I was sitting at my kitchen table stuffing cardboard pizza into my mouth looking at the traffic of my Etsy shop. Pretty normal day, but there was something weird. My roommate got home. I said what up and did my dishes. Went back to my screen.
What was weird is that I had 64 hits form a random site I had never seen before and had never gotten traffic from. 
The traffic source was rstyle.me and so I pasted it into my browser and was forwarded to rewardstyle.com
This confused and intrigued me. Normally when I get random traffic it’s from a fashion blog or something of that nature but this looked like an email list to some kind of subscription site. I became very curious.
So I typed into google “what is restyle.me” and hit one was this clickbait article, so I clicked it. I command f’d the page, searched for rstyle.me and then pressed enter to zoom to the section that the shortcut highlighted.
This post totally enlightened me about how affiliate marketing works within the fashion blogger world. A company like rewardstyle.com collects online retailers (urban outfitters, uniqlo etc.) and also collects bloggers who “have influence”. The bloggers write about blogger stuff, they take tumblr pics and then they link to products they are wearing or that are somehow related to the post they have created. Each of these links go to a company that is apart of rewardstyles.com affiliate brands and the bloggers get compensated a percentage of the purchase their traffic makes.
But this didn’t make sense, why was my Etsy shop getting traffic from rstyle.me, an affiliate site I am not apart of. So here comes my logic. Etsy, as a marketplace whole (what I mean by this is that all shops on etsy.com are separate, but Etsy bundles them and then offers them to rewardstyle.com who thus offers them to bloggers. See where I’m going with this?), recently became part of rewardstyles program. A blogger found my stuff through rewardstyle’s interface, then linked them in their blog. All affiliate links coming from the bloggers blog go through rstyle.me, which I learned from clickbate article and so in turn I am getting rstyle.me traffic through a deal Etsy made with rstyle on my behalf. This is another reason Etsy is so awesome. They do a lot of marketing for you, a lot of paid marketing for you. Free Google Adwords? Yes please.
Other ways you can get traffic is to use Etsy apps that help you do marketing.
This is my hypothesis. I am going to try to find out more by reaching out to Etsy and if I do get a response it will be linked below. As for now, I am going climbing. Lates humans!
Cod⌥
UPDATE: Ended up getting 142 views from rstyle.me today but neither items that were getting hits sold. Another great example showing how traffic doesn’t mean crap if it isn’t buyer ready traffic. Will keep you posted on changes.
