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For the last few years my wife and I have been selling our
handmade décor and geeky stuff on Etsy, an online marketplace. What is the
first thing people ask us when they find out that’s what we do for a living?
Not “What’s the shop?” or “Ooh, what do you sell?” No, it’s almost invariably
something like “I make things too… I should do that. How do I do that?” (Though
sometimes it’s the variation – “I make things and would like you to sell them
for me.”)
Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t offended by these questions,
not at all. We feel incredibly fortunate to be able to make a living (mostly) from
our arts and we want to do everything we can to help every person we know do
the same. The only problem is the misconception about running your own business
selling things you create yourself – it is INCREDIBLY TIME CONSUMING. Many
people, when they hear you work from home for yourself assume you spend half
the day surfing the net and the other half napping. In reality, the two of us spend
well over 70-80 hours a week working on some aspect of our business and there’s
constantly some little detail or project that is waiting impatiently for us to
get to it. My average day starts with making a to-do list that usually runs to
about 20-30 items, ranging from “Email about shipment” – a two minute job, to “Individually
hand paint and heat treat the words Lumos and Nox on 150 switchplates” A job
that can take 9 hours of constant work.
So in lieu of trying to help everyone that asks and not
actually having the time to be much help, we decided a quick series of How-To
blogs would be a great way to guide people down the path of creating their own
online self-employed empire.
The plan is to post 4 blogs, each outlining a specific
aspect of selling on Etsy and other online sources. However, I tend to babble
and that may expand to a number of additional sub-blogs.
So if you don’t have the patience to read all of them and
want to know the five most important things about selling on Etsy, here they
are –
CREATE SOMETHING YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT
If you plan to make a living off of these products, you will
end up making a ridiculous number of them and talking a lot about them with
people. If you don’t like what you make or are just doing it because it will
sell, not only will it become apparent that you aren’t passionate about it, but
it won’t actually be any fun to do.
CREATING IS A VERY SMALL PORTION OF RUNNING AN ONLINE SHOP
Like, depressingly small. Most of your time will be spent
writing, taking care of customers, dealing with problems, shipping things,
taking photos and research.
80% OF A SUCCESSFUL ONLINE SHOP OWNER’S TIME WILL BE SPENT RESEARCHING
This is not an exaggeration at all, especially in the
beginning. You will have to research everything – how to run the site, how to
word the listing, what tags to use, what tags are, what others are selling,
what they are selling for, etc, etc, etc. The second you get tired of
researching and adapting, you stop being successful. The people that have asked
for help from us immediately get a list of about a hundred things to go and
research.
RESEARCH EVERYTHING
I’m not kidding here.
DO NOT ANTICIPATE SUCCESS.
It’s a waste of your time and will only lead to
disappointment. There are currently over six hundred and forty thousand active
shops on Etsy – that’s shops with items currently available for sale. There are
more than a million registered shops and more than twenty five million items
available for sale on Etsy right now. Even if you spend the time required to
research every aspect of your shop, have a unique and innovative product and
spend all the time you can to create an ideal shop and business, you may still
never sell anything. It’s as simple as that. It took us two years and hundreds
of items before we started building a following and found the right items for
us. Some will find that faster, others never will. This is another reason why
you need to make something you are passionate about. At least you will love
what you make.
Good Luck.
The ROUS FAMILY -
