Ask IH: Tips on selling physical products and staying indie?
- !!! 🚨 WALL OF TEXT WARNING 🚨 !!!
- Also posted on PH @ https://www.producthunt.com/ask/6914-tips-on-selling-physical-products-and-staying-indie
Hey guys,
Background:
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my partner and I live in Toronto, Canada 👋 🇨🇦
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my partner and I would like to improve our online sales
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we have experience selling offline by attending local markets and selling directly to consumers this way
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our online sales so far have been direct (word of mouth type of sales)
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now, we would like to take the next step and leverage the online e-commerce atmosphere
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we will continue offline sales this upcoming summer
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my partner is working on this full-time
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I am working on contract at a typical 👨💻 so I help part-time
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my background is software engineering and social sciences so business knowledge is limited to my basic mandatory engineering business classes
Currently we are looking for tips on how to approach the marketing aspect of this entire online terrain.
What we have that we can leverage:
- My partner recently (a few months ago) crossed the 1000 subs on youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB5mFx3KjuOuMZoXDLSUvSg
- What is cool about this number is that all of the traffics and subs are organic
- The views and subs is growing month over month and not stagnating
- This puts her in a good position of searching for Sponsorships in this area (and we would like to leverage this but not sure how yet)
Hopefully the above makes sense, it is always challenging to give enough context to show that we are serious about this and have been working on it.
So our goals:
- we want to bring awareness and sales to her Etsy store (https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/LastMinuteLaura)
- we want to remain indie (so 1 of a kind items / limited number of sales)
- we want to introduce presales but not sure how to go about that for 1 of a kind items
- want to funnel youtube to the store
To attack etsy:
- started to take better product shots
- doing keyword searches for our products
- better product description (based on other top shops)
- currently studying on how to improve ranking on etsy (so... SEO)
- gathering testimonials from previous happy customers and put them on (https://lastminutelaura.ca/)
To attack youtube:
- consistent posting schedule (she found what she likes to make videos about)
- comment engagement
- links to etsy from videos
- amazon affiliate links
Any tips or advice greatly appreciated. If you need more info or clarification, I can see about clarifying that ✌️
Thank you for reading and your time.
Sincerely,
Alex
Hi Alex,
Congrats to you and your partner for the success thus far.
Together with my girlfriend, I've built up an e-commerce shop selling handmade jewellery (made by friends) to $paysTheRentAndHolidays revenue over the past three years. It took about 18 months of work to get there, and since then it's pretty much been on autopilot.
Here are a few suggestions based on what I've learned (also from other b2c startups I've been involved with):
The first and most important thing is to try and increase the lifetime value of a customer by as much as possible. By lifetime value, I mean a) how often they come back and purchase again, and b) how many new customers they refer to your store organically. Make sure your newsletter, product range/upsells, retargeting and referral/viral-loop mechanisms are on point to maximise this value first. Then try and get more customers.
Etsy etc can be great marketing channels, but you want your own ecommerce store at your custom URL as well. It's too dangerous to rely on Etsy long term. I've had good experiences with Wordpress + Woocommerce. Shopify is ok as well.
Offline is an awesome channel for sales. Keep visiting markets. Try to distribute to local physical stores (perhaps on consignment). It takes months to really build up into something worthwhile, but this kind of constant uptrend is really powerful after a year or more.
Authenticity trumps 'slickness' for marketing content.
Consider crowdfunding campaigns for new collections, new product ranges etc. A great way to test customer interest, generate pre-build revenue and finance the extra expense (as well as reaching more potential customers. Word of warning - you need to do crowdfunding properly or not at all!
If my first point was the most important, this last one is a close second: Be consistent.
Good luck!
Hey @louisswiss ! Thank you for such an informative reply! Noted =) Glad we are on the right path!