The Complete Guide to Successfully Selling Stickers on Etsy in 2023
If you’re wondering how to make money selling stickers on Etsy, welcome to our easy step-by-step guide.
While humble in size, stickers – with powerful imagery and message – can transcend cultures. Whether for raising awareness for a cause or sharing the love of puppies, everybody likes a good sticker.
If you’ve ever dreamed of starting a small business with a big heart, perhaps the crafty world of Etsy is the best place for you.
It may seem challenging at first, but take heart – you don’t need any investment or in-depth entrepreneurial knowledge to start an Etsy sticker business. With Print on Demand, it’s much easier than you think.
That said, we’ll guide you through the whole process, bit by bit, helping you understand it thoroughly.
In this article, we’ll show you how to sell stickers on Etsy by covering all you need to know: how to perform market research, find a niche, create a design, make stickers with print on demand, open an Etsy store, and a wide variety of other topics vital for your success.
Table of Contents
- Research the Sticker Market, Identify Your Target Audience
- Find a Niche for Your Unique Stickers
- Create Your Sticker Designs
- Find Where to Create Your Stickers
- Open an Etsy Store
- List and Price Your Stickers
- Set Up Your Storefront, Take Care of Branding
- Don’t Forget About Etsy SEO
- Start Promoting and Selling Your Stickers
Is Selling Stickers on Etsy Profitable?
As eCommerce continues to grow, providing new avenues of opportunities for anyone ready to leave their 9-5 jobs, selling stickers on Etsy is a fruitful pursuit.
After all, despite their seeming simplicity, personalized stickers are an affordable novelty and no stranger to Etsy’s top-selling categories.
One of the latest Etsy star sellers – AcornandCrowStudio – does it with awe-inspiring success, securing 40,400 purchases by Etsy buyers in a month.
$191.1 million
The forecast reach of the global die-cut sticker market size by 2028
Lastly, Etsy itself remains as strong and promising as ever – the eCommerce marketplace in the third quarter of 2022 reported $594.5 million in revenue, beating their own expectations.
If you’ve got eye-catching design ideas, market your Etsy shop right, and keep your finger on the pulse of what’s trending, you’re sure to win over the hearts and minds of people worldwide.
Why Sell Stickers on Etsy?
With over 96.34 million active buyers on the marketplace, Etsy is a great place to start a sticker business.
When it comes to this particular niche, they’ve built an excellent reputation. Here are just some of its benefits.
- Vast existing market. Etsy has garnered a large audience throughout the years – it’s a go-to marketplace for anyone interested in buying unique products. Stickers are no exception.
- High visibility. On Etsy, stickers are highly visible. You can place them in various categories, adding tags for particular events or holidays.
- Customizable storefront. If you sell stickers on Etsy, you’re free to personalize your store however you wish. You can even add videos to your products, showcasing them in the best light possible.
In other words, Etsy is a beginner-friendly platform that gives a good starting point for anyone looking to make money selling stickers.
Things to Look Out for When Opening an Etsy Sticker Shop
While Etsy has a lot of positive aspects, to get the full picture, it’s essential to look at some of its negatives too.
- Increased competition. You won’t be the only one who wants to make money selling stickers. There are plenty of other sticker makers competing for customers.
That said, if you clearly define your niche – we’ll cover that further in our article – it’ll be easier to stand out from the crowd and make a profit.
- Etsy fees. How much does Etsy take per sale? Etsy has listing fees, transaction fees, shipping fees, payment processing fees, and others. The truth is, although small, they do add up.
While Etsy fees aren’t unreasonable – they’re the cost of the service Etsy provides – it’s something to keep in mind.
- Marketing expectations trap. While setting up and listing your products on Etsy is easy, avoid the pitfall of thinking that’s enough to get sales.
To make your stickers sell, you’ll need to optimize for the Etsy search engine and work on digital marketing, but don’t worry, we’ll show you how.
With this in mind, no need to get discouraged because Etsy is still a great platform for beginners.
When your business starts rolling, and you attract loyal customers, it’ll be easier to leverage the power of multichannel retailing and expand your sticker business beyond just Etsy.
Start Selling Stickers on Etsy Today!
How to Make Money Selling Your Own Stickers on Etsy?
With some research and planning, anyone can start printing stickers and selling them on Etsy.
It only requires a bit of knowledge about the basics of launching an online business: how to perform market research, find a niche, price your products, and a few other things we’ll guide you through in the following sections.
Research the Sticker Market, Identify Your Target Audience
Market research is necessary to learn how to sell on Etsy. If done right, you gain valuable insights into the industry, competition, and consumer sentiment. Without this research, your sticker business might never take off.
- Set a goal. Start by defining your goal: Why are you doing the research? What do you want to find out? How will this information help?
