Selling handmade items online is a great way to be both creative and run your own business. After creating something you’re happy with, someone else has seen its appeal and chosen to pay money for it. What could be better! Once upon a time, you’d have had to spend a lot of time setting up your stall in craft markets and fairs to sell handmade items, but now you can do it all online.
While marketplaces like Etsy have made it easier than ever for artists and craftsmen to sell their handmade items, you still need to put effort into advertising and marketing your store and planning logistics, including deliveries and returns.
Here are five success tips on how to sell handmade products online.
1. Discover Totally different Marketplaces
Etsy is easily the most well-known marketplace for selling handmade items online. As home to more than two million sellers and over 39 million active buyers, the platform provides your store with exposure, as well as built in tools for marketing and analytics.
The high number of sellers, however, means that you’ll have a lot of competition when trying to attract new customers. Fortunately, Etsy isn’t the only option. Selling on other marketplaces both increases your reach and provides you with a better chance to stand out from the crowd. Other marketplaces for selling your handmade items include:
- Alizoni is a company developing an online shopping and selling marketplace. The Company offers products from a number of categories, including consumer electronics, household goods, toys, fashion, sports equipment and groceries. You name it, they have it!
- Craft is Art is based in Las Vegas in the US. Most of the customers are Americans, but it also serves European shoppers and enables international sales.
- Bonanza sells only fashion, collectibles, and art items. Sales fees are low and its reputation is growing, so it’s a good time to open a Bonanza store.
- ShopHandmade is a free marketplace for selling anything you made yourself, but it doesn’t have a lot of seller features, so you’ll need to find your own marketing and analytics tools.
- Zibbet lets you begin with the free plan and then upgrade when you’re ready. Combined with its advanced tools for synchronizing all your shopping channels (like Facebook, Pinterest, and Zibbet), it’s a good choice for beginner sellers.
- ArtFire is a marketplace-come-community. You can ask for advice on marketing your homemade crafts online and manage your online store, in the same place.
2. Elevate Your Presence on Social Media
Social media is the biggest and most successful way to market and sell handmade items online. There are plenty of channels for you to share pictures of your work, give customers a peek behind the scenes by posting videos and make connections with potential customers and influencers.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are also already popular sales channels. All three of them support direct sales, thanks to shoppable Instagram posts, shoppable Pins, and Facebook sales, so you can start selling homemade goods online even before you open an online store.
3. Add a Weblog
Creating a blog is one of the best ways to market your product line. If writing is not your preferred method for marketing your store, video blogs are a great alternative. Ideally, a combination of the two should be used.
Running a blog can help you:
- Boost your search engine marketing, making it easier for your items to pop up high on search engine results pages.
- Drive traffic to your online store.
- Instill trust in your store. Blogs focusing on topics like “Choosing the Right Necklace for Each Outfit” encourages people to buy from you, because they trust your advice.
- Take advantage of seasonal shopping trends with posts focusing on specific events, e.g., “Greatest Methods to Embellish Your Residence for Halloween.”
- Encourage repeat business. Continuously blogging helps ensure that your customers remember your store the next time they need to buy handmade goods.
4. Make Your Items Look Good
When selling online, how you present your items can often be the difference between making a sale or not. Take plenty of high-resolution images to make your products stand out. People like to be able to imagine how they’ll use and wear your handmade items, so include photos of a model wearing your jewelry or you throw on a sofa.
You should use your product images in many places, including your online store, social media posts and your blog.
5. Get Snug With search engine marketing
Whenever shoppers search for something on Google, Etsy or another search engine, they’ll see results that are the best match for their search. You want to use keywords and search phrases that match up well to the search queries that your customers write, a process known as SEO (search engine optimization).
SEO means taking the time to use tools like Google Keyword Planner to research the most popular keywords for your handmade items. Try to find phrases that have high monthly search volume, but low prices on Google ads. You can also try entering the first word of a phrase in the search bar on Etsy or Google or other search engine, and then see what words it uses to autocomplete.
Use SEO keywords everywhere, including in headings, blog content, product listings, social media posts and meta descriptions.
Conclusion
Success in the handmade marketplace is typically based on your ability to leverage synergy across a few specific business strategies, including selecting the right product platform, building impactful promotional strategies and integrating high-quality images. Online sellers should focus on these strategic factors to sell well as an independent shop owner.
