Selling Crafts Online

Anyone who has been visiting this blog for a while will know that I’m a big fan of blogging – and of Wordpress in particular. The one drawback when trying to sell crafts online has been the lack of really good shopping carts that work with Wordpress.

There are a few around – have been for some time – but each has its drawbacks. There are some free shopping carts that look great at first, but the problem is that to get them working properly you really needed the “optional extras” and (surprise, surprise) they aren’t free.

The other problem is complexity. To some extent, that’s to be expected because you need your shopping cart to give you lots of flexibility and provide lots of options. However, you don’t want to be messing around with html or php. You have to expect some kind of set-up process – and you’ll expect to spend a bit of time getting the hang of it – but what you want is a list of options, blanks to fill in and buttons to click… not to have to take a degree in computer science!

Well I’ve found one – and it’s superb. Not flawless, no software ever is, but it’s simple to install and when you have queries there’s not only a manual, there are also video tutorials, a forum and an excellent support system. I’ve been working with the developer for a couple of weeks before I’ve mentioned this too you because I wanted to make sure it was as good as it first appeared. I have to say I’m impressed – and that doesn’t happen often

It’s called ShopperPress and it’s from PremiumPress.com. The real beauty of this shopping cart software is that it’s a “theme” – in other words, it works as part of Wordpress naturally, rather than as an add-on. What’s more, all those nice Wordpress plug-ins that you use to automatically back up your blog, submit it to Google, etc, work with it perfectly.

So why a blog to sell your crafts online, why not Etsy or Artfire, etc?

For me, it’s mostly a question of control. There’s nothing wrong with Etsy, Artfire or any of those other places, but they have control over arguably the most important aspect of your business. They can vary the terms… they can put up the prices… you may not like it but you can do nothing about it.

With ShopperPress, your whole business is under your control.

There’s also the cost. ShopperPress isn’t free, but when you compare the small investment to what you pay those other sites in fees in the course of a year, you’ll very quickly make back your investment and be in profit. What’s more there are no ongoing fees and – rather surprisingly – it’s an open license, so you can set up as many different stores as you like at no extra cost.

To get it actually taking the money is a simple question of putting in your Paypal details, or Google checkout, Worldpay, 2checkout or any one of about 20 different payment processors. For me, Paypal is easiest but the flexibility is there if you need it.

If you’ve already got a blog – even if it’s not Wordpress – you could easily install this on a subdomain  – so effectively you would have http://store.yourcraftsite.com. In fact you could do it that way to add it to a normal website if you wanted.

You’ll have gathered by now that I’m a fan. That’s because this is the best solution to the problem of getting a shopping cart on a Wordpress blog that I’ve yet seen.

For full details you need to get over to the PremiumPress website (where you can actually try out the video tutorials before you buy). If you’ve got any technical questions they’ll be happy to answer you there. If it’s something specifically related to crafts and you think I might be able to help, or you want to talk about how to actually implement it with whatever set-up you have at the moment, by all means drop me a line.

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In the last craft business post I looked at the profit potential for you from getting involved with other people’s affiliate programs. This post is going to look at the basics of how you can run your own.

Having affiliates for your online craft business can be a great bonus. It’s a bit like having an extra sales force. They have the ability to reach people who might never find you. They can multiply your profits many times over.

It isn’t really too difficult to implement an affiliate program either. Although most of us get a bit concerned about adding extra code to our craft websites we are fortunately offered an easy way out. For a small  cut, some people will do a lot of the work for us.

This is what I do. Although there are many software programs around for managing an affiliate program I would rather be spending the time in my craft business making crafts. I try and leave as much as possible to other people.

Best Providers?

So for ebooks or downloadable patterns and plans I use either Clickbank or E-Junkie. These two companies are both experts at digital downloads which is why I use them. Clickbank I use for digital ebooks over $8.00 because under that their fees make E-junkie cheaper. So for patterns, plans and short reports, things in the $3.50 to $8.00 range, E-Junkie give me the best deal.

