When it comes to setting up shop in an online marketplace, there’s more to it than meets the eye. In this article, you will find nuggets of information every new shop owner should know!
I opened my Etsy jewelry shop in August 2011, followed by my jewelry supply shop in October 2011. Thinking there wasn’t much I would need to do beyond adding items to my shop, I let it sit, while adding new pieces. I had this naive hope that sales would just…happen. Well, it doesn’t work that way. If your craft is something that is common in the handmade world, you will be competing with tens of thousands of other shops in your field! This was a reality I learned the hard way. Wondering what I was doing wrong, I started looking around at the community Etsy offers its sellers (and buyers). Through the diverse and knowledgeable members, I quickly realized that initial sales don’t come easy and need to be earned to some extent. What can I say; common sense escapes me from time to time! Below is a list of things you should know when opening a shop on an online marketplace!
1. Decide on what you want to open a shop with. Whether it is jewelry, photography, art, vintage finds, woodworking and anything in between. Know exactly what you’re offering to buyers. Once you have the field you want to work with narrowed down, think about possibly adding a niche. Let’s use a jewelry shop as an example. Is your jewelry primarily beaded? High end gemstones? Do you often use a specific median like Sterling silver or hemp? Do you do a lot with chainmail? Are there a lot of your pieces that use similar colors? Do you do a lot of vintage style, bohemian, or steam punk pieces? This all ties back into knowing what you’re offering potential buyers. When someone asks you what kind of shop you have and you vaguely reply with “a jewelry shop” the chances of any further interest quickly dwindles. But, if you reply with “a handmade jewelry shop specializing in wire wrapping of natural stones” or “a handmade jewelry shop specializing in chainmail, inspired by the renaissance era,” even if someone thinks they have no interest in what you offer, the chances of them being intrigued enough to go look at your shop and see first hand what it is you have, is increased!
Also, knowing what you want to make and/or sell is going to play a crucial role in where you should look into setting up a shop. Once you know what it is that you are offering, do some due diligence and look into each online marketplace and check out the types of shops they have. Try signing up as a guest or buyer and participate in their community (forums are usually available), ask around if fellow shop owners think the shop you would like to open would be a good fit. Most fellow shop owners will be upfront with you and if they don’t think your shop would do well in the marketplace of the site you are considering, they probably know of other sites you can look into.
2. Get your shop seen. For new shop owners, this will seem like a daunting and tedious task at first! And you are absolutely right! It is daunting and it is certainly tedious until you get the hang of it! Once you find a marketplace you would like to open a shop in, be sure to read through the guidelines or any seller’s handbook they may have. There should be information on how their SEO works for the site. Whether they tag items for you, suggest tags you use for your items, or let you tag your items from scratch. Check to see if they go by relevancy, recentness of items added, if they link up with major search engines, or anything in between! You have to know how your marketplace works so that you can tweak your shop accordingly. Don’t dive in and start adding items blindly and then look around to see how their SEO works. This only creates more work for you if you have to go through all the items you’ve added and re-do them. Any initial efforts would essentially be futile. Do your homework!
From time to time, I do searches for items similar to something I’m about to list. In my searches, I compare pricing and tags used in other listings to gauge how my listing might rank in a similar search and if I’m in the right ballpark for the price I list my items for.
Ok, so you think you’ve got the idea on how to get your items seen? Now, be prepared to edit your listings at least a dozen times! I know…I just said to think before you list, but hear me out. Once you list your item, do a test search for your item. In your test search, use both broad and narrow terms to find yourself. If you don’t show up in the first 5 pages, maybe 10 pages depending how popular your search is, your chances of traffic to that item (and your shop) have been greatly reduced! Once you test search for yourself and see what page you land on, edit your tags accordingly for a better search landing page (if you want a better landing page). To remain seen and to optimize your chances at receiving traffic, do this at least once a week! I know it seems like a lot of effort, but keep in mind that thousands upon thousands of items were probably added at the same time as yours, let alone the number of listings added in between any test searches. You may not be physically competing with the fellow shops on your marketplace, but you are certainly competing with them in search results!
3. Know how to capture your items through pictures! You don’t need to be a professional photographer with professional grade equipment to capture everything about your item that any potential buyers want to see, but, quality pictures are important!
Let’s take a brief break here.
