• Come Join Me
  • About
  • Photos
  • Published books
  • Portfolio
  • Trivia
  • The Florida Life
  • Writer's Toolbox
  • E-commerce
Julie L. Cleveland

4 Ecommerce Sites for Handmade Sellers

8/23/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
When I started my website, the year was 1997. I was selling hand-drawn graphics and hand-drawn fonts. I also sold products I made from my fractal art that included mousepads, posters, t-shirts and coffee mugs. All of this was before there was even an eBay. I found a payment processor that would handle my credit card sales, but mostly, people sent me checks, and I sent them the product. My website was all coded by me, and it was a very simple site. You see it; you like it; you buy it. I didn’t even have the benefit of Google.

In 2004, when I opened www.bluemorningexpressions.com, I hand-coded my site, but I also dabbled on eBay with my handmade beads and polymer clay work. When Etsy started in 2006, I opened a store there, as well.  Since this time, I have moved on from Etsy and am focused on my site, but for those who are looking for a viable handmade site, here are some of the places that I have found to be good choices.

Handmade Friendly Sites

Indiemade

I have several friends who have made the move to Indiemade. They moved in this direction several years ago when other handmade sites either failed or provided a miserable seller’s experience.

This website/eCommerce solution offers the sellers a solid place to sell their wares. They only support handmade, so you don’t have to compete with bulk resellers. You do have to do your own promoting since they don’t have the built-in traffic as Etsy does. They also have a blog, so you can generate traffic to your site by writing about your product.

Here is an example of a couple of my friends on Indiemade:
https://www.shadowdogdesigns.com/
https://victorianstyletreasures.indiemade.com/
​

Etsy

While Etsy has been around a long time, its focus has been less and less on the handmade artist and more on supplies and other mass-produced items. While there is a need for supplies in bulk, there have always been plenty of places to find those on the web rather than having the sellers infiltrate a handmade site.

As well, they allow for manufacturing partners now that make mass-produced items even easier to sell. Yes, this helps me sell my pillows, prints and mugs, but I don’t have them listed on Etsy for sale. About once a year, I use Etsy to push my handmade beads when sales slow down for me on other venues.

The search engine on Etsy has always been wrong-headed by making you cram all the keywords into the title and description rather than the more organic and natural flow of the current Google search engine.

The key to Etsy, if you want to go that route, is that they have built-in traffic that goes through their homepage, so you don’t have to do all of your own promoting.

Here is one of my friend’s Etsy site:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/Thesingingbeader
 

Amazon Handmade

When Amazon decided to open up to handmade and give Etsy a run for their money, I signed up immediately. There are a lot of people who shop on Amazon, so I saw no reason to not take the time to get my handmade items in front of as many people as I could.

It is not listing-friendly, and there are a lot of pitfalls to selling on Amazon, but there are a lot of really great benefits from doing it, too. I sell a lot of my regular bread and butter things on Amazon like keyrings, thimbles and other things that I can quickly reproduce.

Here is a link to my shop on Amazon Handmade:
While not handmade-specific, Shopify has an extensive suite of tools that handmade artists can take advantage of to build a robust site with everything from payment processing to SEO management.

Shopify
When I got tired of coding my website and decided that Etsy had become too big as they moved away from handmade, I shopped around for a website/eCommerce solution that would meet my handmade needs while making it easy for me to do business.

I always liked to build my own sites because I felt like I had better control over things and was not relying on one site to keep me in business. While I still feel that way, after six or seven years with Shopify, I can say that I’m glad that I no longer have to waste my time redoing the site every time something changes on the web. I only have to concentrate on selling my handmade beads.  

Here is my site:
https://bluemorningexpressions.myshopify.com/

No matter which direction you choose to go, it’s better to focus on a marketplace or eCommerce solution that supports the needs of handmade artists over mass-produced products.
0 Comments

3 Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your Products

8/9/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

So, you have this really great product that you think everyone would love to have, and you have a marketing budget of about zero. What do you do?


There are a lot of ways to tackle this situation, but most of the advice out there focuses on spending lots of money on social media posts and search engine ads. What do you do if you do not have a lot of money set aside for any type of advertising?

Here are some great little marketing tricks that will not cost you a lot of money, and most of them are quite simple to set up. The only downside to marketing without money is that getting the results you want might take longer than you had hoped. Not forever, but a little longer than doing Facebook blasts of your latest product.

Take a look at the following cheap product promotion ideas to see if anything inspires you:

Budget Marketing Ideas 
  • Networking
If you are already on Facebook or Twitter, create a group for people like you who are struggling. Don’t focus the group on your products, but focus it on networking and helping other online business owners get sales.

There are so many groups on Facebook, and the web in general, that it is really easy to find like-minded people who are struggling every day to get traffic to their stores and listings. If you create a group where you can all come together, you can create an atmosphere where everyone helps each other independently of the group.

10 artists in a group can share the other nine artists’ work with their followers, which increase their exposure to more people. Networking has always been the key to getting more sales. From the first elixir wagon in western towns to today’s internet age, sharing information is the easiest thing to do and the least expensive.


  • Email marketing
If you have an email list, then send out emails to your customers. Email still gets the highest response rate of all advertising, and it is either free or very inexpensive. Take your time crafting your subject line, your header and your email body so that it reflects your perfect customer’s desires.

What if you don’t have an email list? It’s okay. You can start one by doing a giveaway of one of your products. You tell everyone on your social media accounts that you have a giveaway and ask them to sign up to be eligible to win. There are some rules around giveaways on Facebook, so make sure that you understand what you can and cannot do before your set out on a giveaway. Then take the email information you get and put them on your email list. Make sure that when they sign up, they know they are getting future emails from you.
​
Even if you only have one sale, you have one person on your email list, so email them.
​


Put a THANK YOU sticker on every order you send out! Remind them that they are appreciated. 
​

  • Referrals
Do you already have great customers who have purchased your items? Ask them for a referral. It is easy to put stickers on your products that ask for referrals, or you can set up a referral fee or free products in exchange for referrals. This type of inexpensive marketing is done all the time from the top companies to the small business owner.

There are a lot of cheap product promotion ideas that won’t cost you a lot of money, so if these product promotion ideas do not work at first, keep working at them until you start to see the sales come in. From there, it will be hard to keep up.


.  
Use a Referral sticker on all of your orders to ask for the next order!
​

If you find this information useful, then please share it with your friends. If you have any suggestions on how to make it better, then please contact me. I am always open to suggestions.
​
Looking for more tips? Subscribe to the RSS feed for more tips on how to market on a budget.  

​

Read the 1 Page Marketing Plan book for even more tips and tricks. Sometimes, this is included in the Kindle Unlimited program, so you can read for free! Don't have Kindle Unlimited? Get it here:

Kindle Unlimited
0 Comments

    Author

    I am a manic writer who has to write all the time about something, even if it is a detailed 'To Do' list. 

    More about me:
    ​
    As an Amazon Associate I earn a commission from qualifying purchases. 

    This section includes affiliate links, meaning that I will earn commission if you make a purchase through my links.

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022

    Categories

    All
    Black Friday Shopping
    Customer Service
    Easy Promotions
    Getting Site Ready For Holidays
    Handmade Markets
    Marketing On A Budget
    Optimizing Your Site
    Print On Demand
    Reputation Problems
    Selling On Etsy
    Setting Up A Printify Store
    Setting Up A Shopify Store
    Social Media
    Twitter For Business
    Where To Sell Handmade

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.