There’s a little more to it than that. Clickbank have a huge army of potential affiliates and they will manage all that for me. I have to set up the download page but Clickbank handle pretty much everything else and pay me twice a month. E-Junkie also have an affiliate program but I have to manage it. Not difficult, and their fees are very low, so for low price items they are my preference. There is nothing to stop you selling a more expensive product through E-Junkie but you will have to work harder at getting your affiliates. You can also use E-Junkie to provide secure download for Clickbank products but that’s getting too complicated for me!

E-Junkie will also handle “real” good for you and provide you with a shopping cart (Clickbank don’t). In fact E-Junkie are one of very few people whose technology works equally well with blogs – an area where some affiliate programs struggle. For this reason I also use E-Junkie to sell my “real” crafts.

I recommend both these companies but that doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Investigate thoroughly before making a decision. E-Junkie you can start from just $5.00 a month which is ridiculously cheap but that doesn’t mean someone else isn’t more appropriate for your craft business. Have a search around, ask awkward questions and keep asking until you get the right answers.

How Much Should I Pay?

The question which most craft business owners ask is how much should they pay their affiliates? The answer is as much as you can afford. It has to be worth the affiliates time and effort or nobody will be interested. On digital goods it’s usually between 25 and 50% – and it can go higher. You might think that’s a lot but think about it for a moment. Once your digital product is finished there are no production or distribution costs so why not make it as attractive as possible to your affiliates? If you want more info on the whole ebook and digital publishing thing, click here.

For real goods, affiliate payments are usually in the region of 5 to 15%. You have to think harder about your profit margin here. Remember, you never pay an affiliate until a product has been sold and you have been paid, so if you have to give away half of your profit margin but you make five or six times as many sales, it’s probably worth it.

Of course there are no guarantees, and adding an affiliate program to a craft business isn’t for everyone. There is great potential but there is also some investigative work to do beforehand and some ongoing management. You might get many people join your program but few will actually put in a lot of effort. 90% or your payments will go to 10% or less of your affiliates. Nevertheless, it gives you the chance to reach many more customers for very little outlay.

E-Junkie can be found here.

Clickbank can be found here.

Make sure you read the details carefully!

One of the things you can do to boost your craft business is participate in craft-related affiliate programs or run your own. Not sure what an affiliate program is? Well let’s explain.

Although affiliate programs really came into being with the internet, they are based on a common business principle that has been used for centuries. If I help sell your craft for you, you pay me a percentage of the profit margin. It’s how most high street stores work. When you buy a tin of beans, some of the money goes to the store and some to the people who put the beans in the tin!

Affiliate programs work pretty much the same way. Except nobody gets paid until a sale is made. OK, but what good is this to your craft business?

There are two ways to look at it. If you have a website or blog you might be able to find complimentary products to your own that have an affiliate program. For example, let’s say that you sell hand-made candles. You might be able to find someone who made soap who runs an affiliate program. If you help sell those soaps you get a cut. It does your business no harm, but your customers might also be interested in that product.

In reality, all you do is add some code and a graphic to your craft blog or website. That code tells the vendor who sent the customer and if they buy something, you get the credit.

It’s a win-win situation. You can sell soap to compliment your candles but you don’t have to pay out for any stock, or store it, or handle deliveries. The person running the affiliate program does that for you. From their point of view, you’re out there selling for them but they don’t have to pay you a salary, you get paid when a sale is made.

Is it worth the effort? Well if your craft business can find another compatible one, why not? It’s a “reward for effort” kind of business but in the main, your effort is little more than drawing people to your craft site – something you would be trying to do anyway. It can add a valuable extra income stream to your craft business. Indeed some crafts people make a full-time living out of affiliate compensation alone.

Next time we’ll look at this from the other side. How you can profit from adding an affiliate program to your craft business.

