Selling Online? It’s Easy!

---

Are you a designer or a craftsman and you want to sell your artwork online?

The moment to enter the e-commerce business has come!

You have no idea about what is the first step before starting to sell? Just read this post and in the end you will have all the tools you need to become a real entrepreneur! There are many virtual platforms offering you the opportunity to build an online store in which you can sell your items quickly and easily. These platforms work exactly as if they were big brick-and-mortar malls. You can build your personal smart and attractive shop on a platform, by preparing your launch window or arranging a discount campaign to reach the attention of potential customers. These big platforms offer you the potential of quick and easy visibility and if you are not very confident about your marketing strategies they can often give you solutions and advice. Let’s see which platform suits you best.

Etsy

Etsy is for all people who love craft and handmade items. It allows you to sell three types of products:

1) Items you have made

2) Commercial and handmade items

3) Items 20 years old or older with vintage style

Selling on Etsy is easy and economic since it provides you with an online personalized store in which you can upload the images of your product for four months with only 20 cents per item. Once sold, you have to pay 3.5% of the item’s value to Etsy.

Ebay

Ebay is the right website if you already have a real store and want to expand its visibility. You can choose to pay for every single insertion (around 0.15 up to 0.35$) plus a percentage that goes from 7.75% up to 10% once the item is sold. Alternatively, you can choose to build your own online shop, with 15.95$ per month for the basic store formula.

Yokaboo

Yokaboo enables you to sell your own artwork, prints, t-shirts, jewellery and music. If you have up to 6 items you can upload them on Yokaboo for free .It is very simple to build your online store and if you are a little bit confident with programming it can be fun!

uShops

uShops comes from Hong Kong and, for the moment, is completely free. This platform offers you the opportunity to build your store only in three steps. You can upload at least 4 pictures for each item very easily. There is no limit to the number of products you can upload and you don’t pay any fee once your item is sold. Actually U-shop hosts 478 shops who sell a wide variety of products.

BigCartel

Big Cartel is a platform exclusively dedicated to online sellers. It hosts thousand of shops which mainly sell t-shirts, accessories, music and clothes. Uploading up to 5 items is completely free, but if you want more you can choose between two solutions: around 19$ per month for 25 products and 20$ for 100 products. It also allows you to open your own store under your own domain.

Shopflick

Shopflick is a very good solution if you are a designer who wants to sell clothes, shoes, handbags and accessories. As its main target are new designers, it offers very expensive but very particular items. You can upload not only pictures of every single item but also videos through which you can explain the items story and how it was made. There is no fee to build your online shop, what you have to pay is 18% of the value of your sold product.

A few more tips

Building your shop in these virtual platforms gives you the opportunity to stay close to your online neighbours so you can easily compare products, prices and strategies. This way you will gain quickly that experience you could miss at the beginning and also you would be spurred to do it even better. All these platforms provide you with merchant services, including hosting of the online store, site design, email services, consulting on promotion and other related services.

You can also check our Etsy Shopping category.