So Frustrating -- So Many Ideas in Common

You are 100% correct! That is why promoting becomes the key to selling on Etsy. I listed number in another thread, but just as one example... My largest selling item in the handmade jewelry category has been bracelets. I know I have a niche by selling sea glass creations, which helps boost my sales, but... the number of bracelets listed on Etsy at this time is a little over 100,000! Without promoting, my 12-18 bracelets are just buried among the glut of bracelets on the site and there is very little chance of me ever selling one. It would be just pure luck (or like I mentioned, I'd need to have a person specifically looking for sea glass) but because I force myself to promote almost every single day (and many times 2 or 3 times a day) I will usually sell at least 1 bracelet each month. Last night I sold a pair of earrings. There are over 200,000 pairs of earrings listed on Etsy and I didn't specifically promote these earrings at all this week, but a buyer (she doesn't have a shop on Etsy) must have found me in a promotion thread, went to my shop and found something she liked. These earrings are not sea glass,and without promoting, I don't see how it would be possible for her to have found my shop. The fact that I made the sale at all was pure luck, but w/o promoting, I know that the sale doesn't ever occur. The one thing about having a unique item on Etsy... if it starts selling well, you will quickly find you have competition and your unique item becomes a bit more common. I sold bubble glass magnets last year around the holidays and I was selling quite a few. I had several custom orders for sets, for babyshowers, for Christmas presents and one large order for for a magnet of each of her pets (and she had MANY pets) All of a sudden there were several sellers selling magnets and selling them for less than I had been! My little unique item was gone and there was quite a bit of competition. I haven't listed magnets on Etsy since and I don't plan to, but I still sell them at craft shows and I also use them as give-aways when I make a sale on Etsy. Sea glass is the same. This past year, the number of sellers that sold sea glass jewelry probably tripled on Etsy. Many of these sellers actually know very little about sea glass, but they use it in their creations because the popularity of sea glass is on the rise and they know that there are people listing and selling sea glass creations. They too want a piece of that action. I truely believe that to be successful on Etsy, there needs to be a lot of promoting. I dislike the whole process of promoting and would much rather be at my crafting table instead of trying to take the perfect image of my bracelet and then sitting on the computer to promote it, but it's the only way to make sales on Etsy... the competition is just to fierce to do otherwise.

Well, that's not always true, especially when it comes to craft items and art. Most things have been done already. The question is whether yours stands out. Or it may be that yours are great and someone else's is great but two people look on Etsy and one likes yours and one likes the other person's. It's all so subjective that you never really know what will sell. Everyone has different tastes when it comes to crafts and art, that's why there can be so many of the same thing, because they will also all be different. And even if you did come up with something completely different and you were the only one selling that item, it still might not move, because people just might not like that style of it. Then someone else goes and makes the same item as you but with a different style, color, whatever and maybe they sell like hotcakes. You just never know. You just have to make what you love and what you find beautiful. It may take a bit but eventually others will find it and love it as well and purchase it.