Adventures of an On-Line Seller
Continued: Selling Through On-Line Malls, Personal Experience

To find my previous posts in this series, please use a search box on the right side of this blog. Your keyword is "Adventures".
Adventure is by definition an undertaking of a questionable nature, and finding the right on-line venue for your product is definitely a questionable thing, with no guaranteed success. There is no recipe that would fit every seller and his product either. Some people manage to maintain accounts at all kinds of possible sites, others stick with one favorite place.

I guess, my approach is somewhere in the middle. I am a quick learner, but it takes time for me to find out all the bells and whistles of the on-line mall and figure out the best strategy to make it work for me. I am not even talking about figuring out what buttons to push (although this may be tricky at times as well); I am talking about a general strategy that would allow my jewelry and tutorials to be at least found on the particular site. I know, I can promote my shop, give out business cards, and in many other ways let people know the address of my shop in the on-line mall. This, however, is not the point of joining such malls. I can promote my own web site in the same way, and probably get even better results, because people who visit it would not be distracted by the other (competing!) sellers. The only reason to join an on-line mall, I think, is to take advantage of the existing traffic to that particular mall. And then comes the next question: how can I make my shop visible to the presumably numerous visitors of the site.

I already mentioned eBay and JustBeads.com in my previous posts. Enough said about eBay elsewhere, so I will not waste time repeating it here. JustBeads was a lovely site, with reasonable prices, good traffic, but with a small enough community of sellers that allowed everybody to be found relatively easy. I would love to see this site re-launch in the nearest future and hope they will regain their strength once the site is up an running again.

My other endeavor (and rather unsuccessful one) was RubyLane.com. This is the place where I totally failed the task of being found within the site, I think. They have a good traffic, and I know a number of happy RubyLane sellers, but it did not work out for me. It is quite sad to admit, especially because I was cautious about joining this site to begin with due to their fees. I did manage to sell enough to just about cover my fees, however the time spent setting the shop there and taking it down a few month later is lost.

My current shop is set up with Etsy.com. I am quite happy with it, although I know for a fact that it does not work for everybody. I registered my shop there in 2006, but did not give it enough attention until more than a year later. Since then, I am working on my shop there almost every day, and still learn a lot. There is a number of ways to get noticed within this site, but my advice to any new sellers would be to visit Etsy forum and look for threads about marketing. They offer a lot of information, and everybody can pick and choose the ideas that may work better for them. Again – different things work for different people.

Right now I am trying out two sites, ArtFire.com and 1000markets.com. Being new, both of these sites lack in traffic (and the second one is not even officially launched yet), but they allow listing your products for free, which is very appealing.

Adventures of an On-Line Seller

Continued: On-Line Shopping Malls

Find my previous posts in this series here, here, here, here, and here.

There are two ways of approaching the task of selling your art and craft on-line. Most crafters are dealing with both of them.

The first one is when you already have a group of royal customers – people who bought from you in person, usually at craft shows. These people already know your product. All you need to do is to let them know where they can find it in between your shows. Almost any on-line selling space (whether it is your own web site or a place at some on-line shop) would work for this group, as long as this place has a convenient check-out process and you provide a good customer service. This one is easy to master – just make sure to pass on your business card with your web site address at every opportunity and remind your customers about yourself every so often.

The second way is a so-called “cold turkey approach”. This is when you are using your on-line selling place to find new customers. This one is much more difficult. This is when you need to think about such things as SEO (search engine optimization), advertising, key words, transfer ratio (number of visitors to number of actual sales), traffic sources, bounce rate (how soon a visitor leaves your shop), and many other highly-educational topics, each of which brings you pages of information when searched for in Google.

It is the task of finding the new customers that makes me looking for better on-line selling spaces. I do have my own web site, and I spend lots of time and effort refining it both for SEO purposes and for my visitor's viewing pleasure, but it is not enough. Trying to bring new people to your own web site is like mailing your advertising postcard to everybody in your town. Most people are simply not interested.

When you join some on-line mall with an established traffic, the task becomes a bit easier. You are now working with a better-targeted group (provided, you joined the right mall, and people who came there to buy something are in fact may be interested in your particular product).

Here are a few things to think about when considering an on-line place to sell other than your own web site (not necessarily in this order):

- Does it target the right group of potential customers?
- Does this site have enough traffic?
- Is it user-friendly (both for your customers and you)?
- How much time will your new shop require (learning the rules, shop set-up, approval (if any), and time for every listing)?
- How much is it going to cost you (look for shop-opening fees, listing fees, and fees per sale)?
- How visible will your product be within this site?
- How good is the technical support at this site?