With clear motivation, you can avoid losing time and becoming distracted by information of little importance.
- Identify trends. Try your best to explore what’s trending: on a local and global level. Which stickers currently sell best on Etsy, Amazon, and eBay?
To see what people search for, you can use Google Trends, Semrush, BuzzSumo, or a wide variety of other online tools.
- Analyze your competition. Who are you up against? For example, study Etsy’s star sellers – learn from their success and heed their failures. What can you offer that they don’t? Do they mostly sell sticker packs, bundles, or individual products?
If you analyze your competitor’s products, communication, strengths, and weaknesses, you can learn to outdo them, winning over a share of their customers.
- Identify your target audience. When the above is done, you’ll get an idea of your potential customers.
To gain a better grasp, you can survey your social network, analyze competitors’ customer feedback, and gather information from social media, forums, and other online sources.
- Build buyer personas. These are market research-based representations of your potential customers. For example, K-pop Katie or Alt-rock Alan. They represent a segment of your audience and personify their key traits.
By understanding your target audience – who they are and what they love – you can create unique stickers tailored to their needs, preferences, and passions.
If you’re willing to put in the time and effort, with thorough knowledge of the sticker market, you can find what it’s missing, filling the gap with beautiful products nobody else has.
Find a Niche for Your Unique Stickers
Like everything on Etsy, the key to success lies in selling products people can’t find anywhere else. To create such products – in our case, best-selling stickers – finding a profitable niche is vital.
In a few words, a niche is a product that strongly appeals to a certain group of people. Everyone requires a different approach, whether they’re spiritual die-hard fitness fans, agnostic craft-beer-loving hipsters, or vegetarian van-life enthusiasts.
Plainly put, the narrower you go, the easier it is to entice these groups to make a purchase.
With a good niche, you can stand out from the competition, spend less on advertising, and earn more. When choosing one, there’s no better guide than your passion.
You can use Google Trends to check whether your ideas are popular enough to spend time creating designs. Here are just a few examples you can modify to fit the needs of your target audience:
- Round stickers with names, quotes, and memes
- Internet aesthetics kiss-cut stickers
- Tattoo-style durable vinyl stickers
- Organization and planner stickers
To learn more, our article – What Is a Niche? 5 Examples of Print-On-Demand Niche Ideas – gives a 101 on everything you need to know, including how to find a niche, the benefits of choosing one, and much more.
Create Your Sticker Designs
In the vast world of stickers, design is everything. To make money selling stickers on Etsy, you must create designs that outshine others.
You don’t need to be a seasoned designer to make your stickers stand out: graphic design skills aren’t mandatory.
If you’ve chosen your niche, coming up with a sticker design idea won’t be hard. A spark is all it takes to ignite a creative spirit. To draw inspiration, you can start by exploring sites like these:
- Dribble. A social networking platform, which you can also use to hire a designer, it has many great ideas.
- Pinterest. A visual discovery engine, often dubbed – The Home of Inspiration. With a wealth of sticker designs on the site, the “Aha!” moment won’t take long.
- Behance. A design portfolio platform where artists showcase their work. Good for both inspiration and hiring a talented designer.
While there are others, these are truly fascinating sites – they’re full of inspiration and perfect for kickstarting your creativity. That said, never plagiarize a design: use it as a starting point to create something even better, adding your personality and uniqueness.
When you’ve got a basketful of promising ideas, it’s time to bring them to life. With various tools at your fingertips, designing can be an exciting and rewarding experience. Here are just a few of your options:
- Canva. With Canva – a cloud-based design platform – making your stickers is easy. On it, you choose templates and play with shapes, illustrations, font, and color. In short, Canva is a fun and easy way to create your stickers.
- Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is a powerful tool, perfect for creating original graphics. While it takes a little know-how, it’s one of the best tools for creating stickers.
- Pixlr. A cloud-based design and photo editing tool that’s easy to use. With it, you can create stickers right in the browser.
This little list is by no means exhaustive, but we hope it illustrates the point: there is a wide variety of tools that you can use to create eye-catching designs.
Finally, for anyone looking for a shortcut – saving time, trouble, and effort – you can try out our Shutterstock integration.
Shutterstock has a vast collection of high-quality images, illustrations, and other visual assets that you can customize to your liking, quickly creating original stickers for your Etsy shop without any effort.
When you sell stickers with a design from Shutterstock, the production cost will contain a fee. To learn more about this option, our Help Center article about Shutterstock integration explains everything you need to know, including how to use it, the pricing, and more.
Quick Tip
Don’t limit yourself to a single product category, explore other Etsy shop ideas and add even more creative products to your Etsy store.
Find Where to Create Your Stickers
When it comes to making stickers, there are three main options. Let’s begin by looking at the old-fashioned way and then move on to the latest method.
