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An Easy, Step-by-Step Guide to Downloading & Analyzing Your Etsy Shop Sales

As small business owners, we are swimming in a deep sea of numbers, stats, and financial data on a daily basis (whether you choose to ignore this sea or not is a different story!). Luckily, what you may not know is that Etsy makes it super easy for shop owners to download their sales info in order to calculate their net income in a relatively painless process.

download your etsy csv file sales

You can download your sales data from Etsy on an annual or monthly basis and quickly export this info to a spreadsheet, where it can be sorted, filtered, summed, and utilized with other data. This is a quick and easy way to calculate all sorts of helpful numbers, including your total sales and shipping, which will be especially helpful for tax time.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to download your sales data from Etsy, and what to do with it once you’ve got it (please note that I use Excel for my spreadsheets):

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

 

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’ll then see a screen that looks something like this:

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

There are lots of different things you can do from here. Etsy offers several items for download, including a spreadsheet of the listings you currently have for sale, your orders by item, your orders by total, your direct checkout payments, and your direct checkout deposits. Read the descriptions to see what else you might like to download. For now, we’re going to use the orders download to calculate our total sales.

Etsy also gives you the option of downloading any of these spreadsheets for a specific month of a year, or for an entire year. Right now, we’ll download all of our orders from last year.

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

downloading etsy sales step4 copy

Since I’m using Windows, I’m going to open my file in Excel. From here on out I’m going to give you some step-by-step instructions on how to format and set up your sales data in Excel. You can obviously format it however you’d like, this is just what makes sense to me, and may be helpful if you’re an Excel novice.

After you’ve got your file open in Excel (should automatically open if you selected “open” in the previous step), let’s first make the column widths all pretty so we can actually read all this data.

downloading etsy sales step5 copy

Now we’ll add filters so we can better analyze all this nice data.

downloading etsy sales step6 copy

Etsy gives you a lot more information here than you probably need, like the names and addresses of all your customers. While the ship state might be helpful to filter for sales tax purposes, we can hide a lot of columns to make our data more manageable. If we decide we need it later, it’s easy to unhide a column.

downloading etsy sales step7 copy

I like to freeze my top row so that as I scroll down I still can refer to the column header to know what I’m looking at.

downloading etsy sales step8 copy

Then we format all our financial data to actually look like money rather than just a number.

downloading etsy sales step9 copy

Now it’s time to use a simple formula to get some great data, like our total sales, total amount we got paid for shipping, sales taxes collected, and credit card fees.

downloading etsy sales step10 copy

Excel makes it easy to use the filter function to sort by all sorts of things. Here, we can put our sales in chronological order. We could even choose to only look at one month or one quarter’s worth of sales (also helpful for quarterly tax returns or payments). We can use this function to look at only paypal sales, only international sales, only sales over or under a certain dollar amount…the possibilities are endless.

downloading etsy sales step11 copy

Let the big green letters below represent the following:

downloading etsy sales step12 copy

Don’t forget that your gross sales on your tax return should include everything you got paid for shipping as well. You’d report A + B as sales on your tax return. E, your credit card processing fees, would be a tax deduction.

You can copy F, your Etsy net sales, to your personal bookkeeping spreadsheet and then add in any other revenue streams and subtract all your other expenses to get your business’ true net income.

So there you go, a step-by-step guide on how to utilize this wonderful asset that Etsy provides for us! If you didn’t know this existed, I hope you found this helpful. You might also want to check out our ongoing Etsy Shop Stats series of articles to get help on another free asset that Etsy provides!

Do you have any questions on how to download and intrepret your Etsy sales spreadsheet?

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the etsy seller spreadsheet by paper + spark

Pinterest Thursday: Ring Display Box Tutorial

I’m so excited to share my Pinterest Thursday: I Tried It! Project with you all today.
In preparation for my upcoming craft shows, I’ve given a lot of thought to how I can display my jewelry at my booth.  Since I’m sort of just testing the waters here, I don’t want to spend too much money on jewelry display items and new pieces.  So, I’ve been trying to figure out inexpensive ways to set up my booth and show off my inventory while still having a cute, unique, attention-grapping display.  I’ve been gathering ideas at my Craft Show Display Ideas board on Pinterest (check it out!).
I’ve got of all sorts of frames and boards and foamy things to hang my necklaces and earrings from, but rings are a different story.  Bring in this wonderful little pin I found:

The pin is for a tutorial on how to make your very own ring display box/tray/thing from a cutlery tray.  Now rewinding, when we first moved into our house, I bought a new cutlery tray for the kitchen, only to find that it was slightly too big to fit in our drawer.  I threw it in the back of my car to eventually return to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but let’s face it, that place can sometimes seem like the 6th circle of hell, and I don’t like going in unless I have $250 lying around that I want to throw away.

