Justyna Dorsz

Sales

Best selling products

When you open an Artist Shop on Threadless, you will receive a bunch of emails with tips on how to: promote your store, prepare design files, customize the shop, and so on. Since I’ve created my new store, I’ve been getting those helpful emails too. One of them was titled “And the Best Selling Products are…” and said:

Tees, Mugs, and Totes! 
These are the three most popular products across all Artist Shops and could be in yours as well!

I got curious if that’s the case for my stores as well. My new store has been opened for a day only, and I haven’t sold anything there yet, but I sold a lot of products in my main Fox Shiver store. So I exported the data and calculated how many items of each product I sold.

Mugs and Totes are not selling well in my store at all. Tees — on the other hand — are the most popular products by far. I sold more t-shirts than all other products combined. Take a look:

Most popular products in Fox Shiver store on Threadless
Most popular products in Fox Shiver store on Threadless

Sales are worth it

Websites, where I sell my designs, run site-wide sales every few weeks. Everything is discounted, sometimes as much as 50%.

I know some artists complain about it. When there’s no sale we earn around 25% of the price of an item. When there is a sale we get less, often as low as 10%.

But sales bring in more customers, so more items are sold. In fact, we all earn more money during sales, even though we get paid less per item.

Unfortunately, none of the apparel websites show sales graphs so we can’t see clearly that sales are worth it. It would be great if they implemented it. But for now, I can show you a sales graph for games sold on Steam.

This is a graph showing units sold of all our games:

Steam Sales Data for Manic Hyena games
Manic Hyena games – units sold

Each spike is during a sale. The first spike is the Summer Sale – it’s one of two big events during the year. The smaller spikes are during less significant events, like Weekly Deal. But even the smaller sales bring in a 5x increase in the volume of sold games.

A graph for apparel sales would look similar. I will see if I can export the data and create my own graphs. Stay tuned.