Shop Critique - Catan niche, impressions decreasing
Shop link: https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/customCATANca
Hey guys! I have been on Etsy for 3 years total but was on Vacation mode for most of that until June of last year. My shop had a really unexpected growth period from November - January where I averaged over $2000 CAD in revenue and about ~50-60 orders. Since then things have slowed down significantly, despite me putting more effort into listing photos, social media, and creating new listings.
For a general look at my trend: visits have looked like this: Oct: 241, Nov: 980, Dec: 1922, Jan: 1843, Feb: 1315, Mar: 973, Apr: 906, and scheduled for 700 visits in May.
For reference, I sell game cards for the board game Settlers of Catan which are custom made and designed to fit into an authentic deck of cards to give the game another dimension.
Per the guidelines for the shop critique and request, the two specific questions I wanted to ask you all are:
1. How much can I expect sales/view/visits to fluctuate over months or even years? From your experience?
- It's hard for me to tell if this is just a slow.. couple of months, or if I'm running out of people who buy products in my very niche niche.
2. What should be my next frontier to pursue further growth?
- There are a few options in my mind. Social media aka bringing outside traffic to my shop (working on this), adding new listings to attract return customers (also working on this), or maybe Etsy ads or tweaking my SEO (never tried ads, have somewhat tried to optimize SEO)?
Why I made this shop: I love catan, and my friends and I had been playing with these cards for years, and we felt they really did add a lot to the game when it had become dull.
Why I feel my products are worth buying: They are really unique! That is the leg up I feel I have. I basically have the monopoly on my cards until or if someone decided to copy them, nobody else sells my specific designs (though there are some (1-2) competitors that sell other types of custom development cards.
I would hugely appreciate any feedback!