If you would like a real-life example of how an affiliate program can work check out Complete Craft Publishing and at the bottom you’ll see a link that says “affiliates”. Have a read and if it brings up any questions, contact me here.

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Whether you are running a blog or more traditional website there are craft business basics that you need to use if you want to succeed. Keeping potential customers coming back to your site – making it “sticky” – is obviously pretty important!

You might hope that interesting info, nice pictures, easy and clear navigation would all guarantee that. Unfortunately it won’t. Truth is people skip by and skip on… there’s a very short attention span online. Your craft business needs to do more than just look good.

Even if your potential customer likes your site, they might never come back. They might think about bookmarking you… and they might not. We’ve all done it, said you’ll go back to a site later – but then not got distracted by something else, never to return…

The fact is your craft business loses out on customers every day. In business, not everyone will buy from you! However, you can do something very positive to try to grab those “hovering” people. Those “nearly” customers.

What you need to boost your craft business potential is a newsletter or e-mailing list, just like I’ve got here to keep you up to date with site changes or important news. Just think about it for a minute. If your visitor will give you their email address you don’t have to worry about them coming back to your craft site, you can get back in touch with them!

And because it’s via email you can do so as often as you like, for virtually no cost.

OK, there’s a cost for the management of these services (you let other people handle the software and all that for you so you can concentrate on what you do best) but you’re talking about a few dollars a month. Don’t you think it’s worth that? To have the potential to get back to your craft business visitors with news and special offers. To give them multiple chances to come and buy from you… even if they forgot they once visited? Frankly, you’d be mad not to.

I currently recommend YMLP because they offer to manage your first 1,000 subscribers for free! Can you imagine? A thousand potential new customers you can get in touch with with a couple of clicks – and it costs you nothing? Craft marketing doesn’t get any better than that!

Even when you exceed that, it’s literally just a few dollars a month. In fact you’ll likely find their prices in Euros because the operation is based in Europe – but who cares, this is the internet!

A slight word of caution though. Run well, a newsletter can add tremendously to your craft business. Done badly it will put people off. A lot of companies want your visitor’s email address so if they pay you the compliment of giving it to you, treat them well. Make them feel special.

As an added bonus you might want to give them a discount off their first order, or offer them something of value (like the dowloadable ebook I give subscribers). It’s easy for you to do and you’ll recoup any small cost many times over, so why not make a little extra effort?

Do that, right at the start of your relationship, and your new subscriber will feel that they are being dealt with personally. Chances are that will get you loyal, repeat customers who have a tremendous impact on the long-term profitability of your craft business.

Here’s a cautionary tale for any craft business!

I don’t mind admitting I’ve made mistakes from time to time. Any craft business is going to get things wrong, it’s part of growth. Stupid would be not learning from those mistakes.

Dumb is sometimes not following your own advice – like I didn’t

Let me explain. One of the things I sell is a craft book that I wrote about five years ago. It’s in a very small area and it’s never made much money – although to be fair I don’t put any effort into promoting it. It just sits there selling maybe one a fortnight. It’s an ebook so I don’t have to do anything, it’s all on auto-pilot. At the end of the year it’s a nice little bonus but no big deal.

Then suddenly that book sold a dozen copies in a single day.

So what’s wrong with that you might say. Where’s the mistake? A nice bit of extra income, right?

The problem is that I have no idea where the sales came from. It’s the only site I run that I haven’t put some tracking code on. Result? Although I have the details of each individual who bought the book, I have no idea how they found it – and that means I’m missing a huge opportunity to improve my online craft sales.

Was it another site that recommended the book? Was it an article that I wrote? Was it a blog or a forum? If I’d taken ten minutes to install Google Analytics – which is completely free – I would know precisely where they had come from and I would be able to capitalize!

So it’s kind of frustrating. If I could get even half those sales each day it would definitely be worth putting some effort in – but I don’t know where to start.

I hope you are not making the same potential mistake in your craft business but I bet some of you are… Get some way of analyzing your visitors. Don’t put it off, it will only take minutes.

