Advice for designer-makers: Pricing, Marketing and Selling Online

Making and selling your own work can be so satisfying and rewarding. But at the same time there’s so much to think about that it can also be incredibly frustrating! From working out what to charge, to setting up your online shop, to marketing your work, not to forget actually making the products.

But the good news is that there’s loads of free advice out there online for designer-makers. To help you make sense of it all, we’ll be posting a couple of round-ups of the best tips on the internet, and today we’re looking at Pricing,  Marketing and Selling Online.

Pricing

This is one of the trickiest things to work out when you’re just starting off. Many people sell their goods far too cheaply. There are lots of things to think about, including the price of materials, the amount of time you spend working on something, and the mark-up that a shop will put on it (if you’re thinking about selling wholesale). Here are some useful guides:

• A good overview of the subject from Design Sponge.
• A more personal view from East London Craft Guerrila
• And if you want to get really in-depth, accounting company MyCake have a whole series of posts about pricing on their excellent blog.

Marketing

So now you have your lovely hand-made goods and you’ve worked out your prices. But how do you let people know your work exists?

• A brilliant post on this very blog on the best cheap/free ways to market your craft business.
• A very useful chart from Handmade Lives to help you diagnose your marketing problems, whether you’re struggling to make a living from your work or just not getting steady sales.
• Niche marketing is what small businesses should be aiming at. Don’t know anything about it? Read this overview on what to do here, from Akker & Co

Selling Online:

There’s two informative posts about this already on the Craftaganza blog, so make sure you have a read of these:

• How I set up my online shop
• How to get the best from Etsy

Are you wondering which site you should be selling on? There’s lots of comparisons online which could help you decide:

• A good round-up of Etsy vs. Big Cartel, from Miseducated
  

And finally, if you’re wondering where selling online can fit into the bigger picture, here’s a useful overview of different markets for your products:

• Markets for designer-makers, from A-N

We hope that was useful for you – look out for another post later this week with some more informative links. And if you have any of your own, post them in the comments here!