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You might remember when Etsy was just a place to resell thrifted items or the odd homemade craft, but today Etsy has grown into a worldwide marketplace with over 4.7 million sellers.
With so many sellers in the Etsy marketplace you may be wondering if there is still room for more, or any money left to be made on the platform, and happily the answer is yes!
And, your next question should be: “What are the best things to sell on Etsy to make money?”
In this article we will cover some of the most popular, profitable, and best selling products on Etsy, as well as unique items.
If you have been thinking about starting an Etsy shop to make money from home, you’ve come to the right place!
Table of Contents
What is Etsy?
So, what exactly is Etsy? It is basically an online store or marketplace where people all over the world can set up an Etsy shop and sell their own items.
I remember back in the day when Etsy was really only for handmade products and vintage items. You couldn’t sell items on the Etsy marketplace unless they fell into these categories.
But, now the rules have lessened a bit and there are many types of items sold on Etsy, not just handmade products.
From craft supplies, to digital products to clothing and furniture, you can open an online store selling items of your choice.
Is it Worth it to Sell on Etsy?
Before learning about the best selling items on Etsy are, you may be wondering if you can even make money selling items on Etsy! The answer is yes.
Choosing the right products to sell, marketing your Etsy shop and being consistent are just a few factors that can help you sell more and find profitability with an Etsy business.
You may have heard of Three Bird Nest, a top seller on Etsy who made $1 million dollars in one year on Etsy! They actually have their own website store now outside of the Etsy marketplace.
And, in 2020 the party props and bridesmaids store ModParty had over $700,000 in Etsy sales!
You can even make money selling a simple product like beads if you don’t want to fool with handmade items like BeadBoat1 does! They pull in $30,000 per month in sales from their Etsy shop!
So yes, you can make money selling on Etsy! There are millions of Etsy shoppers out there. Just use the tips and tools below for product research on the best selling items and find the right Etsy niche for you.
What Can You Sell on Etsy?
First things first, there are seven main categories of products on Etsy, and you will find these on the main menu. They are:
- Jewelry & Accessories
- Clothing & Shoes
- Home & Living
- Wedding & Party
- Toys & Entertainment
- Art & Collectibles
- Craft Supplies & Tools
Anything that you sell on Etsy will fall into one of these groups.
At different points throughout the year there will also be a category for seasonal items, such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day, but the best things to sell on Etsy to make money are the ones that sell all year.
You do not need to make sure that your item fits nicely into one of these categories, as you will see in a moment they are very loose.
11 Best Selling Product Categories on Etsy
As you can see below, craft supplies and tools is the top selling category with the top 100 Etsy sellers. Which is good, because there are a ton of crafts you can make and sell to Etsy shoppers.
Here are the best selling products on Etsy based on the categories of the top 100 Etsy sellers:
| Etsy Category | Sellers in Top 100 |
| Craft Supplies & Tools | 51 |
| Paper & Party Supplies | 10 |
| Home & Living | 9 |
| Weddings | 8 |
| Jewelry | 7 |
| Art & Collectibles | 6 |
| Accessories | 2 |
| Bath & Beauty | 2 |
| Clothing | 2 |
| Electronics & Accessories | 2 |
| Books, Movies & Music | 1 |
Top Sellers on Etsy That Make the Most Money
Thanks to the power of the internet, it’s pretty easy to find out who Etsy’s top sellers are and what the best selling items are.
Marketplace Pulse updates this page every day with the worldwide top Etsy sellers from the past 30 days.
You won’t be able to see how much money these Etsy sellers made, but this will tell you how many orders a particular shop has received.
(There is a tool to guesstimate revenue that we will cover further down.)
If you’re interested in collecting the data on Etsy sellers, you can actually copy it over to a Google sheet, and keep track for a few weeks to months before you settle on a product.
This takes some of the guesswork out of choosing what to sell on Etsy for yourself since you can see what the top selling items on Etsy are.
Take Etsy Revenue with a Grain of Salt
Even if you could see the sales in a dollar amount, that wouldn’t necessarily give you an accurate picture of how much money you will make, because that number is revenue and not profit.
Many Etsy sellers choose to market their products with paid ads, which of course, comes out of their sales revenue.
One popular planner shop spent over $50,000 in ads to make about $90,000 (or $40,000 after ad spend.) So, revenue of Etsy items sold definitely doesn’t paint the whole picture!