Thus, much to the annoyance of my husband, I never made it around to returning the cutlery tray.  Fastfowarding, when I saw this tutorial, I was like, AHA!  Finally something I can do with that tray!  Now I can make a super cheap ring display box AND avoid ever stepping into Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

The main two items you need are any sort of cutlery tray type thing, or just a plain tray, and some upholstery foam, which I found at Joann.

Some scissors and a box cutter or a knife are also helpful, along with some relatively thick fabric.  If your fabric is too thin, you’ll be able to see the green foam through it.

Use your scissors or a knife to cut out foam pieces to fit in the cutlery tray divisions, or, if you’re lucky, one big piece for a regular ole tray.  In the pinned tutorial, she uses just one big tray, so it’s a lot easier.  Sadly I was working with a tray with lots of divisions, so I had a lot of cutting to do.  I was sort of worried my final result might look odd with all the divisions, but I think it turned out just fine (you’ll see soon).

Here’s my box with the foam pieces fitted in.  I then took my box cutter (you could use a sharp knife too) and started slitting lines through the foam where I wanted to be able to sit the rings.  I sliced the lines about half-way into the depth of the foam, and I tried to keep my lines straight (but didn’t really succeed) and evenly spaced.

After I was done cutting lines, I took my fabric and cut it into pieces, and basically stuffed in into the sliced lines, folded it under the pieces of foam, and stuffed it all into the box.  I used the point of my scissors to really stuff the fabric in there and make it as taut as I could get it.  I chose a basic neutral colored muslin fabric.  I planned to paint my tray a bright green and I really wanted my rings to be able to pop against a non-distracting background. Obviously, you can have fun with the fabric and color scheme and make it match your bedroom or branding or whatever.

After spraypainting the tray green (and thus restuffing all the foam pieces), this was my final result:
Yeah, some of my lines aren’t straight, and my fabric is a little wrinkly in places, but once this baby is full of rings I think it’s going to look great!  I also love the green color.  I can’t wait to see it on my craft show table full of shiny things!  The only bad thing is that when I made it, I realized how many rings I need to make to fill it up!  I put EVERY ring I currently have for sale on it in this picture, and you can see it’s like….1/5th full!  I have a LOT of work to do!
I think this is a great project even for non-craft show vendors.  You could make one of whatever size you want for your own personal ring collection and show it off on your dresser or vanity.  It’d also make a cute handmade gift for a friend!
life by the book

Pinterest: I tried it! LSU Yarn Wreath

Today I’m trying something new!  Kristen over at bythebookpaper had the most excellent idea to start a weekly blog series on Pinterest.  If you’re like me, you may have a giant Pinterest board of DIY craft projects or recipes that you’re longing to try.  Well, Kristen has decided to encourage us to actually *do* all these pins that we’ve spent hours diligently pinning.  Each Thursday, I’ll try to post a pin from my Crafts & DIY pinterest board that I’ve successfully attempted (key word being “attempted”).

This past week, I tried to recreate a pin I’d been eyeing, and really an item I wanted to make for a long while:

yarn wreath pin from miss priss

 

I love yarn wreaths.  I have some others pinned also.  I’ve bought a few off of Etsy….they are just so fun and colorful and happy…they add a little bit of childhood cheer to your house or front door :)So this weekend is my mom’s birthday, and we happen to be traveling to Dallas for the LSU-Oregon season opener football game.  So I decided to make her an LSU yarn wreath based on my pin!

You can see I started out with pretty much the standard materials — a foam wreath form I got at JoAnn, some yellow felt for the pom pom flowers, yellow and purple yarn, a hot glue gun (represented by two hot glue sticks haha), and scissors (unfortunately not shown, but I think you can figure it out).

You can follow Mrs. Priss’ tutorial.  You simply wrap your yarn around your wreath form in whatever design or pattern you want.  I didn’t use an exact scientific method, just lots and lots of wrapping until everything looked relatively even.  It takes a long time to finish a whole wreath.  I must have watched 5 episodes of Buffy.  Now I understand why some people charge upwards of $50 for these babies on Etsy.  Happy birthday mom.

You can decide how you to finish of the ends of the yarn.  Simply tying it is an option.  I tied and then hot glued the knot for extra strength, but that gave the back of my wreath a slightly funky look.  You could even use pins to hold everything down if you wanted to.

Ta da!

And voila, a nifty cute lil LSU wreath specially for my momma.  I made the yellow pom poms with some felt.  Unfortunately I have no pics of the process, but that’s really easy also.  Just cut out two inch strips of felt (the longer =  the bigger the pom pom).  Fold in half and glue along the edges (not on the inside).  Then, make little cuts every half inch or so along the strip on the inside (non-glued side).  Start on one end of the strip and being rolling around and around the center, gluing where you want to, then glue closed.  Instant pom pom!

Now I’m excited to try more wreaths…one for every season and every holiday and some just for fun!

I hope that made sense, let me know if you have questions!  This concludes our very first Pinterest Thursday.  One pin down, many many more to go!

Want to join in?  Let me know what you’ve made from Pinterest!

Feel free to follow everyone’s progress by clicking the button bellow:

life by the book