Anyone thinking about putting a design on a shirt eventually asks how long it takes to sell. The answers online tend to come from people who sold quickly, which is a skewed sample: the people whose designs sold in the first week write about it, and the people whose designs sold in month five, or never, mostly do not. This post is the less flattering version, from the side that watches every listing, not only the ones that worked.
How long a design takes to make its first sale
Usually weeks, and months is common. A first sale in the first week happens, and when it does it is memorable, but it is not the normal case. The normal case is a wait long enough that an impatient seller would already have deleted the listing, and some designs that went on to sell took longer still.
There are three reasons a new listing is slow.
- Search has to learn where to show it. A new listing has no history. The marketplace tries it in front of a few searches, watches whether anyone clicks, and only then decides how often to show it. That takes time, and it cannot be hurried.
- It has no proof yet. Buyers lean on reviews and sales counts when they choose between two similar shirts. A new listing has neither, so it loses close calls to older listings until it earns some.
- Its buyers may not be shopping yet. A design for a holiday, a season or an event sells in the weeks before it, and is close to invisible for the rest of the year however good it is.
Most designs never make a first sale
The timing question hides a bigger one. Most designs, on any print on demand shop, ours included, sell little or nothing. That is true of good designs as well as weak ones, and of designs that took a weekend as well as ones that took an hour.
When a design does sell, it usually sells a handful of times rather than steadily. The income in this business does not come from an average design doing averagely. It comes from a small number of designs that find buyers, and nobody, including us, is good at predicting in advance which ones those will be.
What this means for judging your own design
- A week tells you nothing. A quiet listing after a fortnight is the normal state of a new listing, not a verdict. We do not even read a listing's numbers until it has been up for 50 days. If you want to know why a listing is quiet, the post on why a design is not selling separates an unseen listing from an unwanted one.
- Seasonal designs need a head start. We aim to have a holiday design live 90 days before the day, because a design that goes up the week before has no time to be found.
- Volume matters more than any single design. If most designs do not sell, one design is a lottery ticket and twenty designs are a test.
- A sale is a signal. A design that sold tells you a buyer exists, and the next designs worth making are new ones for that same buyer, not the same joke reworded.
What to do while it waits
Mostly, make the next design. A quiet listing does not need attention in its first weeks, and fiddling with it can hurt: every change to a title or its tags makes search start learning about it again. The time is better spent on a second and third design for the same kind of buyer, so that when one of them finds its audience, there is more for that audience to find.
Why the wait costs you nothing here
A long wait is expensive when you paid for something up front. A box of shirts loses value while it waits, and a listing you pay to renew costs money every few months whether or not it sells.
On YourOtherJob the wait costs the artist nothing. We list the design, keep a partner's design on Etsy for at least its first eight months at our expense, and print and ship each order when it comes in. If a design sells, you take a share of the profit on each sale. If it does not, you have lost the time you spent making it and nothing else. The arithmetic on a real order is on the payout example page.
If you have designs and the patience this takes, you can create a free account and upload one.