10 Best THings to Sell on Etsy
We already talked about the best things to sell on Etsy by category, but these top 10 most popular items on Etsy are guaranteed to surprise you
- Jewelry
- Pendants, beads, and jewelry making supplies
- Bridesmaids gifts
- SVGs
- Stickers and pins
- Printables
- Seeds
- Sparkles, sprinkles, and scatter
- Personalized kid’s clothes
- Digital scrapbooking paper and clipart
The majority of these 10 best selling items have been classed under “craft supplies” so you can see how deceptive that category really is.
It’s important to do your research and not assume that the best products to sell on Etsy are cardstock and washi tape!
Popular Jewelry Items on Etsy
The Etsy shop that most recently topped the list of Etsy’s best sellers, is a shop that has made nearly 1.5 million sales since she opened in 2014.
CaitlynMinimalist sells minimalist personalized jewelry, mainly in gold tones. The average price of one of her items seems to be around the $25 mark.
Remember that 1.5 million was total sales, and not dollars! It doesn’t take much math to know that this top seller is doing very well on Etsy!
As this successful Etsy shop shows, jewelry is one of the best selling items you can choose.
Her current sales are estimated to be 9,444 per week. At $25 per item, her weekly sales would be around $236,000!
Gold tones and minimalism seem to be important trends on Etsy right now. The other two jewelry sellers who made the top 15, also sell simple gold colored jewelry. Both of these shops mainly sell earrings, but one also focuses on jewelry for ear cartilage piercings.
Jewelry is absolutely one of the best selling items on Etsy and a good product for making money. If you like designing it is one of the handmade products that sells well.
Check out these tips on how to grow your home based business.
Pendants, Beads, and Jewelry Making Supplies
Of the “craft” sellers who actually sell craft items, most sell products for making jewelry.
Popular items in these shops include: Pendants and charms for earrings, necklaces, and bracelets, as well as beads. Other top sellers in the jewelry making space sell wire, chain, and closures.
Jewelry, and jewelry making supplies, might be at the top of the list of best selling items on Etsy, but there are lots of other options!
Unique Bridesmaids Gifts
It took a bit of digging to figure out what items the top “wedding” shops actually sell the most, because that could be anything from invitations to party favors.
The most popular wedding items for sale on Etsy are surprisingly geared towards bridesmaid “proposals.” Meaning little gifts that are personalized for asking your friends to be your bridesmaids. Other popular items are along the same lines, but for flower girls.
SVGs (Digital Graphics and downloads)
An SVG is a “Scalable Vector Graphic” – Basically a digital download of a seller’s art. Customers purchase these art files and then use them to create their craft projects.
SVGs can really be used on anything from t-shirts to wall decals. The key to selling SVG files seems to be quantity. Most go for just a few dollars or less, so you will need to sell quite a lot to make decent money on Etsy.
If you sell commercial licenses for people to use your art for products that they intend to sell, you will make a bit more money.
The top seller in this Etsy category sells all types of designs, from personalized monograms to seasonal designs. The second most popular SVG seller makes most of their sales from designs for reusable tumblers. (Think Starbucks reusable cold cup.)
Digital downloads are one of the best things to sell on Etsy to make money, because if you already have the tools and skills, it won’t take much for your shop to become profitable.
You can sell the one product over-and-over again without having to manage product inventory or shipping. When thinking about items to sell, this is an important factor.
Digital downloads are also one of the easiest things to sell on Etsy, since once you create it, you can sell it as many times as you want without doing any more work!
And, they are definitely one of the best selling items.
Stickers and Pins
In a more traditional Etsy moment, funky stickers and pins do make the list of top selling items.
These stickers aren’t for kids though! The most popular items in this category involve curse words, coffee, and skulls.
The top seller also sells pretty acrylic butterfly pins and sticky notes. There was only one Etsy shop in the top 25 from this category, and only two shops on the top 100 list who sell accessories.
Printables
One of the best selling items on Etsy to make money are printables. A printable is just a digital item that customers purchase, download and then print themselves.
Printables can include many items. Fitness trackers, budget sheets, and daily planners are just a few examples.. Planners in particular are really popular on Etsy right now.
Just like the digital art graphics, printables are an easy and profitable item to sell on Etsy since you just need to make one file that you can sell over and over again.
And, printables are one of the top selling digital products on Etsy.
Digital prints and downloads are the best digital products to sell on Etsy because of this!
Seeds
Do you want to take a wild guess at what Etsy category seeds are in? That’s right, more “crafts.”
There are actually three seed shops in the top 25 Etsy sellers, and they all market exactly what you would expect: Fruit, vegetable, and flower seeds for your garden.
