Useful Etsy Features

I've written before about Etsy Hacks and how useful they are but today I want to talk about digging into Etsy's options that you may not know about that make running your shop much easier.

Your Etsy
By default clicking the "Your Etsy" link takes you to your currently listed items if you're a seller. If you go to the Account link and click the Preferences tab you can change this to go to your Sold Items instead.

Message to Buyer
A thank you note is always nice to send your buyer but you can do so much more with this message. I include a link to my newsletter which is simply using Feedburner to turn an RSS feed into an email. You can use your shop RSS to do this, I went a step further and used RSSMix to combine both my shop feed and my studio blog.

Download Shop Data
I use spreadsheets for all my accounting including tracking inventory. Etsy added this option fairly recently and it makes inventory much easier. I download my entire shop as a .csv at the beginning of each month which combined with the data from the beginning of the previous month and my sold items I have most of the inventory data that I need with a minimum of fuss. You can find your shop data under Shop Settings -> Options and click the Download Data tab.

Download Sold Items
At the beginning of each month when it's time to do my accounting for the previous month I download the .csv file for my sold items form the previous month. This file has a wealth of information about your sold items that you can use, price, shipping, sales tax, coupon codes used, customer names and addresses, and more.

Download Etsy Bill
Another useful accounting download on Etsy is your Bill. It has a breakdown of every fee and payment you've made for a month. You can find it under the Your Bill link then click the month you want and scroll to the bottom of the page.