just need a simple yes or no answer
- Make sure you link to any other related products that might suit them as you could still turn the inquiry into a paying customer (yay for upselling in an easy and non sleazy way!)
- It’s very important that you use ‘foreseeable future’ or some similar wording as if you put ‘at the moment’ people may reply with something like ‘ok great I’ll come back and email you in a few months’ time when you have more free time’ and you’re thinking ‘noooo, I didn’t mean that I was just trying to politely say no!’
I shared heaps more strategies for increasing sales, growing an Etsy shop and more advice on how to approach custom orders in my ebook: 54 Mistakes Etsy Sellers Make
Topics covered in the book include (but are not limited to) are:
– Ways you don’t even realize you’re turning customers away
– Fostering repeat business
– Competitive market research
– My step by step market research product viability process I use to determine whether a product is worthwhile or if it’s likely to be a flop
– SEO, social media & marketing you shop (what to do and what NOT to do)
– In-depth shop analytics analysis
– Simple changes and tweaks that make a big difference
– How to find your target customers
– How to make more money from the products you already have (and with minimal effort)
– Pricing
– Shipping
– Shop management
– Improving efficiency and workflow
– Product photos (mistakes that are so easy to fix and yet most people don’t do them)
– Product descriptions/sales copy
– How to convert browsers into buyers
– Bookkeeping
– Goal setting & business planning
– Key differences between hobby Etsy shops and business Etsy shops
– And much more top secret information!!
Also included are my favorite resources I’ve used to grow my Etsy shop, and which you can use to help turn your shop into a thriving business ?
Most ebooks will tell you what to do, but not HOW to do it. This ebook is different. I share all of the strategies I’ve devised from my 3.5 years of selling on Etsy. You know how to set up an Etsy shop, let’s move past the introductory stuff and get into the real strategies. This ebook does NOT have regurgitated information; these are my own personally devised methods, my tried and true formulas for generating a consistent healthy income online from my Etsy shops.
Related posts:
- How to effectively use and make an Etsy shop banner (step by step video tutorial)
- How to make a logo for your Etsy shop (with step by step video tutorial)
- How to make a product catalogue/line sheet for your business (selling to wholesalers or retailers)
- My simple and easy method for tracking product inventory using Excel spreadsheets
- How to use Google Adwords Tool to do Keyword & Market Research for Etsy Sellers
- How to quickly & easily run a Black Friday sale for your Etsy shop
- How to do market research for your Etsy shop or online business using Marmalead (review includes video tutorial)
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