They also sell what you might not expect: Seeds for medicinal plants, heirloom flowers, and slightly more exotic veggies, like white beets
This category is likely to have a high degree of seasonality, but if you happen to have access to a lot of seeds, or you love gardening, why not give it a shot?
What makes seeds one of the best things to sell on Etsy, is that there are virtually unlimited varieties to source and sell. You could open a very specialized seed shop and find a nice niche for yourself.
Sparkles, Sprinkles, and Scatter
This is another sub-category of “crafts” that is a little tricky to define. Two shops sell in this niche, with sparkle being the thing they have in common.
Some of the best items to make and sell on Etsy are not what you might think! And some of the best selling items are surprising.
The top seller in this corner of Etsy sells all kinds of teeny tiny objects.
One of their best selling items is polymer clay “sprinkles.” Inedible sprinkles that look like the real thing. They also sell glitter and little gems.
The better question would be “what don’t they sell?” because this shop has scatter in the forms of tiny fruit, fish, donuts, clouds, and more!
The second best selling product under this umbrella is rhinestones and sparkly gems. One of Etsy’s top sellers has a whole shop dedicated to selling the bling you need to glitz up your shoes, clothes, decor, and more.
Some of the best selling products on Etsy come in small packages! And these types of products can be the best selling items on Etsy to make money since they don’t cost you much or take up much room to store.
Personalized Kid’s Clothes
Only two of the top 100 sellers on Etsy sell clothing.
The top Etsy clothing shop by a wide margin sells custom t-shirts for babies and kids. Their best selling items are diaper shirts, and most of them are for pregnancy announcements, particularly for photo shoots.
Photo shoot and announcement type items could almost be their own category, since a lot of SVG’s could potentially be for the same thing. And we already know that the most popular selling bridesmaid items on Etsy are along the same lines.
The other top 100 seller in clothing still doesn’t sell much by way of women’s clothes. They have plenty listed, but their best seller is a T-shirt about dad jokes.
Digital Scrapbooking Paper and Clipart
The final best selling products on Etsy are for digital scrapbooking.
The top seller makes most of their money from instant downloads of sparkly clipart like diamonds and glitter, as well as scrapbooking paper.
One of this shop’s best sellers is a 30 pack of floral background paper designs. Another is “shimmer strips” which are graphics of glitzy ribbon.
If you are looking for something fun to make and sell on Etsy, this might be it! And like we said, these top selling digital products on Etsy are an easy way to make money and keep making it!
Surprising Facts About the Best Selling Products on Etsy
Now that we know all of the most popular items on Etsy, what can we learn?
Surprises about the best selling items include:
- No women’s clothing
- No vintage items
- No home decor
- Not many traditional craft items
That’s not to say that these items couldn’t sell well on Etsy, but they are not best sellers currently.
Despite how it looks on Etsy, women’s clothing may be best left to selling on Amazon. Or, you can start your own Shopify store.
Other things that we learned:
Unique Items Sell Best on Etsy
Another thing that sticks out is how unique these top selling items are! Sure there are a few sellers doing similar things, but you would not expect inedible sprinkles to be one of the best selling items on Etsy!
This tells us that finding our own path is key.
It’s Not Too Late to Start Selling on Etsy
With so many sellers on Etsy, it can be easy to get discouraged and feel like it’s too late to start a successful shop. That is definitely not the case!
Three of the top 10 Etsy sellers started their business in 2020!
Volume is Important on Etsy
Six of the 10 top Etsy sellers price most of their items between $1 and $5.
Little items can clearly sell well, but you will need to be capable of selling a large volume if you want to make money on Etsy at that price point.
And, if you are planning to sell a physical product, you will want to make sure you can handle the logistics of a large quantity of orders.
One good thing about small physical products is that a lot of orders can go by letter mail. This will cut down on your packing and shipping costs.
You don’t have to have a super inexpensive product to sell on Etsy, CaitlynMinimalist has proven that, but you will need to do some really solid research to become a top seller at a higher price point.
How to Find the Best Selling Items on Etsy
If you are just in the beginning stages of considering starting an Etsy shop, there are a couple of ways that you can research how well a product might sell.
Or, maybe you have no idea what to sell at all and just need some ideas on what you can sell on Etsy!
EtsyHunt to See What Sells on Etsy
EtsyHunt is a totally free tool that you can use to gain valuable information about what is popular and selling on Etsy. There are two components to EtsyHunt: The Chrome browser extension, and the website.
