Do you sell items on a web site??

[December Fairy]

I'm thinking about making a web site to sell tarot bags and spread cloths, jewelry and maybe matching hats and scarves. All crafted by me.
I'm just wondering how well does a web site do? I'm not looking to make a ton of money, but I would like it to be worth doing.
Wondering what you think if you do it?
How do you make it easy to find?
If you have any tips, I would love to hear them.
Thanks

 

[floracove]

Great idea for a topic of discussion!

i've wondered the same thing...

 

[Silverkitten]

It's allot of work right at first. Building the site, finding a shipping cart, getting all your cart code to work right. Then submitting your site to search engines and making sure that your key words are right for the spiders and web crawlers to pick up. All of that takes countless hours of your time. It can be frustrating when one tiny little line of code is off. I strongly suggest you know some HTML, it will save you lots of frustration, well some anyway, lol. And read everything you can about building a website. There is a wealth of information online. And even a few tutorials.

Then it is important to have links that the web crawlers can "crawl out of" your site from. Link sharing is so valuable. That is how you get your site to become recognized. And if you have pictures, you must make sure that in your code they are all labeled with alternate information such as:

green velvet tarot bag

This way if someone who is blind is at your site, the equipment they are using can read the picture and say it aloud to them. Search engines really like this sort of coding and will rank your site higher if you've taken the time to do this.

Anyway, these are just a few tips on site building. The beginnings of starting an online business are not easy. But once you get it up and running and the search engines pick it up, it's pretty smooth sailing from there. The more link sharing you can do, the more traffic you'll get, thus the more business. I've had an online business for about 5 years now. It finally got to be too much, too busy for one person to manage and I had to close down one department. I was shipping products all over the world; Japan, Austraila, Hong Kong, Virgin Islands, Mexico, and the US. It took about two years to get it's feet off the ground, and then it went gang busters.

Well, there are my thoughts and opinions. Hope they were at least a little bit helpful and did not scare you away Good Luck with your plans. Sounds like you have some great ideas and products to share. Keep and "I can do anything" attitude, and you'll do fine.

Blessings,
Donna

 

[December Fairy]

Thanks for the advice Silverkitten,
It's something I want to do. At first I was just thinking about making them to put on Ebay. But, I think a web site might be better??

 

[baba-prague]

We had a very basic shop for a couple of years - really it wasn't much more than a secure link for people to pay - it looked VERY uninspiring. But we've just launched a "proper' online shop and yes, I think it's a good idea. However, it can be a lot of work - it depends on the scale you're aiming for. We are developing quite a lot of new products and designs now and so we wanted a shop large enough to expand easily. What we have still isn't perfect - we'd like to keep improving it - but it's turning out to be worthwhile, although it doesn't exactly bring in megabucks!

We're - reluctantly - going to use ebay too as there's no doubt it acts as a very good way of letting the wider world know you're there. So perhaps you can also try both? Ebay is expensive in terms of fees and nowadays bidding seems low (to me anyway, having looked around the site recently) but if you see it as a good way of advertising then why not?

(our shop is now my website link if you want to take a look - I'm happy to answer questions about how we did it).

 

[cormac]

Sulis does -- if I may be so bold to post this tho it is not my website

she has some great looking bags -- i ordered the celestial stars bag and a black reading cloth -- these will be my first bag or cloth so i'm excited and very anxious to see them in real life

 

[Kahlie]

Well, I only sell Tarot Readings and Oracle Readings on my website.

Making a website does take a long time. But on the whole, it's only 35% of trying to sell your products. the other 65% is trying to get your website into the search engines and finding other places to promote it.
It's really a lot of work to do all those things. If you are planning on it, I suggest you know HTML & Internet Marketing. Besides that, you will need some starting $.
While Ebay is a good way to get a "Name for yourself", that means you need to have regular auctions up, a logo, and a lot of money... The fees of Ebay.com more then doubled, so for a 10.00$ or more bag you already need 0.70$ insertion fee, on top of that comes a gallery picture, bold etc. Then you still need to pay the costs of PayPal as well!

All in all it's quite a lot of work!

Good luck with your venture,

Kahlie