Selling Your Handmade Art And Craft Online

When I decided to turn my hobby of jewellery making into a business I had to consider how to sell my pieces. I thought that the markets for my designs were either personal, face to face selling or via a website. These were the two ways I initially chose to go.

Selling at a market, from a stall or table is interesting and enjoyable, but markets and house party’s are extremely time consuming. If you are employed and it is only a small number of pieces that you wish to sell, then this is probably not a perfect solution.

Building a web shop can also be very time consuming and expensive. I know this because I am speaking from experience. The problem with this option is that in order to make your website visible to potential customers they either have to know your name or know what your online shop is called. There will be a limited number of people who have this information and therefore the number of potential customers is also very limited.

In order to increase the number of customers to your website you need to increase traffic to it. There are two ways to do this. The first is online advertising. This can turn out to be very expensive. You will probably have to invest more money than you are likely to make from selling your work.

The second way to increase traffic requires you to learn a whole new set of skills in online marketing and Search Engine Optimisation. These skills are interesting and challenging, but if you only want to sell small amounts of your work, can be very, very technical.

So is there a way that you can have a website and all the traffic you need to have a chance at making a sale? The obvious answer is Ebay, where you can set up an account or a shop and sell your work. There is certainly a great deal of people or traffic, on Ebay every day. But is this the answer for handmade work?

At the start of this piece I suggested there was a solution and I can not believe that I was not aware of it until fairly recently!

There are marketplaces available on the web that will allow you to build a shop online very easily and simply. These sites are incredibly easy to use and in order to sell the only other thing you need is a Paypal account, which you can set up for free.

Opening an account on one of these marketplaces is free and very simple. The great thing about them is that they have lots of ‘traffic’, or potential customers to you and I, who actively choose to buy original handmade products.

There are sellers on these sites that have sold dozens, if not hundreds of pieces of their work. Not only have a lot of them sold well, but, I noted that many established online sellers of handmade jewellery and other types of craft offer their pieces for sale in this kind of marketplace as well as on their own websites.

In June 2010, the Telegraph’s article, Best of Britain’s sellers on Etsy, gave their recommendations for the best of British art, design and craft on Etsy.

Etsy is probably the most established site on which to sell handmade goods and it is great if you live in the US, or want to try to sell your products there. There is however a growing community of UK and European sellers on Etsy.

The UK now has a number of marketplaces including Folksy, MISI, Coriandr, and Not Mass Produced. All of these sites will enable you to sell your handmade products online to a national or global audience.

The account is free. The sites make their revenue by charging a listing fee for every item you list. This is only a few pence or cents, and if you sell an item there is a percentage fee payable, usually approximately 3-5%.

The shop building software that you will use to build your own shop is intuitive and incredibly simple to use and will produce professional looking shops. Could this be what you have been looking for? Do a web search for any of the sites mentioned above and start selling your own handmade items or art. You never know what may come of it, fame and fortune may await, you may find a career that you never believed possible, but if not, it is the perfect way to fund your hobby!

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