- Create your own from scratch. This option comes with a few costs – time, money, and patience. To create paper stickers, you must invest in inkjet or laser printers, materials, and other tools. Additionally, shipping is on you, too.
- Use sticker printing services. You can order batches of stickers from a print shop that specializes in printing stickers, but you’ll need to handle shipping yourself.
- Try print-on-demand sticker makers. A beginner-friendly and cost-effective option. You can use a print-on-demand platform that offers various stickers ready for personalization. The best part? They ship for you.
With Printify, by simply signing up for a free account, you get access to a wide variety of stickers that you can easily customize with our Mockup Generator and add to your Etsy shop with just a few clicks.
You don’t need any up-front investment, and if you already have a few designs, you can easily start making stickers today. When you make a sale, we’ll print, package, and ship directly to your customer’s doorstep.
Quick Tip
While stickers are great, you can also sell printables on Etsy, thus appealing to a wider audience and further increasing your profit.
Start Making Money Selling Stickers on Etsy Today!
Open an Etsy Store
Etsy is famous for its easy registration: it’s the fastest and easiest route to sell stickers online.
To open your sticker shop on Etsy, you’ll first need to create a seller account. If you’ve ever created an Etsy account to buy a thing or two, you can use it to set up your store.
When you’ve signed in or registered, there’ll be a gray circle with a silhouette in the top right corner – click on it and choose Sell on Etsy. Then, you’ll land on the Sell on Etsy page. Click Get started to begin opening your own Etsy sticker shop.
Step 1: Shop preferences. Tell Etsy about you and your shop. Set shop preferences: language, country, and currency.
Step 2: Name your shop. When picking an Etsy shop name, you can be as creative as you wish. That said, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Try to make it:
- Easy to remember. Pick a memorable name; make it clear and catchy. Most importantly, clearly convey what you’re selling.
- Original. Name your store in a way that sets you apart from the competition, reflecting your unique style.
For inspiration, you can try Shopify’s business name generator or a wide variety of other tools readily available on the internet.
Step 3: How you’ll get paid. To get paid, you need to input your payment details and connect your bank account to your Etsy shop. Indicate whether you’re an “Individual” or a “Business,” fill out personal information, and select the country where your bank is located.
Your funds will be sent to your bank account weekly, every Monday. You can change this later by going to Shop Manager, then Finances, and finally to Payment Settings, where under Deposit Schedule, you’re free to choose between daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly deposits.
Step 4: Set up billing. Enter credit card details to pay for your Etsy fees. Enter your credit card number, CCV, expiration date, and the name on the card.
Step 5: Your shop security. As a security measure, Etsy requires you to set up two-factor authentication. Choose your preferred authentication method: an authenticator app on your Android or iOS device, a text message, or a phone call.
Step 6. Stock your shop. Lastly, add a product listing to your shop; it can just be a draft product, so don’t worry too much about the details. Afterward, click Open your shop to become an Etsy merchant.
As you can see, it’s a pretty simple and hassle-free process. Next, we’ll cover how easy it is to add listings with Printify.
List and Price Your Stickers
Now that you’re an Etsy merchant, sign up for a free Printify account to access a wide variety of stickers you can add to your store. Once you have an account, just follow these steps to connect your Etsy store with Printify.
When ready, you can create listings and manage all orders from your Printify account: the product details, shipping, and pricing can all be set up on our platform and transferred to Etsy upon publishing the products.
If you’d like to learn how to price your stickers in the most profitable way, our article – How to Price a Product for Ultimate Success – has all the information sticker sellers need.
In addition, when you’re pricing your products, remember about Etsy fees to make sure your sticker business brings profit, not headaches.
Lastly, instead of just selling one sticker per listing, sell a wide range of combinations: bundles, sticker packs, or sticker sheets. Remember that the right approach will largely depend on your designs, target audience, and the purpose of your stickers.
Set Up Your Storefront, Take Care of Branding
As with any online business, the perception of your store is vital. When customizing your store, pay attention to every tiny detail – try to make a professional impression, reflecting what makes your brand stand out.
Here are a few things you should have:
- A beautiful banner image. Your shop’s banner is your largest branding asset. With it, you can show off your brand and stickers or advertise a sale.
- Information about your store. Add your store’s description, create a custom profile photo, and tell people about yourself; everyone loves a good story.
- Shop policies. A must-have for all shop owners, helping to avoid confusion. While boring, they’re essential. Add delivery, return, exchange, and privacy policies.
- Answers to frequently asked questions. Explore other sticker shops and check what information they provide. Are the stickers waterproof? Can you combine my orders? You get the point.
You can start by doing some research – take a look at the best Etsy sticker shops, learn from what they do well, improve on what they don’t, and tie it all together with your personal touch.
Quick Tip
Use Etsy shop policies to prevent misunderstandings and build better relationships with your customers.
