Should I lower my prices if my Etsy shop isn't selling?

Not yet, and most likely not at all, because you can't test a price on traffic you haven't got.

I've had 3 Etsy shops of my own. Craft supplies, then Swarovski jewellery, then handbags and accessories, and there's nothing linking those 3 except me. In all 3, nobody saw the products until I optimised the shop. Same result in 3 completely different categories, which is more than I'd put down to bad luck, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to work out that the thing I kept changing was never the thing that was wrong.

So before you go into your listings and knock a few pounds off, it's worth being honest about what you'd actually be testing.

How do I know whether it's the price or the traffic?

Look at how many people saw the listing this week, not how many bought.

Nobody has stood in front of your shop, looked at what you charge and decided against it. For somebody to turn your price down they have to see it first, and if the views are in single figures then nobody has been given the chance to say no. What you've got isn't a rejected price. It's a price nobody has been shown.

That distinction sounds like a technicality and it changes everything you do next, because the two problems have completely different fixes and only one of them is the one you're working on.

A price is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis needs people to test it against. 20 visitors and no sales is a signal worth reading. 2 visitors and no sales is not a signal at all, it's just 2 people, and one of them might have been you checking the listing looked right on your phone.

I understand exactly why you'd land on the price anyway. If the market is already full of people making the same thing you make, then price is the only lever anybody has left you. Everyone tells you the market is saturated, you can see the other shops selling something close enough to yours, and price is the one thing you can change this afternoon without learning anything new. It's a completely logical thing to do. It's just built on a premise that isn't true, which is why arguing with the tweaking never works.

What does lowering the price actually cost me?

More than the difference, and the bill arrives in a few places at once.

The obvious one is margin. You're taking money off a business that isn't paying you properly yet, which is the wrong way round from how it should go. The money is supposed to travel towards you.

The less obvious one is the time. Every week you spend in there adjusting prices, rewriting the odd description, moving a photo around, is a week the actual problem sits exactly where it was. I've done that. I once priced a collection about 10% under everybody else because I'd decided the stock just needed to shift, rather than backing the thing I'd actually made, and I can tell you that the decision felt like action at the time and it wasn't.

And there's a third one nobody mentions. If you've already cut to the bone, then getting found is going to hurt before it helps, because you'll be selling more of something at a price that was never going to pay you. That one is genuinely worth sorting before you go looking for people rather than after, and it's the only version of the price question I'd actually answer before the traffic question.

Otherwise the discount is doing what a discount always does when nobody is watching, which is nothing at all, quietly.

What should I fix instead?

The boring part, and I'm sorry, because it is genuinely the dullest work in the whole business.

Clear photos. Proper descriptions that say what the thing turns into rather than only what it is. Titles and tags written the way somebody would actually type it into the search bar, rather than the way you'd describe your own work to a friend who already knows what you make.

That's the stall. If the stall isn't right, then every bit of attention you earn walks straight past it, and you'll have done all the hard work of getting somebody to look and then lost them in the two seconds it takes to read a title that doesn't say what the thing is.

Then, and only then, the room. You promote the subject rather than the product, which is the bit most people skip because it feels like it has nothing to do with what they sell. And you move the people who turn up onto an email list, so you stop rebuilding your audience from scratch every time the platform changes its mind about you.

Do that much and the price stops being a guess, because there'll finally be enough people looking at it for their answer to mean something. That's the whole point of the order. You're not being told to ignore the price forever. You're being told you can't read the answer yet.

Does this work for everybody?

No, and the way it fails is worth knowing before you start.

You can do every bit of that work too broadly. Titles and tags written for anybody who might possibly want something, a subject so wide it isn't really about anyone in particular, and then the people who do find you don't think you're meant for them, which isn't far off not being found at all. Being findable and being for somebody are two different jobs, and the first one on its own will get you traffic that reads your listing politely and leaves.

The other honest thing is the pace. The one maker I've watched do the whole thing properly worked at it steadily over about 4 months. Not a weekend, not a heroic Sunday of retagging everything, just a steady 4 months of unglamorous work, and I'd rather say that out loud than sell you a quick fix and lose you in week 3 when it hasn't happened yet.

What she has at the end of it is the bit I think you're actually after. She'll tell anybody who asks that she runs a handmade business and she's making money from it, and she says it without hedging.

Before you touch the price again, go and look at how many people saw that listing this week, and ask yourself honestly whether that number is big enough to have told you anything at all