A Georgetown University Center Education and the Workforce study titled “Learning While Earning: The New Normal” notes that more than 70 percent of college students work while they are in school. For many of us, this requires finding an employer willing to work with employees who can’t work full-time and whose schedules change from semester to semester.

​

Finding an employer willing to extend this type of flexibility can be challenging, luckily, the internet opens up all kinds of possibilities for entrepreneurs of all ages and all career stages. If you have the ability to produce and market your own handmade products, launching and running an Etsy store can be an ideal way for you to help fund your college education and launch a potential ecommerce career on the side.

​

Running an Etsy store during college can be done on a low budget, from startup to operations and marketing. Fellow students and friends can even hop in on the project and provide marketing, production and order fulfillment help. This way everyone gets a piece of the pie, while growing your store and being able to focus on school.

​

Now this seems easy at first glance, but there are many things that can be done to kick your Etsy shop into high gear. A good start is to increase the amount of channels your shop is on. Start by putting your store into the shopper’s path, instead of waiting for shoppers to discover your Etsy store. When you manage stores on multiple platforms, instead of just one, you’ll reach more shoppers. Some of the other platforms where you can run online stores alongside your Etsy store are Bonanza, Zibbet and Handmade at Amazon.

​

Nowadays, Consumers are savvy and many are tired of the same-old, same-old. Whether they found a mass-produced item online that inspired a search for handmade alternatives or saw something they wanted elsewhere, they know they can turn to an online search to find similar items. The better you optimize your product and store pages for online search, the more buyers will find your stores instead of similar competitors.

          

It will take time to manage and run your Etsy store from an operations standpoint, but you can’t stop there. Establishing a formal publishing schedule is vital for social media and email marketing to increase brand awareness and create opportunities for future sales to both returning and first-time customers.

​

Running an Etsy store could be your ticket to paying for schooling and achieving financial independence before you’ve even earned your degree. Use these ideas to launch your own store or find like-minded students who want to partner with you as internet entrepreneurs.