Learn how to take pictures for Etsy to create product photos that won’t leave anyone indifferent.
Don’t Forget About Etsy SEO
First things first: what is Etsy SEO? In a few words, it’s a way to improve the visibility of your Etsy store and its products – learning how to get more sales on Etsy through SEO can be a true game-changer.
To make your store search-friendly, you’ll need to do keyword research, but don’t worry, it’s not difficult. You can use:
- Etsy SEO tools. You can use tools such as Alura, eRank, and Keyword Tool Dominator to see what people search for.
- Etsy’s search bar. In Etsy’s search bar, you get suggestions after typing only a few letters. These suggestions are searches that people have made previously and which are currently trending.
On that note, here are a few ways you can cut through the noise and gain more visibility:
- Add keywords to your product titles and descriptions. When writing your product titles and descriptions, try to add the most relevant keywords at the beginning. This will help buyers know what you’re selling, thus increasing your Etsy sales.
- Regularly renew your listings. To get a small boost in the search rankings, try renewing your listings, but do so only in peak hours, when most people are browsing.
- Name your store right. While we’ve already touched upon this, it’s important to highlight that adding a competitive keyword won’t hurt, but it depends on whether you have the space or not.
To learn more, our article has 17 Etsy SEO tips and tricks that’ll help you improve your store.
Start Promoting and Selling Your Stickers
When selling stickers on Etsy, building a loyal customer base and promoting your store plays a big role. If no one knows about your store, sales won’t come that easy.
To increase the likelihood of success, here are a few tried-and-tested ways to consider:
- Social media marketing. As a way to save money on advertising, social media is a blessing. By posting regularly, showcasing your printed stickers, or offering giveaways, you’re sure to attract people who love your work.
- Etsy advertising. With Etsy Ads, your stickers get a spotlight. They are paid ads that run inside the marketplace, placing your stickers in visible spots within Etsy search results, categories, and market pages.
To learn more, Etsy’s step-by-step guide on how to set up and manage an Etsy Ads campaign covers everything you need to know.
- Influencer marketing. As the use of influencer marketing continues to grow, collaborating with an influencer to let the world know about your stickers is a strategy worth considering.
If you want to make money selling stickers on Etsy, don’t underestimate the power of marketing – after all, it’s the engine that drives the growth of any online business. A sticker shop is no exception.
To learn more about how to market your Etsy store, our recent article is here to help, providing valuable information for anyone looking to skyrocket their sales.
Start Selling Stickers on Etsy Today!
How to Make Stickers to Sell on Etsy With Printify?
With Printify, you can say goodbye to the old-fashioned way of making stickers. Today, anyone can create their own stickers to sell without any investment or costly equipment – it’s an easy, fun, and hassle-free process.
Step 1: Sign Up and Choose Your Sticker
Start by signing up for a free Printify account. Now, you have access to various stickers that you can customize to your heart’s content.
A quick look at some of our stickers:
Step 2: Apply Your Sticker Design
When you’ve chosen your favorite, it’s time to bring your sticker designs to life. In our beginner-friendly Mockup Generator, anyone can easily design and create stickers.
For best results, keep in mind the recommended guidelines for stickers so that there are no unpleasant surprises when your customers receive their physical stickers.
Step 3: Edit Product Details
After your sticker design is ready, take time to fill out the product details perfectly. If you want your stickers to sell on Etsy, it’s a must – Etsy’s search engine favors shop owners who write beautiful product descriptions with naturally embedded keywords.
Step 4: Connect Your Etsy Store
When all of that is complete, just follow these few short steps to connect your Etsy store with Printify. With our sticker printing services, your store will have a never-ending supply of products.
If Etsy doesn’t seem a good fit, another popular eCommerce marketplace – eBay – seamlessly connects with Printify, too. Take a look at our Etsy vs eBay comparison to see which one suits your needs the best.
Step 5: Publish and Start Selling Stickers on Etsy
Now that your Etsy sticker shop is linked with our sticker printing service, you can publish your products directly to your store for the whole world to see.
A Few Closing Thoughts
As we conclude our guide on how to make stickers to sell on Etsy, we hope you’ve gained enough insight, inspiration, and confidence to cross the starting line. Just like with everything else, it all begins with you.
While it takes a little patience, persistence, and planning, anyone can make money selling stickers online.
Whether you want to sell round stickers, kiss-cut stickers, durable vinyl stickers, bumper stickers, planner stickers, or sticker sheets, our catalog has a wide variety of products you can customize any way you like.
With Printify at your fingertips, you can launch a successful profit-focused Etsy shop without any investment, equipment, or logistical worries.
Start Selling Stickers on Etsy Today!
Written by
Leon Walker
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2 comments
Useful info, thank you 🙂
Hi Donna,
Thank you for your feedback!