So here is my blog post for her, and everyone else. :)
Firstly, I'll talk about Etsy. Etsy is obviously the most well known place for crafters to sell their handmade wares. I mainly sell crochet and knit items, but have other items for sale, as well. I guess I shouldn't say that I sell them since I haven't really sold anything yet. I've been giving away things for free to get a feedback rating established. I'm not sure when I'm going to stop doing this. Etsy will get the most eyes on your items.
Etsy also has some interactive features, where other sellers and buyers can lounge and hang out.. I hear there was a chat feature at one time, but has been disabled. Here's a link to an Etsy chat started by some Etsy users.
With Etsy, you'll pay $.20 every time you list an item, and when you renew that listing, as well. I have taken to adding this amount of money into the price of the item, and if I relist it, I add the amount again. I haven't decided where the cut-off will be for how many times I will relist an item.
Etsy also allows multiple ways to pay for items. Other venues such as Storenvy, do not. Etsy also takes a portion of your sale. I'm not sure what that portion is, but I believe it to be 3%. I don't think this is a huge deal. They need to make money, too, right?
So far, I've been paying around $20/month in Etsy fees. Lately it has been less, though, because Etsy recently changed the way the search works. Before the change, sellers would relist their items every day to be at the top of the search because the default search was the most recent items. Some sellers were spending hundreds of dollars a week or a day this way. Those same sellers were also making a ton of money and could afford it.
Now, the search has changed to the most relevant. The most recent additions are still considered, but don't hold as much weight. Since recency isn't such a factor anymore, I'm paying less per month now...probably around $10-$15/month. They just changed this in August so I don't really have much data to average this yet.
I think Etsy is the place you want to start, especially to get people aware of your items. And they also have a ton of seller tools to help you get started and drive traffic to the store.
Their seller handbook is invaluable.
I did create an account on Artfire, but I just coudn't justify the $10/month to be able to sell over there. Having a buyer's account is free, but if you want to sell, you have to pay. Maybe if I had some actual return customers that knew me and my items, I may be able to justify a store there. I'm paying that much at Etsy and not selling anything yet so really, I can't afford it.
It would be nice if Artfire didn't charge monthly and did it like Etsy as a per listing fee or a small percentage of sales so I could control how much I paid every month. I took advantage of Artfire's free one month seller account, but didn't keep it. I didn't get much of a chance to delve and explore Artfire very much.
Over at Storenvy, you can list as many items as you'd like for free. You can only use PayPal as a checkout option, though. They'll take 3% of the sale as well. One of the things I do like about Storenvy, is that you can buy from multiple stores at once. Meaning, you can put items from different stores in your shopping cart and then check out and PayPal disperses the money to the different sellers. With Etsy, you can't do that. You can only buy from one store at a time. I'd like to see that change at Etsy.
Storenvy seems to have a pretty streamlined way of adding items to your shop, as well. Its not a big deal to me, but with Storenvy, you can have only 4 pictures of your item, where at Etsy, you can have 5. I would also like to see Storenvy allow more tags for items. With Etsy, you can add 13 tags, with Storenvy, you can have only 55 characters. Tags being keywords people would use to search the site and find your items. Also, at Storenvy, you can add different links to your other stores (pic) or blogs, or facebook or whatever.
That way, people can 'follow' you or 'friend' you to keep up with you and your products. This is a big help to get noticed, I think.
The last place I have items is at Madeitmyself.com. Right now, this site is totally free to sell at. It is in beta, and I think they will be charging in the future, but no prices have been set. This is something that people without a lot of money might want to take advantage of. But on the downside, this place does not get very much traffic, that I've seen.
Madeitmyself could use some streamlining in adding items, but really, its in beta and you can't really expect everything to work perfectly all the time.
All these stores have one thing in common: You can't expect to put your items up for sale and then quit your day job. You have to do something to create traffic to your store. I have accounts at all the major (and some minor) social networking sites. Every time I list an item, I make a post about it on every one of those sites. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Jux, and sometimes Flickr if I am particularly proud of my item. I also have a website (I can help you make a website and I don't charge much -- contact me for rates) and I bought business cards. I leave them everywhere I go.
BTW, Tumblr, is a great way to get people to see your items as proven from this activity in my Tumblr stream:
I also post on craigslist about once a week pointing people to my Etsy store, or my website, and I just recently started this blog. I'm trying to update it once a week.
Keeping up with all of this is time consuming. I do it every day. Its almost a full time job. I get off work at about 6 pm and I go to bed around 1 am, sometimes later. During this time the only thing I do is make items or promote my shops on the various sites. So around 6+ hours a day, excluding Fridays and Saturdays, I've been doing this for about 2.5 months now and haven't sold one thing (except for free stuff, but that doesn't count).
I haven't done any of them, but I think crafts shows are probably the way to go at first, if you can. That way, you can get your items shown to a lot of people that are there to buy. If you include a business card with their purchase, they'll have that if they decide they want to buy more items from you online.
Ok, this post is way longer than I thought it would be and I still want to compare the various social networking tools. So I will save that for my next blog post, probably some time later this week.
Julie
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