My experience with online sales is very limited to our local Facebook garage sale page. Even at times, selling on a local garage sale or rummage Facebook site is still a pain. With sign making, I decided to create an online shop on Etsy.com. I have been doing research for months to learn ins and outs, and started building this online shop yesterday and have spent hours working on it.
Even though I felt like I was prepared for this online sales journey, I was not. And nothing is as easy as others make it out to be. After spending hours taking decent photos of signs, that don’t overly staged or amateur, and then uploading the photos, editing them and then completing all 20-some fill-in boxes for each item, holy moly, I was over it.
But slowly and surly, after about 2 hours, I managed to get 5 signs/coffee mugs and some vintage books listings organized with my online shop which I have not made public yet.
Then enter the world of shipping which you need boxes, bubble wrap, packing tape, etc.
I will say that Etsy makes this part easier that as long as you know your complete shipping box dimensions and the weight of the item you are selling, they will generate your label and cost for the total purchase. But then needing to measure all the items, boxes and then weigh them, was whole another process.
Lessons learned already (and I am sure there are many, many more to come):
• Online selling takes time and lots of details (like 29 drop boxes or fill-in boxes of details for each item).
• My pictures always need to be rotated, no matter what angle I take them at. This might be just special to me (insert eye roll) but no matter what, my pictures load upside down which is another step in the process is to edit and flip them before you load them to Etsy.
• I pray that I am completing all the sales fields correctly and not promising the world at the same time.
• Plan on spending about 2 hours to post 5 items. Hopefully, this timeframe will get smaller.
• Check prices of similar objects (which I did).
I think the goal here, moving forward, is to plan on adding say 4-5 listings once a week and then watching what sales, what doesn’t and then re-evaluate.
I am sure this will be an eventful journey. I may completely fail but at least I can say that I tried and I also learned a lot about the process. Those who make a living off of Etsy and other similar sites, I completely respect your time, patience and attention to detail.
Hopefully, by next week, I will feel brave enough and have uploaded more items and the store will go live. I will keep you posted on this journey and thank you for reading!
rosemary-lemons.com 