How much traffic do you really need to make money from your handmade shop? (2024)

You can watch the video or read the written version below.

To make money, you need to make sales.
To make sales, people need to find your store and visit it, in other words, you need traffic!

It’s a fine balance between traffic and conversion, and sometimes I get makers asking me why they are not making sales when in fact they are making a decent number of sales for how much traffic they are getting – they just need more traffic! Unfortunately, not everyone that visits your shop will make a purchase, in fact, the industry standard is 1 – 3% conversion rate.

That’s why when you work on your social media, SEO, or any other marketing strategy to get people to visit your shop you need to know what’s a realistic number to aim for. Let’s calculate that now, shall we?

I’m going to use a 2% conversion rate for this example. If you know your conversion rate is bigger (congratulations, by the way!) or lower, you can, of course, adjust that. And if you don’t want to do math at all, you can alsodownload my free traffic calculator here.Ok, let’s do this!

Step 1 – What is your average sale price?

First, you need to calculate your average sale price. If you can’t calculate that yet, use your average item price instead.

For our example, we’re going with an average sale price of $80 so we can work with easy, round numbers.

Step 2 – What is your revenue goal?

The next step is to write down your revenue goal.

For this example let’s say we want to make $5000/month in revenue from the shop. Careful, it’s revenue, not the actual income you want to pay yourself or profit.

Step 3 – How many sales do you need to make to reach that revenue goal?

Next, we need to figure out how many sales you need to make to reach your revenue goal from step 3. To do that, you will need to divide your monthly revenue goal by the average sale price (from step 1). Again, if you don’t want to calculate that yourself, you candownload a free traffic calculator to do that automatically for you.

In our example, it would be $5000/$80 = 62. That means we need to make 62 sales averaging $80 each to reach our revenue goal of $5000.

Step 4 – How much traffic to do you need to bring in every month to reach that goal?

The last step is to determine how much traffic do you need to make the required amount of sales. To do that, you need to use a quick little equation. Take the number of sales you need to make each month (from step 3), multiply it by 100 and that divide that by your conversion rate:

Again, you can download your free calculator here.

Let’s look at our example:

(100 x 62) / 2 = 3100 visitors per month

Let’s make sure the maths stack up:

If you have 3100 visitors in your shop and only 2 of them will end up buying, that means:
3100 x 2% = 62 sales

Of course, this could change a bit if one month you happen to sell only lower priced items or only a few more expensive items. But this is a great way to get a general idea of what you’re looking at when it comes to driving traffic to your store.

If you were wondering why you’re not making more sales despite having a few hundreds visitors to your shop each month, here’s your answer: you need more traffic! Andif your conversion rate is lower than 1%, you might need to work on that before you start sending more traffic to your shop.