I'm not breaking any records this week. I did the the handles on the 5 pots I made on Monday.
So I thought I'd give you what info I have about selling pots online. I certainly am no expert here, but it's something I am very interested in and I do want to put more time, energy and money into my online presence/shop this year.
I have an Etsy shop to sell pots online. Most everyone has heard of Etsy by now, but if you haven't, head on over to the site and check it out.
In my opinion Etsy is a good way to get into online sales. It's easy to set up and use and the cost is low. It costs 20 cents to list each item and they take a 3% commission of the sale. You can accept credit cards by using PayPal or take checks. PayPal has fees too, but I have found it easy to use and it has some nice features (like sending folks invoices).
I've heard artists complain that Etsy is very large and that there is a wide range of quality in the work. This is true. I also find Etsy to be very hard to search. I can't even find myself on there using their search feature. (I'm probably not tagging things correctly). So the way I use Etsy is to point people directly to my shop via my website/blog, email campaigns, postcards etc. I give them my Etsy address or a hyper link and that gets them right to it. I certainly doubt anyone will ever just stumble upon me there and buy my work.
I know very little about how to utilize Etsy to its full potential ie, getting your listings seen more or whatever. I do know you can pay to be featured. There's lots of info out on this stuff on the Etsy site and other blogs. (If you have links or info please leave them in the comments for us)
I have found that I like to do a scheduled listing of work on Esty that I promote to people. In December I did this and had pots up for a few weeks before Christmas. I sold enough pots to make me quite happy. Of course I had to then ship them but I was prepared with bubble wrap, peanuts and boxes which made it painless. I have also started using the Click and Ship feature that the USPS offers so I don't even go to the post office, my mail carrier just picks up the packages.
My goal is to have some sort of integrated online shopping cart here on the website by the end of this year. (hopefully!). I will probably hire someone to do that work for me and to tell me what 'company' or whatever to use. I want to overhaul the whole site before long and this is part of that plan.
I'm sure there are other options out there other than Etsy. The only one I really about is Other Peoples Pixels. I think Amazon has some sort of thing but I haven't seen it in action. Of course there are lots of e commerce sites that are used in website development and I guess some that are stand alone. I'm just trying to stick to what I know here.