Our selling cross stitch patterns on Etsy series has gone over many of the key elements of HOW to sell, but I get one question far more than any other:

How much can I make?

Sadly, there isn’t a hard and fast rule for this, however, over the last 2 years, I’ve been compiling data to give you an idea of how much you can make.
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The answer isn’t as obvious as you think either. Thanks to Etsy’s rating system, which relies on SEO, store ranking, title, and most importantly ‘freshness’ stores can have really varied success. As a result I set up a three new stores; all selling the same patterns, with the same descriptions, costs, names, and we gave the stores zero marketing. I used a series of $5 patterns (giving $3.80 profit per sale).

Store 1 – Set it and leave it

For our first store, we created a batch of 10 patterns and put them up to sell. On average we sold 4 of each pattern across the whole year. This means we got $152 in profit.
For most stores starting out, this is exactly what happens. The initial idea of pattern creation seems OK but after the first ten, people give up and wait to ‘see what happens’. Sadly, due to the low return, most people give up at this point.

Store 2 – Set it and add a pattern a month

Much like the first store, we put up 10 initial cross stitch patterns, but we then added an additional pattern every month for the remaining 11 months of the year. This extra work (12 hours at our count) not only gained us a further $152 from the new patterns, but thanks to Etsy’s freshness rating increase each patterns sales to an average of 8 each. This means that our end of year total was $669 in profit.
Considering that it was only 12 hours of work, the additional patterns basically allowed us to increase our profit by 440%. TOTALLY worth it.

Store 3 – Set it and add a pattern a week

But does this increase in work always pay off? For our third store we added an extra pattern every week. 52 extra patterns were actually rather time-consuming, and the constant pressure was always on us. However, the increase in ‘freshness’ rating paid off to some extent. We increased our pattern sales average to 12 of each pattern. This means that we made a shocking $2827 in profit.

Store 4 – Set it and add a pattern every day

And we took it one step further. To top this whole experiment off, we added 2 patterns a week. Yes. We really tried this. We couldn’t keep it going however, and gave up after the 6-month point. However, the results were clear. We made no additional sales per pattern within the year. In fact, the mass of patterns actually had the opposite effect; we sold LESS of each pattern.
We’re not sure if this was down to a possibly decreased quality of patterns, however we think that the extra work just wasn’t worth it.
 
So what does this mean? Well as far as we can tell, uploading a new pattern every 1 month or 2 weeks is the best bet. It’ll get you the biggest return on your time, and increase sales all over. However, you really need to think about the timings here. We did a few shorter tests to see if you could add a block of 12 patterns at the start of the year went and it’s clear that you need to post regularly through the year to keep up your freshness rating.

What about patterns that cost more than $5?

Yeh, we expected you to ask that. In fact, we did some research into exactly that. It appears that up to a point ($18 per pattern, as far as we can see) the decrease in purchases is equal to the increase in price. What that means if you’ll still make the same amount of profit, just on less pattern sales.
 
We’d like to thank the pattern creators that allowed us to test with their patterns. All profits were given back to the original pattern creators; Lord Libidan took none of the profits.
 
If you’re struggling to hit these figures, it might be worth checking out our guide on why your cross stitch patterns aren’t selling.