Making Money With Your Crafts

There is a lot of demand for unique, handmade items, whether we’re talking about apparel, household goods or even decorative items. If you can make it, chances are you can sell it. It just comes down to where.

The easiest way to start is by selling to friends and family. Your relatives and friends can give you an idea of which of your crafts is going to sell the best, and be the most popular. Once you have a good grasp on what you will be able to sell, you can start finding places to set up shop. There are plenty of options – some online and some offline.

A great offline option is to take part in your local craft fairs. Churches, schools, crafting groups and other small organizations put on small fairs regularly, and in most cities there are some larger occasions as well. The Crafts Fair Online has a good directory of fairs, but if they don’t have much of a listing for your area, trying typing your town or city’s name into Google, along with the words “craft fair.” Most of the larger fairs, and some of the smaller ones, charge a fee for participating, so you want to make sure that you can at least make back your fee, as well as the cost of the materials and time that went into your crafts.

If you want to sell your crafts online, you can establish your own website and sell them that way, or you can sell them on sites like Etsy. Etsy allows sellers to establish a ‘shop’ free of charge, which means that you get your own personalized slice of their site, where you can list items you are selling and photos of those items. There are some costs, and Etsy requires that you have a credit card on file with them to set up a shop. To list an item, Etsy charges 20 cents for 4 months.

Etsy focuses on handmade items, which are often one of a kind. There are a number of other sites that make selling your crafts easy, especially if you have a way of turning them out in bulk, as well. The best known is eBay. eBay charges listing fees, too, but they scale them based on the selling price you set. They also charge a final value fee, which is a varying percentage depending on the ending price of auctions.

There are lots of options beyond eBay and Etsy, like the following:

• Handmade Catalog

• Craftmall

• YabbleBabble

You can also choose to set up your own website to sell your crafts. It takes a little more work on your part, but you won’t need to worry about listing fees of any kind. Running your own website also makes it easier to take commissions, like if a customer loves a style of scarf but wants it in a color you don’t normally use.