Shop Handmade is a great way to sell your crafts or craft supplies online. You can also sell all kinds of vintage things too! The best part is you can list your handmade items for free. This is possible because they have sponsors that will pay the listing fees for you. They conveniently pay you through Paypal when you sell your item. They also do full page advertising in major magazines to help drive people to their site. I think this is a great way to make some extra money. I am an Etsy seller, but I am signing up for another outlet to sell my things.
5 comments:
I was wondering how you thought it compared to Etsy, so I was glad to see that you already do Etsy, but will do this other. How is Etsy for you? Let us know how you think Shophandmade is. Thanks.
I singed up for a shophandmade.com site myself but the other day I noticed something that really turned me off to using them. You may have noticed that when you list an item and you view the main page of the website your item(s) will show up quite often in the featured product list. When I first noticed this I was very happy that my items would get this type of exposure, as I’m sure most other sellers would. That was until I visited the site from another computer and noticed that my items suddenly were not showing up. I originally thought that maybe they just dropped out of the list over time as Etsy.com listings do. This was until I went back to my main computer and noticed that my items were always showing up on front page.
What I found out is that if you are logged into the site or your session is still active the site knows you’re online and cycles your products through the main page for you to see giving you the impression that you are getting front page exposure of your products. However, if you are not logged in or your session has timed out (you wont see the “my store” link on the top right) your items do not show up. So in essence it’s all for show to make you think you are getting front page exposure and you’re not.
MiaHysteria, I signed up for shophandmade, but have yet to put anything on it yet.
Sop, That is interesting that they make you think your products are being featured. I don't know if that is a reason not to use them though. Like anything else, you need to advertise on your own. Let us know how you do on Shophandmade.
Well I have had my products up on shophandmade.com for a few months now. I am in the process of taking them all down today.(I also had a shop on etsy, closing that down as well)
With shophandmade I received Minimal traffic, no sales, and their back end tools for sellers is a complete mess. Just taking my products down today I've had to enter 0 in stock 3 times for each product before their servers register the change.
To be quite honest, once I figured out they were misleading sellers about the front page exposure that lead me to start seriously thinking of opening up my own website.
Granted I do have some some design experience, setting up your own shop is not as hard(or expensive) as people think it is. The hardest part for me was getting a good photo of my father(the wood turner) for the front page and making an acceptable logo.
I figured if I am going to spend the time, and effort to create a family run business I should actually be marketing my OWN site and not giving a shopping network free advertising.
In the end I think it's a complete waste to spend all the time and effort to market and bring a perspective customer to a site where they can easily click and go view 10,000 other shops.
So I've spent the last couple months designing the website. I have been live for less then four weeks and things are going very well. The forth day the first sale arrived (without me doing any advertising or marketing) and I am now in talks with a company to supply them with products for a corporate retreat.
So in the end, I guess I should thank shophandmade for pushing me over the edge else I would not of gone forward and created my own website and our products would still be sitting in the shop.
Rob, I was also thinking along those same thoughts about using these sites to sell my handmade things on. You have a good point about sending people to a site and them clicking to someone else's shop. I visited your shop and wow, that is very nice. Good luck to you and keep us informed on how you do.
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