If you’re someone who sells at craft shows, fairs or festivals, do you ever have trouble finding them?

OK, so this post isn’t about selling crafts online, but a lot of people sell offline as well, via galleries, stores and shows, so I think it’s appropriate.

Anyway, it’s a long time since I sold at shows, so I don’t know the current availability, how you find appropriate fairs and festivals, etc… but I do know somebody who does!

Cathy over at Fairs and Festivals.net has all the info on US craft shows and events that you could possibly need. There’s organizer detail, emails, websites where available, all the stuff necessary to make enquiries or bookings.

If you’re into selling at craft shows it’s got to be worth a look. Full details here. There’s a free craft show profits ebook up for grabs as well.

I’ve been seriously thinking about publishing a book or a course about the tremendous power of a craft business blog. I’ve been asked about it and I certainly feel qualified to do so. I have several of my own blogs and I consult with a number of other business helping with theirs…

It’s good money, and I know how quickly a craft blog can become profitable. It takes a bit of work, of course, but the number of potential customers you can reach grows enormously. A craft friend who I help has added three thousand people to her newsletter list in seven months. How would you like another 3,000 people knocking on your door?

But… I bet you guessed there would be a “but”?

I have to be honest, it’s already been done. Not craft specific perhaps, but there’s a book you can download, which is free, and which I couldn’t recommend more highly.

Because it’s the book that got me started blogging three years ago.

That’s when I came across this slightly unusual Australian called Yaro Starak and his ebook, Blog Profits Blueprint. He was in the middle of a trip around the world, paid for solely by his blogging – and he’d only been at it eighteen months at the time!

Now Yaro isn’t a craftsman, he wouldn’t pretend to be. He’s a blogging expert and the advice he gives in his book is appropriate to every blogger – or potential blogger. He’s not full of marketing whatsit either. He tells you it’s going to take time, which it will. He tells you how to structure a blog for long term profitability, not for some sort of nonsense about making a hundred grand tomorrow.

I’m not going to go banging on about this. He’s the guy I learned blogging from. The book is free so why wouldn’t you get a copy?

Well I guess if you’re not interested in blogging – that would be about the only reason. But for me that’s a bit like saying you don’t want your craft business to make any more money than it is now.

Seriously though, I’m no suggesting Yaro’s book will help you become a millionaire next week. But do I think it could it help you build a successful, profitable craft business? Yes I do. Download your free copy here.
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I’ve mentioned how writing articles is great free marketing for your crafts – enough times now so that some of you might be getting fed up with it – so I’ll keep this real short.

The thing is, it works – and here’s the proof:

That’s this blog, number one in Google, against 21,200,000 other pages – and I didn’t spend a cent on advertising. I write for the blog, I submit articles.

Now I’m not showing this to brag – I’m showing it to prove what works. How much better do you think your craft business would be doing if it was number one in Google – and it cost you nothing?

If you’re new to the blog and I haven’t had the chance to bore you to death with this yet check out a free, craft-only article site: Great Craft Articles and the best book on the subject: The Art of Article Marketing.

Google rankings change rapidly and maybe the site won’t be number one tomorrow. It’ll still be right up there – and every day in the top ten makes a huge difference to the exposure your craft business gets.

There are two sides to your craft business. The first is making your crafts, which is the bit we all know and love to do. The second is selling them and it’s probably the area where most crafters are less comfortable and know least about.

Fortunately selling crafts online gives you the ability to reach far greater markets and can provide your craft business with a huge boost.

Setting up an online craft store is now within the range of any of us, there are even some – like Artfire.com – that are free to start. The store is only half the challenge though. Unfortunately many crafts people think that you can just open a store on the internet and the customers will flood in. They get very disappointed when it doesn’t happen.

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Chances are that if you’re reading this post about selling crafts it’s because you’ve heard that search engines are important to your craft business but you need more information.

Happy to oblige!

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