Top 5 places to sell hand-crafted products online
Top 5 places to sell your hand-crafted products online
Long gone are the days where the only place to sell your handmade products was the local craft fair. With so many online marketplaces and easy to build website options, the possibilities for reaching a global audience are endless. Crafted, handmade and artisan products are now seen as unique and quality options, which, if marketed correctly, can outsell the mass-produced equivalents imported from abroad.
Here are some of the most popular online market places:
Etsy
Probably the most recognised marketplace, and one of the largest, for selling handmade crafts. You can sell anything that is handmade.
In recent times Etsy has been accused of selling out and watering down the handmade elements of the site, however, as a site it is still one of the leaders, and has a very active community of sellers and loyal shoppers alike.
Accounts are free, but users pay a small listing fee and a percentage of each sale made.
eBay
Long established as the marketplace for second hand, as well as new products, it shouldn’t be discounted for your handmade products.
You can list under several categories, including handmade crafts and handmade jewellery.
You may be charged an insertion fee to list, depending on your account setup and the additional listing features you choose when setting up your individual listings. When your items sell, you’ll be charged a final value fee.
Amazon Handmade
This ecommerce giant entered the US handmade market in 2015 with approximately 80,000 products and then shortly after in the UK and Europe in 2016 with 30,000 products.
The number of handmade sellers and products have grown significantly into the millions worldwide since this time and as monthly account fees are still being waived there is unlikely to be a slowdown in 2021.
Free to list and a commission upon sale of 12% in the UK, overall, it’s a relatively risk-free option to test out the opportunities.
Access to all of Amazon’s billion-dollar traffic means that if you know what you are doing to get the right exposure for your products, then Amazon Handmade could be a big winner for your products.
Shopify
Providing you with your own online shop, Shopify is probably one of the most well know e-commerce shop platforms, giving you complete control over your shop front, pages and the products that you sell.
It is effectively like an out the box, customised website that is easy to setup and configure with the additional of extras, such as domain name, hosting, professional templates, user friendly interfaces, and many simple to use tools and integrations with other third-party systems to help setup and run your business quickly and easily.
You can try for free for 14 days, after this expect to pay monthly plan prices, and don’t forget to include credit card and transaction fees on each sale made.
Facebook Shop
Many handmade sellers are looking to social media to find people who are interested in their products and convert them into customers.
A very easy way to set yourself up with your own online shop is to add a Facebook shop to your business page. You can add as many products as you want and organise by collections. You then just need to decide if you want to customers to checkout through your website or through messaging. Once you have added products, customers can browse and purchase.
There are no monthly fees or transaction fees. Customers can also message the shop via your Facebook messenger account.