Improving Sales on Etsy Photo print store

It is a while since I updated the story about my sales success in selling photo prints on my Etsy Shop. Things have really picked up recently and I’m beginning to hope that I have reached a level where there is more traction in the Etsy search results. For a broader overview of my progress in selling prints of my work, see this 2025 Review of Print Sales article for more details.

I opened the store in May 2024, following an approach of creating products in exactly the same way for each photo. I wrote a long article about setting up my Etsy Store and my approach to pricing and the product images, which is well worth reviewing if you are thinking of following in my footsteps.

Etsy Product Pricing and Margin

One thing I have done since I wrote that article in 2024 is to revisit my pricing by comparing my prices with those of successful photographers on Etsy with a wide range of print sales. Clif Haley, for instance, has over 1000 sales of prints on Etsy and his base prices are about 25% higher than mine. When I checked today, he wasn’t even running a sale which means that anything he is selling at the moment is considerably higher than my prices! You can’t directly see what sizes he has recently sold, but clicking the “1055 Sales” link down the lower left border at least shows the likely size because of the thumbnail of the type of image sold. Those with multiple prints displayed on a wall are the smaller sizes.

So, I chose a range of base prices that were around 25% less than his, and ended up with the following types, sizes and prices for my prints:

I decided that I would run a sale quite often. Usually at 25% off, although I ran a sale in December at 30% off. I also give coupon codes to people who put a print in a shopping cart and then fail to buy it at 30% off. Finally, when I print the image myself at home (anything up to 16×20 inches on paper), I include a personal letter to them in the shipping envelope filling in some background to why I took the photo and offering them 40% off another print from my collection. That has sometimes worked!

The costs here include shipping, and the margin is the income minus Etsy transaction fees, minus the production and shipping costs under a 25% off sale and a rarer 40% off sale. Overall, I have sold 24 paper prints, 10 Canvas, 3 Metal and 1 Acrylic in 2025/2026. I’d like to move towards the larger prints and, in fact, four of my five print sales in February were canvas prints, which is a great result. For March, I am trying a different discount approach with no overall percentage sale, but a special 40% off when the order value is more than $250. We will see how well that works!

Running Etsy Ads

I’ve been running Etsy Ads on my full portfolio for about 14 months now. I set the budget at $3 a day. Most days I don’t reach that budget as it only charges when someone visits the shop as a result of the Ad. In 2025, I spent a total of $419 on advertising on the site – ie about $35 a month. This is my graph for 2025:

This is gross revenue, not what my margin or profit is, but quite a number of these are ones that I printed myself at home and so there is less of a cost associated with them. I can’t easily separate out the sales from advertising in my spreadsheet, but for 2025, my profit on the items – ie revenue minus transaction fees and the cost of production and shipping was $1587 and net margin after advertising and listing fees was $1147. All in all, I think it is worth it, bearing in mind that all those sales show that my shop is more successful to any visitors and it also gives me a chance to get good reviews as well, which all count against search position, I understand.

Marketing your Etsy Store

I have sometimes asked buyers how they found my work on Etsy. Many people say they did a Google Search for an image of a particular location and they saw my image, liked it, and found their way to buy it. Sometimes that is via Pictorem or Fine Art America, but also it has been through that image in my Etsy store appearing in the search order. I’ve not directly spoken to anyone who came first to Etsy to search, but I’m sure that happens and that is when the Etsy Ads are important in getting my image in front of a potential buyer. All that suggests to me that making sure that Google finds multiple links back to individual images in my store is very important in getting a higher search position. I continue to write articles about my photography work on Backyard Image and publicizing these stories on Facebook and LinkedIn. I’ve also continued to build out a series of portfolios on Backyard Image that I don’t intend real people to visit. They are linked to at the foot of my page on the site about Prints, so that Google and other search engines can find and index them and then index the photos on my Print on Demand site so make sure that first, they are actually in a search index which is by no means clear that they get there from Fine Art America, for instance, on its own, and second it gives Google one more link to the image to increase its prominence.

Overall Growth in sales from my Etsy Store

Is all this working? There is a real time cost of putting an image on Etsy – around 25 minutes I think, on average, to copy an existing product, replace all the images for the new product and change the titles, descriptions, tags etc. As a result, I only have 48 images for sale in the store, and I keep telling myself to add more! To be honest, the biggest issue I have is choosing which images to place in that store out of the 3000 or so on Pictorem and Fine Art America!

But I think it is working. I asked my AI friend to create a couple of graphs from my Etsy spreadsheet to show my progress and this is what it produced:

And a cumulative version:

The AI conclusion:

The data shows your Etsy store’s performance from June 2024 through February 2026. In the graphs above:

• Sales (Blue Bars): Represents the number of items sold each month.
• Net Income (Green Line): Represents your monthly profitability in dollars.

Key highlights from the data:

• Best Sales Month: December 2025 with 11 items sold.
• Most Profitable Months: February 2026 ($523) and December 2025 ($508) saw the highest net income.
• Growth: There is a noticeable upward trend in net income starting in late 2025.

So, there you have it. I’ll report all these sales (and the others) in my regular end of month earnings report next week. If you have any questions on my approach, please ask them in the comments below. I generally reply to all comments!