Using the EtsyHunt Browser Extension
The first thing that the EtsyHunt extension will do, is populate additional data in the search box on Etsy. When you start typing a search phrase, EtsyHunt will show you the views and competition for that term.
Once you visit an Etsy shop this tool will show you statistics about it, including:
- When they opened
- How many total Etsy sales they have made
- Then number of weekly orders they receive
Once you are in a shop and browsing through the listings, EtsyHunt will show you the sales data for each individual item, so that you can see what their top selling products are.
Using EtsyHunt.com
The EtsyHunt website is really amazing! You can see all the top Etsy sellers from the last week for the whole platform.
You can also enter the URL of any one shop and see their best selling items for the past 7 days. So if you already know a category of products you want to sell, you can find your favorite store and see what the most popular items they are selling are.
Downsides of EtsyHunt
EtsyHunt is perfectly fine if you aren’t ready to invest in your Etsy business, and you are just at the information gathering phase. However, there are a couple of downsides to this tool.
First let’s talk about the limitations of the browser extension:
The first is that the sales data doesn’t always load on every item. In fact there are whole shops where the browser extension can’t come up with data on the products.
The second is that you have to scroll through pages and pages of items to try and figure out what the best sellers in a particular shop are.
EtsyHunt also doesn’t have any price data.
Finally, the data on the product pages is really hard to read.
The EtsyHunt website works a lot better than the browser extension, but you can only get 7 days of data, which isn’t very accurate.
If you are totally committed to getting information for free, you could export the data weekly and compile it in a spreadsheet once you have collected several weeks.
Alura
Alura is a pretty amazing tool for Etsy entrepreneurs, but it is a paid subscription based tool. The good thing is that you can cancel once you’ve done your initial research, but you may get addicted to using it!
But, if you want to know how to see what sells on Etsy Alura is an ideal tool. (Knowledge is power after all.) And with Alura, you can figure out the best things to sell on Etsy to make money.
When you perform a search with Alura, you can see all of the data from the page of Etsy listings, including:
- How many “favorites” the average item has
- Top seller by revenue and sales
- Average price of items in search results
- Typical monthly sales across all results
Having pricing and sales data all in one place is the best part of using Alura! It can help you to identify what are the best items on Etsy to sell to make money.
Alura also assigns a score from 1-10 on your product search, to let you know how demand and competition stack up.
Downsides of Alura
You can use the Alura browser extension for free for up to 10 searches, but you will likely use up all of those just playing around with it!
Alura can be a little clunky to use. It can get stuck on a list of products and need to be refreshed, and it takes a minute to load the data.
Other Top Selling Items on Etsy
It’s good to know how to do product research, but what if you already have a skill or a great idea?
Here are a few more best selling items from Etsy that didn’t make the top 10:
Best Selling Sewn Items on Etsy
Handmade sewn items might not have been in the top of best sellers, but there are still plenty of successful shops in this niche.
The most popular sewn items currently on Etsy are embroidered products and of course, face masks!
Hand embroidered items can usually be sold at a pretty high price on Etsy, and shops offer everything from shirts to home decor. If you like embroidering, there are customers on Etsy who will appreciate your work.
Embroidery supplies are also popular on Etsy, including templates and thread.
Best Digital Products to SEll on Etsy
Hands down, the best digital products to sell on Etsy are calendars and planners! There are even courses available that are dedicated to helping you create planners to sell on Etsy.
This niche is pretty saturated, but shops continue to join Etsy and make money. If you have a unique planner or calendar idea, this could be the side hustle for you!
Within the planners/calendars niche, the best selling listings are printable bundles.
What makes printables one of the most profitable items on Etsy is that you can design your printable once, and sell it forever. They also don’t cost much to make. More than likely you will only need an inexpensive software subscription.
Of course a planner or calendar will need to be edited annually, but that’s not too bad to enjoy a year’s worth of sales.
Since you only have to make printables once, they are an ideal product to sell on Etsy to make money.
Best Selling Vintage Items on Etsy
The top selling vintage items on Etsy are jewelry and clothing.
Of course which clothing items are popular depends on the fashion trends from year to year, but vintage dresses seem to always be pretty popular.
Selling vintage jewelry on Etsy is tricky, because you will be competing with thousands of shops that put “vintage” in the title of their products, but they aren’t truly vintage.
There might be room here for more genuine vintage sellers, but you will have to find a way to stand out. There isn’t currently a way for customers to filter for authentic vintage items.
