Butterfly Chic Boutique Blog

Here is the first of the elaborating follow up posts I promised. If you missed the original post you can read it here.

The most important thing in selling is what you are selling. Your product!
I mean you can have great photos, list regularly, great prices and promote your butt of but if you are selling chocolate covered rabbit poop, it ain’t gonna sale. If you are making the same, exact thing as 285 billion other sellers, you aren’t going to sell as much because you have more competition.

Do you have a usable product?

What do you mean by usable product? By useful product, I mean things that serve a purpose. Practical items. As the USA is in a recession, and the majority of buyers and sellers on Etsy are from the US, and have less and less disposable income, and become more prone to save than spend, it will start effecting companies that sell non-essential items.

Like if you sell art or photography, especially if your price points are in the high-end range, I’m sure you have already seen sales start to taper off, try putting your art onto items people can use, and you can offer at a lower price point, coasters, hair ponies, totes, shirts, cards, those types of things.

Not to say that all people who sell non-essentials will not have great sales stats, but the more useful or unique the product, the easier it is to market and sale….

It also helps if you sell a disposable product, one in which the customer will use your product for it’s intended purpose and then need to come back to you to replace that product. Things such as soap. You don’t buy a bar of soap and keep it forever and never need another bar of soap. It gets used and must be replaced by another bar of soap.

Do you have a unique product? Can they find the same thing everywhere else? Are you one of 15,469,034 zillion jewelry makers? If so, you know what I mean. Jewelry is probably the most competitive handmade market out there, so you really have to do something to give yourself an edge over the competition.

Do you have a style? Do you only work with sterling silver and Swarovski crystals? Do you offer clip earrings? (an often ignored market) Do you work with gold vs silver? Do you use only the finest, most expensive beads and findings, or do you specialize in quality made affordable jewelry?

What makes your product unique or better than those they could buy elsewhere? Do you do something special? Are your cards hand cut by you rather than precut store bought blanks? Are the envelopes handmade? Is that fabric used to make that purse brand name? or vintage? Why would the buyer not just go to wal-mart and buy the same thing cheaper? Why would they not go to one of the other 50 shops on Etsy that sell the same thing you do? Why would they not just go to their local craft show and buy from their instead of you?

Continually improve your product. So you make an awesome product that sells like hot cakes. But what happens when your target market all own your hot seller? Sales drop if you haven’t improved upon it or added to it in some way. Never think you ‘got it’ always look for ways to improve all of your products. There is ALWAYS room for improvement in every aspect of your business. The market is constantly changing and business and products should constantly be changing to meet those needs. That is what makes a successful business.

So, what makes your products special?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 10:19 and is filed under Crafting, Etsy, Handmade, branding, unique, tips, Selling tips, internet sales, lost sales, business, Small Business Problems, Small Business Start-up, plan, planning, online, market research, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.