How I Made My First 3D Print Sale on Etsy

For people who 3D print, a lot of them love it as a hobby, but many eventually want to start selling 3D prints to make some income. I found myself in this exact same scenario and it took me a long time to learn how to actually make that first online sale on Etsy.

To make your first 3D print sale on Etsy, the biggest factor is number of listings published in your Etsy store.

The common belief is that you’ll make your first 3D print invention, idea, or listing, then it will just start selling like crazy, because you’ve seen it happen somewhere online in a viral clip.

That stuff is social media, it’s not a real experience. There’s usually tons of work behind it, probably a lot of failed ideas in the past, and then they managed to make something work.

As a regular person who enjoys 3D printing and wants to make some online sales, what you want to do is maximize the number of opportunities that people view your listings.

Having one listing is at least putting you on the map, but not even close to getting those views.

Think of listings as darts, and the bullseye as your first sale.

The chances that you hit the bullseye on your first throw is extremely low. But if you throw 30 darts at the dartboard, you’ll end up hitting it at least once.

After about a year of inaction and low effort, I finally decided to lock in and actually put some real work towards getting my first Etsy sale.

I decided to do a 30 Day Etsy Listing Challenge, where I published a new listing every day for 30 days.

I got this strategy from a guy called Nik who runs a YouTube channel called the Etsy Consultant. He’s been in the game for several years and works with a lot of Etsy store owners.

There’s so much information out there in forums, YouTube videos, articles…it’s hard to really narrow down what works, but I set out to learn it and apply it myself.

The first step was deciding what 3D print I was actually going to create and start selling.

Obviously the best method here is to see what’s already working. This led me down an interesting path of research and data collection.

I did the basic thing, search for “3D print” on Etsy and start looking around. It was hard to see what was working but I started noticing patterns and seeing how Etsy worked.

Eventually I decided to get into research mode like I’ve done with tons of my 3D printing articles and comb through as many 3D print Etsy stores as I could.

I also bought a software called EverBee which gives very useful data on each Etsy listing about views, sales, favorites and more.

Using this along with tons of effort, I made a massive list of 3D printed items that are selling well on Etsy, along with 3D print stores that are selling well, along with their bestselling listings. This took me about a month of daily grinding.

Here’s a picture showing the days and number of listings I did for the daily.

Now this wasn’t just for me to make my first sale of course, because that would be a little overboard.

I knew I eventually wanted to solve the common issue of everyone else having no idea what to sell so having this list would be a treasure trove.

I ended up looking through the list for ideas on what I could 3D print and sell.

I came across these home decoration items calls door toppers. These are cool little almost 2D shapes that sit on a door frame as a decoration.

Had no idea these were even a thing.

I liked this because it uses a small amount of material and is in the popular Etsy niche of home decoration. The audience on Etsy has certain likes and interests overall so I leaned in on this with my item choice.

Another green flag for these door toppers is you can do so many unique designs. It’s like wall art, you can apply it to any niche or interest out there.

After that I started looking for designs that already existed on platforms like Thingiverse, Thangs, Makerworld, Printables and saw what was popular already.

A lot of the popular door toppers were animal themed so I followed that trend to make my first door topper, which was a sleeping cat.

I figured out a few ways to design this file. One way is I could get an existing SVG file, then convert that into a 3D model, then 3D print the design.

You can also create a picture file like a jpg or png, convert that to an SVG file, then do the same process to make it into a 3D model and print the design.

I went with the second option.

I’m not the best at art so I went with ChatGPT to create me a basic design.

It came out pretty good at first, then I did a few prompts to tweak the design and eventually had my first version I was happy with.

I then did the conversion process to turn it into a 3D model and 3D printed it.

Now I just had to test out the door topper to see if it would stay on the door.

It did!

It was awesome seeing the actual design 3D printed and working as intended.

Now I just needed to take some pictures of this model on my door frame, then put up a nice little listing on Etsy.

It took me a while to learn the process to create a listing that can actually perform. Luckily, the Etsy Consultant had a video on how to do SEO in 10 minutes that really simplifies the process.

I followed that and finally ended up listing this cat door topper.

I continued to make listings regularly, even making a Google Sheets document to keep track of listings and list down ideas for future listings.

I ended up making my first sale on day 5 by posting the sleeping cat design in various Facebook groups, hoping to get some ideas and confirmation on whether people liked the design.

I got some really good feedback and other ideas on what else I could do. This is a good idea builder to learn what people like…from real people.

One lady ended up saying she loved it and would like to get one for herself. I sent her a Facebook message letting her know what I’d put it up for sale.

I sent her a link and she tried to buy but was actually met with an error. For some reason, when she put the items in the basket and tried to pay, she got an error saying “All payment methods for this shop are temporarily unavailable.

The crazy thing about that is I would have never known if she didn’t tell me.

There could be stores right now that have this error, people have tried to buy, but customers couldn’t and just left for good.

I immediately got into contact with Etsy support and let them know about this issue. I just had to confirm a few details like card info and they lifted the restrictions.

She then bought the sleeping cat door topper design, along with another devil girl design that I found on Thingiverse which was commercial-free.

Now that I got the first sale I was very excited. I continued listing more items for the daily challenge, then worked on creating her order to ship out.

I already had the prints ready from taking the pictures so I used those and packaged them up in a box that filament spools come in.

I had some experience with shipping, but wasn’t too confident with it. I managed to buy shipping labels through the Etsy platform and printed it on a thermal label printer that I bought.

Then I just stuck the label down, took it to the parcel shop and they scanned it in to ship to my first customer.

I actually documented all 30 days of this challenge in our 3D Printerly Profits Skool group.

So that’s the story of how I made my first 3D print sale on Etsy. It does take knowledge, effort, and action to make your first sale.

Use whatever you can to your advantage for marketing. You may even get your first sale from sharing Etsy listings with your social network, or similar posting in Facebook groups asking for actual opinions.

The main metric to get your first sale is number of listings.

Have you made an Etsy store yet?

How many listings do you have up on Etsy?

Have you made your first 3D print sale yet?

Let me know and I can help out.

If you want to learn more about making profit from 3D printing, join the 3D Printerly Profits Skool group.