And before this post gets too long, here is a list of possible on-line selling places for hand-made goods. I've tried and left some of them, I have shops in various stages of maturity at others, and some I have not even visited yet. I think I will share my personal experience with these sites next Thursday.

http://www.1000markets.com
http://www.artfire.com
http://www.artflock.com
https://www.artfulhome.com
http://www.artbyus.com
http://www.artsefest.com
http://www.blujay.com
http://bigcartel.com
http://www.buyitsellit.com
http://www.cafepress.com
http://www.canduru.com
http://www.craftersbuzz.com
http://www.craftmall.com
http://www.crowsoup.com
http://en.dawanda.com
http://www.erayo.com
http://www.ecrater.com
http://www.elsewares.com
http://www.erayo.com
http://www.farcountries.com
http://funkyfinds.us
http://www.folksy.com
http://www.girlshopspot.com
http://www.gozabo.com
http://handmadecatalog.com
http://handmadefusion.com
http://hyenacart.com
http://www.icraft.ca
http://www.imagekind.com
http://www.kinfolkcrafts.com
http://www.lollishops.com
http://lov.li
http://lunacraft.com
http://www.mintd.com
http://www.myartplot.com
http://www.mystore.com
http://www.mywares.com
http://www.notonthehighstreet.com
http://www.papernstitch.com
http://www.pinkdoodle.com
http://www.redbubble.com
http://www.rubylane.com
http://www.seekingdesigners.com
http://www.silkfair.com
http://www.shophandmade.com
http://www.shopify.com
http://www.skydowntown.com
http://www.smashingdarling.com
http://www.strictlyhandmade.com
http://supermarkethq.com
http://www.thumbtackpress.com
http://www.trunkt.org
http://veganica.com
http://www.wagglepop.com
http://www.winkelf.com
http://www.wholesalecrafts.com
http://www.wwcrafters.com
http://www.yabblebabble.com
http://www.yessy.com
http://www.yinia.com
http://youcraft.org
http://www.youcraftylot.com
http://www.zazzle.com

Adventures of an On-Line Seller
Continued: Blogs

I started my blog in July, 2006.

To be honest with you, I did not know what to do with it for a while. I understood that a blog has a great business potential, and that was my main reason for starting it. After all, the fact that Google likes fresh content while blogs provide the freshest content possible is really easy to grasp. What I did not understand is how to make my blog interesting for real people, not just some search engines. I am not a chatty person by nature, and coming from the academic and industrial sectors, I believed that mixing personal and professional stuff is never a good idea. Turns out, I was completely wrong on that...

Anyway, I've compiled a list of blog ideas for artists, not in any particular order (I am using this list myself and happy to share it with anybody interested):

- Pictures of your new works;
- Pictures of your studio;
- Stories about work in progress;
- Cool tools and supplies;
- Stories and pictures from your customers;
- How-to about anything and everything related to your craft, business, or anything else you care about;
- Your thoughts on any topic related to your area of interest;
- Promotions of fellow artists;
- A giveaway (both for fun and for business promotion);
- A place for advertisement (see my Project Wonderful spots on the right);
- Stories about places you visited – from walk in the neighborhood to a trip abroad;
- Favorite recipes;
- Things that affected you personally and that may or may not influence your art;
- Posts about family, pets;
- Reviews of your favorite books and movies.

More ideas?

Adventures of an On-Line Seller
Continued: Personal Web Site

To continue with my Thursday series, I want to talk about creating my own web site. That was an adventure in itself!

I wanted to make my own web site myself, and at a reasonable budget. I have to admit, it was a difficult task, but I enjoyed learning everything I had to make it happen, and I am glad I did it myself.

My first web site was from geocities.com. Free, built over an existing template (which I kept changing over time), and with some pop-up adds. Looking back, I see how many mistakes I made with this site. Aside from the design flaws, this site was screaming about my lack of knowledge about SEO, and the pictures could have used more work (which they did, over time). Never the less, I managed to make some sales even from that site.

What would I do differently if I had a chance to start over? I would start with a blog rather than a web site. This would be a more successful approach, because there are so many things that can be done with blogs, not to mention that search engines love them.

My next move was to obtain my own domain name and find a new host for my new web site, free of adds. The first company I chose (after a careful consideration!), managed to lost all my data two days after I launched the site. They also refused to help me with restoring it. The problem was that I relied on their pre-built templates, which I changed a bit. Yes, I saved all my photos and descriptions, as well as the HTML codes of all the newly created pages. However, there was no option for uploading these pages for me. So, when the data were lost, all I could do was to go back though every individual page and re-upload every picture and description manually once again. Well, I was so pissed off by the service I received from this web host that I went looking for a new one.

The good thing about this story is that it finally gave me enough motivation to learn HTML and stop relying on any templates. Turned out, it is not too bad, and in a month I had my third generation of web site up and running with a new host. By the way, I am glad to report that my new web host, pair.com, provides an affordable and reliable service, and I am very happy to be their customer. I switched my domain name hosting to this company as well.

Note that I said “third generation”, not “third version” of my website. That is because the number of versions I went through in these few years I cannot even count. I've changed everything (a few times!) - layout, background colors, logo, all pictures of my jewelry, beads, vases, and wall pieces... Even the ideology of the site, its purpose, had changed. At some point it was a standing-alone on-line shop with a gallery of sold items. Now it is a gallery of my best items with a link to my shop on Etsy.com. I still sell my tutorials directly from my web site, but not the other items.

To complete this rather long post I want to offer two links I found very helpful for myself.

