Go To Great Panes

If you live in a state that has sales tax based on the buyer’s address (destination-based) and the rate is determined by political boundaries–like counties or cities–and not on 5 digit zip codes, you may still be stuck.

Several states are set up this way including New York, Florida, South Carolina, Washington and others, and in these states some 5 digit zip codes cross county or city lines, meaning that two ship-to addresses in the same 5 digit zip code should be charged different sales tax rates.

Neither Etsy nor Paypal is set up to accommodate this issue so in-state buyers must be billed manually by sellers registered in most of these states if you want your tax collected accurately and need the receipt to show the actual tax due & collected.

Washington sellers are lucky–their state allows them a little lee-way when collecting sales tax through sites that aren’t set up to deal with the full 9 digit zip codes (see here for info) a few states have similar breaks for sellers, but many of us aren’t so lucky.

If you are in the same position as we are and are wondering what to do, here’s the only way I can find to make collecting tax accurately work:

1. Offer “other” as a payment option in your Etsy shop,
2. ask in-state buyers to select “other” as the method of payment in your listings & shop policies, then
3. send them an email invoice with the sales tax rate for their ship-to address: Sending a Paypal Invoice

Most online sellers are aware of the business, premier and personal types of Paypal accounts but not so many know about the micro payment account where lower per-transaction fees are charged with a higher percentage fee. (I know this type of account is available to US sellers, but I don’t know about other countries.)

Micro payment accounts are useful for low dollar amount transactions because of the lower transaction fee (and less useful for larger transactions because of the higher percentage fees), but if most of your transaction totals are under $12.14 it might be a savings for you to use a micro account.

Premier:
$0.30 per transaction plus 2.9%
one user–an individual

Business:
$0.30 per transaction plus 2.9%
same as the Premier account but you can accept money under your business name and have multiple log-ins (not just one user)

Micro-Payment:
$0.05 per transaction plus 5%
same as regular business account

Paypal tells you here that you are allowed “one Personal account and one Premier or Business account”, but they specify on the following Paypal page that you should have a micro payment account in addition to your regular business account if you want to receive both macro and micro payments.

See here for more on Paypal’s Micro Account & how to get one:

paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.html

The most common response is to improve your photos, and while good photos are very important, even excellent photos will mean little if your items are not showing up in search results for folks to see those photos and click through to your item. Web-based searches don’t return photos with their listings, so you really need to improve in other ways to get outside traffic in to your shop.

Promoting your business is great and usually necessary for success, as is getting the internet search engines to work for you…

The key:

Repeated text in titles, descriptions and tags is a good thing–it gives more weight to those keywords when search engines are returning results. Improve your listings with better titles, descriptions and tags by including words and information that folks would use when looking for items like yours–basically think like a buyer…

Some important ways to describe your items in the text:

Content–tell us what your item is in detail.
A print? original? watercolor? photograph? hat? earrings? purse?
Does it have two orange cats in a field of flowers? a field of yellow and white daisies? of light pink tulips?
Red hand-knit hat with a multicolor tassel? or pompon? (or pom-pom, since that’s a common alternate spelling)
Yellow and light blue handmade clay pendant on a bright pink ribbon necklace?

Mood/Theme–Use common descriptors for your style so folks shopping for a “feel” can find you.
Examples: Retro, goth, rustic, folk art, steampunk, kawaii, mod, surreal, formal, casual, country…

Colors–describe all main colors in your item.
Don’t describe the color of the background of your photo of a product (or the props you used) since that’s not what a shopper will be looking for/able to buy from your listing. (Obviously if a photo is the product, all main colors in it should be included.)

Size–in inches and centimeters.
The web is international, don’t make your buyers guess what something would be in their units of measurement.
Print sizes in the title is very helpful in addition to it being in the body of a listing.
Personally, I like to break the size out of the descriptive text to make it easy to see, like here: Suncatcher–Roswell

Working all those in to a flowing description & adding the appropriate bits to the title and tags can be a challenge.

It helps to have some writing skills, a friend who can help or to post in the forum critique section to get ideas on how to refine your listings. Here’s an example of an item description I helped someone with in the forums:

http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6556178&page=2

That’s not the only way to work keywords in, sometimes folks tell a story in their description and/or use humor and that’s a great talent. I’m sure if you browse Etsy and see a few good description styles you’ll find one that suits you and your items, but be sure not to copy anyone’s listings.

Just a list of keywords isn’t good, search engines will see that keyword spamming and it may actually hurt your search engine results.

These should also help you get a feel for what tags and text will help:

Guidelines & Tips: Tagging on Etsy
etsy.com/storque/how-to/guidelines-tips-tagging-on-etsy-281

Etsy: Meta Tags
gotogreatpanes.com/blog/2009/07/21/etsy-meta-tags

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) info straight from Google
gotogreatpanes.com/blog/2009/06/22/search-engine-optimization

The good news:
Today LisaJune posted in the Etsy forums about a new Etsy employee to work just on the Etsy/Google Merchant integration (yay!)
and
she’s started a new thread for the problem that some sellers using vacation mode have had with items not being put back in to syndication when they came out of vacation mode (which appears to be a problem on Google’s end, not Etsy’s)–see here for her thread:

The bad news:
I haven’t heard anything new about when Google will be able to get all shops syndicated. Last I heard is a forum post back in April that said Google still can’t handle all Etsy items through their new Marketplace Partners set up (here).

(((Knocks wood that all my fellow sellers will be syndicated soon!)))