Haven't Heard From Me in a While?
I know! It was Valentine's Day. I really made a push to sell earrings last week, and it was incredibly busy for me! I have sold 28 pairs of earrings! That's a lot for me...just starting out and everything, and it was basically all I could handle. It made me realize that I need to make a few changes. The first and most major was to adjust my shipping cost and look at ways of reducing it since I presently offer FREE SHIPPING and would like to continue doing so without significantly cutting into my margin.
I realized that packaging one set of earring in its own 3" X 3" gift box and then shipping it in its own corrugated mailing box was not only excessive, it was heavy, and thereby upping my shipping costs considerably. Now that I am packing in a flatter box, I can use mailing envelopes that lower my shipping weight by 6 ounces and my shipping costs by about 80 cents per package. That may not sound like a lot, but if you multiply it by 28, it would have saved me more than 22 dollars last week.
I am still experimenting with facebook marketing, and it directly resulted in over 2,000 hits to my etsy shop last week! If you remember my previous entry about facebook marketing, I said I got 52 views, and I thought that was a lot.
Of course, "views" do not "purchases" make, so there are still kinks to be worked out of my advertising plan. One major drawback with facebook is that it is very expensive. Again, I am concerned about my margins being eaten up by advertising costs and I am exploring other avenues. 3 of last week's sales came from return customers so advertising to my existing customers would not be a waste.
If anyone has any ideas for marketing -- please leave comment
