With today’s e-commerce landscape, handmade art, hand-crafted accessories, wooden hand-carved furniture— you create it, they buy it!
A perfect way to be both artistic and run your own business is to sell handmade pieces online. When you sell crafts online, is there the key to success?
To ensure that the creative business you are building is sustainable, there are steps you should take. Learn some of them below.
Explore Different Marketplaces
Etsy is arguably the most popular marketplace for internet retail of handmade pieces. It is host to more than two million sellers and over 39 million active buyers.
The platform provides your store with visibility and built-in marketing and analytics tools. However, the high number of sellers means that when attempting to draw new buyers, you will have a lot of competition.
Luckily, Etsy isn’t the only choice. Selling on other online platforms increases both your scope and gives you a greater opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
Get Your Prices Right From the Start
When starting up a small craft or goods business, pricing your work is a major concern. You need to hit that ‘sweet spot’ where your item sells, and you earn a profit.
In the beginning, it’s worth spending time to get your pricing right if you want to have a successful business. Or else, your business could collapse, even with high sales.
Consider everything from time, resources, manufacturing, and process. Decide whether you want to sell your goods wholesale in the future, as this will influence the retail price.
Consider Promotions
Don’t forget promotions. You’ll fail to offer any discounts in the future if the margins are slim. You will need to think about where in the market you want to be.
Best Practices for Inventory Management of Your Goods
The inventory is the collection of finished products or goods used in the production owned by a business. It is categorized on the balance sheet of a company as a current asset, and it acts as a buffer between production and order fulfillment.
Inventory management can help your online store evolve and expand quickly, providing you with the resources and budgetary breathing space to expand and take on more orders. Yet inventory for makers of handmade products has more legally-binding benefits.
It is not simple to handle inventory for the crafts business, especially if you’re new to e-commerce. To help you get started, here are some best practices.
Reorder Value = Average Daily Sales Of Product × Lead Time
How much of each supply do you need to order? Firstly, find the product in question’s average daily sales number and then multiply it by the lead time of the product.
So, if you sell 10 bracelets a day on average, and each bracelet takes one week to create, you can order 70 bracelets supplies each week.
Deducting Inventoriable And Non-Inventoriable Items
The difference between inventoriable and non-inventoriable goods, particularly during the tax season, is an important one. These are words used mostly for tax purposes, but they apply, in practice, to raw materials (inventoriable) and other supplies (non-inventoriable).
Only after the item has been sold can inventoriable goods be withheld from taxes; it is included as one of the COGS in the year the sale was made. However, non-inventoriable items can be removed from the year they were purchased.
/inventory-291c7c3c45a74e0a94c3708742e48ff9.jpg)
Conclusion
There is so much that goes into making a good business for online goods and crafts. The path is, indeed, long, and it can be not very easy, and it has so many steps.
Usually, success in the handmade marketplace is dependent on the ability to maximize synergy through a few basic business strategies, including choosing the right product platform, profit pricing, and inventory management.