Chapter 2
Getting to Know You and Your Product
Before you start this process, let's do a quick brainstorming session to get a better understanding of your product. You know your handmade product best, and you know what you know. Do you know what you need to improve on? Survey yourself using the following questions, and write these answers down to help you narrow down what you want to sell, what you need to learn, and what you are the best at!
- What do I make? (List it all)
- Do I love what I make?
- What do I want my main product focus to be?
- What sets my product apart from the competition?
- What technique do I do better than the competition?
- What is the price range of my product?
- Is it easy to ship?
- What is my target market? (Who will be interested in my product?)
- What are 10 possible words that describe my craft?
- Do I have a “good” digital camera?
- Do I have a blog?
- Do I have a Twitter account?
- Do I have a Facebook account (personal profile and fan page)?
- Do I know how to effectively use the above social media tools to promote my products?
- Do I understand search engine optimization (SEO) and how it helps with traffic from search engines?
- What keywords or phrases fit my products, and do I know how to properly place them?
- Do I know how to design a banner, or know someone who can do it for me?
- Do I know how to take product pictures that sell my products?
- Do I have business cards?
- How many hours per week can I dedicate to selling my product?
- How will buyers find my items?
- Do I have a PayPal account?
- What shipping should I use—United States Postal Service, FedEx, or UPS?
- Do I need to collect sales tax, and how do I do that?
When getting ready to sell your handmade goods online, it is important to know what is selling, trending, and what is hot. There are a few sites that can tell you what is being searched on Google and other search engines. With that information, we can determine what is being bought online. These tests, tools, and searches will help you determine the direction you want to take your products. These tests are not 100 percent foolproof ways of determining how items will sell, but they will give you an idea how the market is for your handmade goods. This is a great opportunity to really get to know your products and what people are searching for out there on the Internet.
The very first simple search you can do right off the bat is on Google. Go to google.com and type your product category in the Google search box. For this case, I am going to use “crochet” as the example. When you type this in, hit the search button, and see advertisers on the right-hand side, you know it is a good niche to sell in. A niche is a small category within a larger one. For example, “crochet” is a smaller niche within handmade products, and “crocheted hats” is even smaller yet. Getting very specific will help narrow things down and really tell us important information about your handmade products.
The first tool we are going to look at to help us determine if your handmade products are going to sell is Google Trends. Google Trends lets you compare the world's interest in your chosen niche markets over an extended period of time. For example, I entered crochet, knitting, and yarn and discovered some significant spikes in the interest in all three in the past 12 months (shown in the following graphic).
You may enter up to five terms and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. You can look at past years or the past 30 days. It also displays how frequently your terms have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
The next site is also more of a general overview of the searches for the niche you are looking to sell in. Google Insights give you a look at the search trends over a long period of time.
In the following example, I searched the same three words—crochet, knitting, yarn—and you can see the trend in searches from 2008 to 2010.
Google Insights also give you one more advantage. It gives you some of the top searches according to the terms you entered. You can see below the top searches and the rising searches.
Google Insights also provides you with a look at the location of these searches. You can see what country is searching for your product the most.
Google Trends and Google Insights are both great indicators to know if your niche is being searched, but there is much more to this process.
The next step in the product research process is to search and see if there are popular magazines selling in your niche. Popular magazines can tell us if people are reading about your products, and if they find them interesting. The first site I like to visit is Magazines.com. First, you want to look at the top categories they have on the left-hand side. These are the top magazine categories that are selling right now. If your craft/art/products fall into these categories, that's a good sign.
Click on the “More Categories” button and find the hobbies section. You will see the arts and crafts section right at the top. Check out the top-selling magazines in the arts and crafts sections.
Now let's take it a bit further and search our crochet niche and see the results. In the following picture, there are a number of knitting magazines. This is a good thing when you see magazines that are selling in your niche. If you are not seeing any results for your products, that is OK. At this point, you are just getting a feel for the market. Not seeing any magazines does not mean you shouldn't sell what you make on Etsy.
eBay Pulse is a daily snapshot of what the current search and item trends are on eBay. You can find info on popular searches, largest stores and most-watched items.
Although the eBay Pulse page shows an overview of the entire eBay marketplace, you can use the drop-down menu to refine and filter the lists to show content for specific categories on eBay. Check out the following picture; you can see the trend for crafts on eBay. You can also see the largest stores selling craft-related items.
Now it's time to check out the competition over on Etsy. There are a few easy ways to find out who, if anyone, is selling what you make.
The first way to find out if anyone is selling what you make is to do a simple Etsy search. Type your subject in the search box at the top of Etsy's site and hit “Search.” Use quotations around the word or phrase to get more of a focused search result. While you are looking around, stop by some of the Etsy shops and see what types of items these shops are selling, and ask yourself a few questions:
- Are the prices close to what I was going to sell my items for?
- How will my pictures compare?
- How will my shipping prices compare?
- How will my shop policies compare?
Now that you have a better understanding of your niche and what is being searched and bought online, you are ready to start setting up your Etsy shop.