The first one is to Rena Klingenberg's site, home-jewelry-business-success-tips.com. This site is a collection of jewelry-related business (probably even wider – craft-related business) articles. There is a section for selling on-line, which is a good start reading.

The second link is to J. Cricket Walker's site gnc-web-creations.com. Cricket and a group of other enthusiasts teach one of the Internet's most popular series of on-line classes for Search Engine Optimization, Successful Website Marketing, and Website Development Training. You can sign up for any combination of these classes and receive regular E-mails with their tips and instructions. I went through this training myself and found it tremendously helpful.

Adventures of an On-Line Seller
Continued: Just Beads

...See my previous posts on this topic here and here.

To continue with recollecting my on-line experiences, I wanted to talk about a lovely site I used to use to sell my polymer clay beads on, called justbeads.com. It was a refreshing alternative for ebay, and there, in fact, people were selling beads only – polymer clay, lampwork, metal, commercial supplies – but beads, and beads only. I am talking about this site in the past tense because, as I just found out this morning, the site is currently closed. Here is an excerpt from the announcement they posted a couple of days ago: “We've made some great progress this week! Now that we've completed the rebuilding of the JustBeads.com Auction site, we've been free to concentrate on the many site modifications we wanted to implement...We've still got a lot of work to do....but we are definitely getting closer! Please check back often for our status reports and watch for announcements of our Grand Re-Opening! ... Stay Tuned! “ So overall it looks like something exciting is going on and the site is going to re-open even better and stronger than it was.

When I just started selling there in 2004-2005, the site was quite active, and I was able to sell everything I listed, with people competing for my beads. Later the situation changed – beads (and not only mine, it seemed like a common situation) would still sell, but there were no bidding wars anymore. One bid would appear just seconds before the auction was about to end, and the lot would sell for the minimal preset price. I really did not mind that, although selling in an auction situation was more fun. There were small fees for listing and a percent from the sale price, as far as I remember. You also had to pay for some extra features, such as additional pictures in your listing, a thumbnail picture, some ways to highlight your listing on the page, and the place at the front page, if you wanted any of these tools. One feature I really liked was an artist of the month article/interview they did once a month. There was a nice craft fair-like atmosphere on that site.

I am really eager to see the new changes they make. I left this site when I started making more finished jewelry, built my own site (which is an adventure in itself – more about that in my next post), and then Etsy came along with their lower fees and an option to leave the listing up for months rather than days or weeks like on Justbeads. Anyway, I am willing to reconsider this site once they re-open and I am urging everybody for makes their own beads to do the same.

The pictures in this post are some beads I sold through Justbeads.com. Anybody who knows my work now would see that I was still experimenting with various techniques and looking for my own style back then.

Adventures of an On-Line Seller

Continued: Legal Stuff

See my previous post on the same topic here.

Back to 2004...

Inspired by my first sale (and pushed in the same direction by my husband), I decided to start my own small business.

By then, I had some experience selling my own hand-made goods, although it was in a totally different country (back in Russia, 10 years earlier). As a student, I used to make custom wedding dresses (which was very romantic and creative, but not profitable enough due to the time involved and the amount of customer service needed), I then switched to making backpacks for fellow white-water canoeists (which was way more successful and less time-consuming). Anyway, I had a rough idea of what's involved – business registration, taxes, etc., and I was not looking forward to that. I think, legal stuff sounds scary to many creative minds in any part of the world.

Turned out, the entire process here in the US is quite straight-forward, and so my business was created and given an official status in a record time.

I was about to look for my list of useful links on this topic when I came across this post:

Small_Businesses_and_Taxes

I think it answers all the basic questions related to the legal part of turning your craft into business very well.

To be continued - next Thursday...

Adventures of an On-Line Seller

I've been experimenting with a few on-line tools recently trying to increase my sales, and this made me reflect on all kinds of different venues I've tried over the years. I think it could be an interesting read not only for fellow artists and crafters, but also for people who buy our products on-line. Just like with almost everything in this life, there is more to selling on-line then meets the eye.

I think I will do one post a week on this topic.

So, here is about my first on-line sale. I think it happened in early 2004. I've been working with polymer clay for a few years by then, but never sold anything. I was making things for myself, and it was a nice creative outlet for me. At that time I was working in pharmaceutical industry, in the area that is strictly regulated (for a number of good reasons), so being able to do something the way I want it was a well-desired change for me.

In 2003 we moved to Maryland, and I met many new people, who noticed my polymer clay jewelry, complemented it, and made me want to do more. I started experimenting with caning. Those who've done it, know that making canes produces a huge number of similar things, which beg to be sold (otherwise what are you going to do with them?). And so finally I've got enough courage and listed my first set (necklace and earrings) for $20 on e-Bay. It received exactly one bid, which was enough to sell the set. I was so happy! I could not believe somebody liked my work enough to pay money for it. Looking back at this set (see the picture below), I realize that my craftsmanship could still use some improvement, and the money I've got for this set did not cover the time I spent making it, but back then I was proud and happy...

More about my on-line adventures next Thursday.