Think about the last item you bought online. Were there photos to represent the item you were buying? Probably! Were the pictures dark, blurry and skewed? Considering this was an item you bought, I doubt it. Pictures are the only thing a buyer has to go by when they are considering your item. If the pictures are dark, blurry, look too edited and skewed, a potential buyer will probably look elsewhere for what they are in search of. Pictures should be crisp, represent your item honestly (minimal editing) and show the color and any details as accurately as possible!
Again, you don’t need to be a professional photographer to achieve these results. All you need is a digital camera (decent camera phones work fine as well), a computer with photo editing software (Picasa, GIMP, Photoshop etc.) and a substantially lit area (outdoors gives amazing lighting) to take your photos. Take at least 5-10 pictures of each item. Knowing which one’s will turn out good can’t always be determined from the camera display, uploading your pictures and editing them will give you the best idea of what pictures are worth keeping.
When editing photos, all you should really be doing is adding light to the photo if you didn’t have enough light while taking them, editing the color to match the color of the object if the pictures came out with any strange “hue” and cropping them to eliminate any unnecessary blank space or things you did not want in the photo. There is no sense in editing photos to look different from the item you are trying to sell. Misrepresentation will likely get you negative feedback from a buyer, which is enough to make future buyers skeptical in ever purchasing from your shop.
4. Get connected! Online is a priceless tool and more often than not, it’s free! Create a Facebook page just for your shop, create a Twitter account for your shop, sign up with StumbleUpon and “stumble” your listings, sign up with Pinterest and “pin” your listings and create a shop blog. You will get from your shop what you put into it! If your shop is a hobby and you treat it as such, you will probably get some traffic and some people who “favorite” your items. Depending on what your shop offers, you may get good sales or you may get a trickle of sales. If your shop is something you hope will bring in decent earnings, you are going to have to put a lot of work into it, including getting it seen outside of the marketplace itself!
This step isn’t that important until you get your shop set up and a few listings in it. No point in working on networking if there isn’t anything to see for anyone who may stop by! As I have both learned for myself and have told other new shop owners: Don’t expect sales from you networking attempts. Initial networking connections are probably going to be other shop owners or people who make handmade goods themselves. Nonetheless, these are invaluable connections to have. Whoever “Likes,” “Follows,” or “Re-blogs” your page or links, is now passing your information onto their audience. Then whoever from their audience passes your information along is now sharing it with their audience, and so on! Most importantly, you don’t need 5,000 “likes” or 15,000 “followers” to be well connected. The most important thing in your networking circles is the strength of your connections. Connections that are well connected themselves, with followers who are well connected, optimizes your chances at reaching so many new people!
5. Have fun! The moment that you begin to think of your shop as a job, is the beginning of a downward spiral for your shop! Just by considering opening a shop, you must have some entrepreneurial thoughts in that creative head of yours. If your shop becomes something you think of as a job, any entrepreneurial thoughts you had, are on their way to becoming a distant memory. Running your own online shop is something that is supposed to be fun and an outlet for your creative pieces. There will be times where it feels like you’re spinning your wheels and doing far more for the shop than you are getting out of it. There will be times where you have customers who seem like they want to ruin your day with a complaint they have. There will be times where you get no sales and minimal traffic for long stretches of time. There will also be times where you have a smile brought to your face from the amazing positive feedback someone leaves on an item they absolutely adore. There will be times when someone is distraught that an item they had their eye on was sold and they desperately hope you will do a custom order for them of the item they didn’t grab in time. There will be times when you get an order from someone who was referred to your shop by their friend, who had something they just had to have for themselves as well!
Running an online shop is not much different than starting a business. You have to build it from scratch and work your butt off to build it to the level you want it at. Once at that level, you have to keep working to maintain that level. But if all this work starts feeling like a job instead of an investment, it will reflect in your shop and in the quality of the items you make. This is not to say that your shop is a lost cause if you get to this point. Simply take a step back and re-evaluate your shop and try to figure out the root of the problem so you can take steps to remedy it and get your shop back on track.
Now that you have a better idea of what to expect once you open your shop, take the bull by the horns and start building your shop, as well as your reputation! Don’t forget to stop along the way to look at all that you have done and accomplished with your shop. You are going to be your biggest fan in the beginning, so go on and admire all the work you’ve done!
Good luck in your online shop endeavors!