Selling Homemade Items Online

Selling your homemade crafts during the summer time months can be harder to do than the fall because of the lack of craft shows. Some may think that the summer will lead to the death of selling their homemade crafts. The summer time though may actually lead to the time when you can get your sales to blossom to levels that you would never dream of. Now you might be scratching your head trying to figure out how you can skyrocket your profits while no shows are available. The summer time is when you can harness the power of the online selling sites that are available. Some of the sites that I will go over here are Ebay.com, Ecrater.com, and Usfreeads.com. However you also have to have an account to receive payments to. Receiving payments thru Paypal.com is easy to do and I will go over them and Google checkout.

The first and probably one of the largest sites that you may have heard of or even used to buy off of is Ebay.com. Ebay.com is a great site for people with very limited computer experience. For the most part Ebay.com will give you step by step instructions on how to list and sell your homemade craft. Ebay.com does charge a sliding scale fee and an entry fee which could be prohibitive for some people. Ebay.com does have a large number of viewers each day and your product will gain quite a bit of exposure. Ebay.com would be a great site for people just learning how to sell online or people with small quantity of items.

As you learn how to progress in the world of the internet selling business you will probably want to go away from a site that is going to charge you to list your item with the chance that it might not sell. So I would recommend going to ecrater.com. Ecrater.com is an excellent free site for people who have homemade crafts to sell. Unlike some of the other selling sites that use a percentage of your sale price to support themselves ecrater.com is totally commission free. That means that if your homemade craft sells then you get to keep all of the profit minus your transaction fee and taxes that you would calculate out with an accountant. Another benefit of ecrater.com is that they will list your products onto Google shopping for you free of charge as well. A big downside though is that you have to do all of your own advertising, but it is better than having a percentage of your sale taken out each time.

If you do not have a lot of products to sell and only want to utilize a classified style to share your homemade craft then I would recommend using USfreeads.com. Not as popular a site as some USfreeads.com is a classified style of advertising. They do charge for premium membership, but that is a very minimal cost because you have unlimited ads then and can place pictures. With a premium membership you can also insert buy it now buttons connected to your paypal.com account to receive payment from impulse buyers.

Etys.com is another platform that is great for selling products on. I know for me I have started to dabble with Etsy, but have not had any major success selling here. However, Etsy has prided itself on being the one platform that specializes in handmade items. The items are selling are alpaca products, so I am not sure if they are just not popular or if they are an item that is too expensive for most people. When you do list on Etsy you need to keep in mind the listing fees, selling fees, and even the cost of your payment processor to make sure you are making money or you could easily lose all of your profit because of the fees that are associated with using Etsy.

Determining how to accept payment can be a hard task at times. So many different types of payment accepting programs are available online that you do not know which ones to count on while selling your homemade crafts. Two very prominent programs that are available that can be easily integrated into the sites mentioned above are Paypal.com which can be used on all three sites and Google Checkout which can be used with Ecrater.com.

The first payment processing program that I will cover is Paypal.com, which will allow you to accept credit cards. Paypal.com will take a fee out of each transaction though and you will have to remember to take that into consideration while pricing your homemade crafts. Paypal.com will also require to you verify your I.D. with a deposit to your bank account that you have to enter the amount into paypal.com so you can receive payment. They do allow you to withdraw up to a certain amount each month, but if you do more verification for them they will raise the level that you’re allowed to withdraw.

Google checkout requires that you have a Google account. Google checkout is very easy to sign up for and will allow you accept credit cards. Google also offers quite a bit of seller protection to help keep you safe when you sell your products. Please note that Google has started to switch the name to Google Wallet, but it does basically the same thing.

Both of these payment receiving sites have benefits that will help you out. However, you must determine which is right for you. Some people may prefer only using one of the payment processers which is fine.

So to start selling your homemade crafts online you will need to locate a site to sell on. Ebay.com, ecrater.com, etsy.com and usfreeads.com are all great sites to sell online on. Then you will have to determine which method of payment processing you would accept. Selling your homemade crafts online though you will fall under some laws and will be required to ship out orders within thirty days of receiving them. Selling homemade crafts online can be enjoyable and highly profitable for you as you can expose your product to people all over the world. So enjoy selling your homemade craft online and start making money today!