Orange County Jewelers and Tips for Selling On-Line

June 19, 2010 - PRLog -- Years ago, I used to take a lost wax casting class and then sell the charms and pendants I made in my class on Ebay. At the same time, I was selling my work through local art shows and sold wholesale to a few boutiques. Back then, on-line selling was not nearly as big or as competitive as it these days. Ebay, in fact, was just about the only game in town when it came to finding a venue to sell via the web if you didn't have the money or expertise to create your own web site.

Now that is not the case. There are tons of networks (Etsy, Artfire, Zibbet to name a few) where you can set up a shop in minutes. Now, whether or not you sell anything is another story. Since I am a teacher, I get a chunk of the summer off from my "day job," so one of the goals during my summer break was to whip my little Etsy shop into some kind of shape, and along with way, I have found a number of helpful resources so I thought I'd share some of them with you:


A big deal over on the Etsy forums is to have other people critique your shop. We also do this on the Jewelry Making forum on this site as well. The Etsy Business Tips blog has a post called the "Etsy Self-Service Critique" where you are offered a way to critique your own on-line shop by ticking down the long list of the most common shop issues such as photographs and descriptions.
Speaking of the Etsy forum, one member included tons of helpful links in one post, entitled (appropriately) "GIANT List of Helpful Links." Obviously, you may not have time to look at every single link in this super long list, but I have found a few helpful items there.
In the Jewelry Making forum, I post about a very cool site that ranks Etsy shops by sales. Once other members went over there and started looking at the top jewelry sites, many of them supplies actually, this thread started to include some interesting information about whether or not top shops are really "tops" when it comes to making a profit.
Finally, one of the big issues with selling on-line, no matter if you have your own web shop or are part of a network, is shipping. How much do you charge? How do you figure this out? What about shipping internationally? A blog called Go to Great Panes has a slew of information and related links in a post entitled "Shipping."
If you have some other helpful information about selling on-line feel free to post a comment and share your knowledge.

For more information visit http://orange-county-jewelers.nlds.us or call us directly. Here is another Orange County article http://www.prlog.org/10747471-orange-county-dermatologist... for your reading enjoyment.

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