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Are you considering starting a business to sell your crafts online? Okay then let’s dive in. I believe that we will grow a successful e-commerce store for you.
Starting an e-commerce store is super exciting, and I’m passionate about helping you get it right. But I don’t want to overwhelm you as too much information. In my opinion, some details are more important than digital kinds of stuff.
And so that’s what I’m going to share with you most important tips to keep in mind when you’re getting started. Please change your mindset. It all starts with a mindset shift that you have to make in your head, but it has significant consequences on the number of sales that you might be making.
And the idea here is that you have to stop considering yourself as a hobbyist. You are the handmade shop owner, a product designer. The reason this matters so much is not only because it helps you understand and start focusing on your products. Also, you’re going to have to work on some business, logistics, packaging and marketing stuff. But it’s essential for the way you’re going to enter the marketplace and position your shop and position your brand. And we don’t want people to look at your shop and look at your brand and think all this is just a cute little crafty do it yourself store. Name it how you want it to be homemade, handmade or handcrafted. We all want them to look at your products. Your store should tell us ‘this is a handmade designer brand!’ Moreover, I am honestly trying to emphasize how this small mindset change will matter. The consequence can have on your branding and your marketing strategy down the line.
That’s something that I always try to keep working on marketing, user experience, and so on. It is painful at first because you can be very passionate and love to create many different types of products. But the truth is that when you do this and start selling many different products, it is not an advantage for us. Most importantly, the style of items in your shop will confuse potential customers. They don’t understand what your store is all about. And they leave your shop without purchasing anything. So what we want is you use the specific type of products that you’re selling. You must have the particular customers that you’re selling so that you can have a cohesive shop.
Furthermore, Google has friends, and those are important for us. Those are Think with Google and Google Trends. Following trends and do some research is something I covered in another post. You should read it when you finish this one. But the idea is that you can only sell what people want to buy. And I know it sounds undeniable, too obvious almost for me to be saying it. But it’s true.
You can’t just create an item and trying to sell online without making sure that people are looking for it. And that is something that people are currently typing into their browser to search and to purchase online.
A lot of people won’t agree with my opinion, but please try to avoid selling only one of a kind items and preferably start thinking about creating product collections. I’m saying that because of it’s impossible to sell one of a kind items online and run a successful store. The reason is it’s so much harder. Because it takes longer to create a product detail page that makes sells, after all, each product is different. It takes longer to take pictures each time of this product to write a new listing and your product description, find original tags that you’re going to add all these listings. Isn’t it lots of work for just one sale. And we must go to do that over and over again. Are you so passionate to create unique items? Okay then, maybe it’s fine to have a couple of one of a kind items in your store. So you can test it and see what’s working and what’s not. Please let me know about the results of your tests.
But really, what you want to do is start making ready to ship items that you can now stock off. You want prepared to ship items if what you want to do is scale your business in the future. Creating a product collection helps people. They will buy more than one product when they make an order with you because you have matching items. So if you’re selling me this wooden spoon and you have a matching colander or cutting board, I might be tempted to vote a three together so that it looks beautiful. Same ways are selling me a plate. And also a mug and they, you know, are these cohesive sets that I could have in my kitchen. So it’s good for that. It’s good because it also makes your brand and your store more cohesive. Your visitors understand better than landing on a shop that sells all sorts of different things. And it’s also easier to use when you do marketing. It’s quite an essential point that it helps you because you can buy lots of thing in bulk and cut down on your cost of supplies.
How to Price Your Items
Let’s keep it simple and continue step by step. I know thinking about the numbers and the money and working with spreadsheets isn’t much fun. But every maker who starts a new business needs to price for profits and its not the most fun part of it.
But really, you need to take the time to understand in detail how pricing works. The first step is to decide your hourly rate. $20 or $120 how much is your hourly rate? However, we all never think about it if we never worked on an hourly basis before. It is easy to calculate. Did you know how much money you spent last month? Divide this number to standard monthly working hours of your country.
Want to calculate your hourly rate in detail? Please download this file: Free Pricing Calculator for your Crafts.
You cannot run a business if you don’t make money. We don’t want to waste your time crafting and creating products ever hours of your life for $100 profit at the end of the month. So many makers undercharge for what they worth. They undercharge products. And it is a vicious circle spiralling down to overwhelm. And your store is never growing, and it is never working out. So it’s essential. I’m not saying that to scare you in sound or dramatic, but you need to understand how pricing work and you need to price for profits. If you need help with that, if you want to dive into some pricing spreadsheets download this file: Free Pricing Calculator for your Crafts
Product photography
Product photography is essential what is going to make sales for your store or not. We might work as hard as we want to get people to visit your shop. We might spend as many as we can on marketing. If your product photography is not clear and detailed enough, then people aren’t going to buy it. Used to be more comfortable and functional enough was truly good enough. A few years back. But now we all know the rise of Instagram. What we’re doing all day is looking at beautiful pictures of stuff. And so our expectations much higher. That means you might need to shoot tons of photos for a couple of days and trying to figure out how your camera works and learn about photography. Or you might need to invest in working as a professional photographer that will do that for you. But its always better be on your own at the beginning.
So really take the time to think about that and decide what road you’re going to make, but invest either time or money in product photography. It is so worth it.
I hope this help. Please leave a comment below. Let me know your questions. I am so glad to take the conversation in the comments.
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