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Selling What You Make, Online

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by Jeremy Pellani

You have probably found that there are businesses selling items similar to what you would like to provide, but is there money to be made?  That is harder to determine; however, there are ways to investigate.  If you are familiar with eBay and you have an account, you can search completed listings.  If you don’t have an account it is easy, and free, to sign up.  You do need an account to search the completed listings.  This will show you all of the recently sold and not sold items for the keywords you searched. 

Search eBay for the product you’d like to produce.  You’ll see the products people are currently selling.  To the left of the results in a beige box you’ll see “search options”.  Check the box that says “completed listings” and click “show items”.  You can tell if anyone is buying the type of item you want to sell and for how much.

Another way to assess the demand for a product is to use a “keyword selector tool.“ This tool will allow you to see how many people searched a particular keyword on a particular search engine the previous month.  I used to use the “overture keyword selector tool”.  They are no longer available. This one, http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html, is a comparable tool to use. Or you can look for others by searching “alternative keyword selector tool”.  I mention this because the future availability of these tools for free is tenuous.  I‘ve had good success with businesses that get 500-10,000 searches per month.  Less than 500 the market may be too small, and more than 10,000 the completion is too high for me to want to compete. 

Between these two tools you should be able to get a sense whether or not customers are searching for and buying products similar to yours.

If you are encouraged by the results of your research, it is finally time to produce and sell your product.  Before making the investment of time and money into your own website, I think it is wise to try and sell the product on a website like eBay or Etsy.  Both sites charge a fee for every item you list whether or not you sell the item.  For this fee, they provide you with the opportunity to reach many consumers in a short period of time and with relatively little invested. 

I know many people are successful on eBay.  I have found it a great place to start to try and sell a product before making a larger investment of time and money for a stand alone website; however, I have found that ultimately running my own website to be more profitable because I reach more people searching specifically for my product.

Etsy is a similar site to eBay but has much lower fees.  They will only allow handmade items to be listed. If you are interested in selling handmade items, it is certainly a website worth checking out.  There is a feature on Etsy called “time machine 2” that allows you to see the last 1000 items that have sold.  The customers on this site seem to be buying items at sufficiently high prices for the sellers to make a decent return.  I suspect people are willing to pay these prices because they value handmade things.  If you believe you’ve found a product that is a keeper and you’d like to move beyond eBay or Etsy it is time to start your own website.

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