Unique Things to Sell on Etsy
When looking to sell on Etsy, it is a great idea to try and find an untapped market. We learned that from the sprinkle shop in the top 10!
Of course what makes an item unique, is the fact that it’s unique, so you may need to spot your own trends if you are looking to sell something that nobody else is.
How to Spot Up and Coming Trends for Etsy
There are a few great free ways to see what newer trends might be hitting Etsy in the near future:
Pinterest Trends
Every year Pinterest puts out their “Pinterest Predicts” report, which covers all of the products and ideas that they predict will be trending for the year.
The best part? It’s usually pretty accurate.
Here are a few of Pinterest’s trend predictions for 2022:
- Rhinestone and crystal accessories
- Clothing in loud colors
- Traditional watches
- Styles and accessories for natural hair
- Goth (dark colors for everything from makeup to table settings)
- Checkerboard pattern
- Afternoon tea (cups, saucers, invitations, and the like.)
Pinterest doesn’t just pull their predictions out of thin air! They spot trends based on skyrocketing search terms on their platform. While nothing is a sure thing, Pinterest trends are not so much a gamble, as a safe bet.
Pinterest Predicts is a great way to get Etsy ideas, because their platform is very product focused. Most of their predictions can be easily translated to items that you can sell on Etsy!
Google Trends
While Pinterest looks forward, Google Trends will tell you what was popular in search over the last year. This is a great tool to help you find good things to sell on Etsy.
Google Trends is less product focused so you will need to do a little more sifting. They keep track of everything from top-searched songs to political topics.
Here are a few Google search trends from 2021 that you could translate into an Etsy shop:
- Sustainability and natural products (pens, razors, soap, cleaning products, etc.)
- Plants
- Bell bottoms (vintage anyone?)
- Flannel
- Rings
- Mindfulness (journals, planners, meditation guides, and more!)
Once you have decided on a short list of products, you can also run them through Google Trends to see the popularity of your idea over time. This will help you avoid products that are declining in popularity.
Things to Consider Before You Start Selling on Etsy
Choosing a Niche
It can be tempting to try and make one shop work for multiple passions, but it’s important to niche down on Etsy, and devote yourself to one customer.
Ideally customers will get to know your shop, and return to you whenever they need a similar item.
We saw in the Etsy top sellers that every single shop was very narrow in the type of products that they offer. The most “diverse” shop was the seller who offers both stickers and pins, but that’s still pretty narrow, and arguably the same customer.
If you have multiple great ideas, expertise, and passions, then you should create a plan to scale your Etsy business into multiple shops.
Selling on Etsy Pros and Cons
Why should you sell products on Etsy? You already know that there are a lot of “pros” to selling on Etsy:
- Easy to set up
- Good profit potential
- Low overhead
- Huge customer base
- Etsy support
- Lots of guidance available
So what about the cons?
Downside to Selling on Etsy
The big scary downside to selling on Etsy, is for it to be gone in the blink of an eye.
It’s unlikely that the platform will shut down in the near future, but at any moment a miscommunication (or a hacker) can get your shop deactivated, and your revenue down to zero.
This isn’t super common, but it can happen, so you should future proof your Etsy shop by purchasing the domain and thinking of ways to build an income off the platform.
Other cons to selling on Etsy:
- Etsy takes a cut
- Competition is high
- Prices are generally low
- It can be a lot of work
How Much Does it Cost to Sell on Etsy?
Opening a store on Etsy is actually free! There are no monthly subscription fees which makes it an excellent choice for starting your own business.
They do however charge you to list your items and they take a cut of your sales. But, the advantage to selling on Etsy instead of going your own route is they are well-known and receive a ton of traffic. Plus, they advertise so you get free marketing!
Etsy fees include: $0.20 listing fee (per item), 5% transaction fee, and a 3% – 4% + $0.20 payment processing fee.
On a higher priced item those fees don’t sound too bad, but it might make you think twice about listing items for $1.00!
Finally, if you are selling a physical product, make sure that you have the time and availability to be packing and shipping orders all the time.
Best Products to Sell on Etsy
That was a lot of data and ideas about what anyone can start selling on Etsy, but what should you sell on Etsy?
- A trendy item that sparks your interest
- A product that your skills are uniquely tailored to (digital designs, embroidery, etc.)
- Something you have particularly good access to a supply of (vintage, seeds, etc.)
- An item you have searched for on Etsy and couldn’t find (new sustainable product, etc.)
- A best selling product that you can do better (anything from the top 10!)
As always, the best items to sell on Etsy to make money, are the ones that you can stick with!
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