Simplifying Selling Handmade Products Online In India Here's how to build a successful business in five easy steps

By Akash Gehani

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For those of you who have made products by yourself and wish to find buyers for the same, here's good news. Building your handicraft skill beyond a hobby towards entrepreneurship can be challenging but is very much achievable. To help you sell your homemade merchandise online, here are five steps you can follow to build a successful online business in India.

Target a niche: make and sell one thing

As a business owner, the niche is the class of merchandise you promote. Also, it relies upon the audience you target. For example, recall an artist who sells oil paintings. She paints landscapes, photos, and abstracts. When she narrows down to just one class: portrait, what will appear? Will the number of customers she receives be lower? No longer! In fact, because she specializes in one particular category, her target audience will see her as a professional. Her area of interest is portrait oil painting. If she again niches down into portraying the simplest wedding ceremony portraits, her business has better probabilities to scale!

The more niche your handicrafts merchandise are, the less difficult it is to promote them online.

Here is why it's crucial to narrow down the area of interest:

  • You will be regarded as a professional and your business will be a move-to for that area of interest
  • Reduce competition
  • You can charge a premium given the uniqueness of your product
  • Get satisfactory clients

Here's a quick checklist to help you locate your area of interest:

  • Find out the marketplace demand of those merchandise and the market trend
  • Assess the investment in business
  • Check the competition for these niches
  • Think about how much you want to earn within the market
  • What form of people do you want as clients?

Pricing your handmade products

Labour costs needs to be calculated:
Begin by means of fixing the amount you need to earn by the month to cover simple living charges with the aid of selling your handmade products online. Then, note down the number of hours every month that is spend running the commercial enterprise. Now, divide the first value by means of the second — that is your hourly fee. Subsequently, to discover your labour costs, multiply the variety of hours it takes to make a single product and your hourly fee. That's your labour price.

Calculate making costs:

Add the fees of all the raw substances you used to make your product. One can also include values like electricity, internet charges, and rent.

Calculate wholesale and retail price:
Making prices plus labour fees at minimum price at which you could sell your products without making a loss. To get a profit, you have to sell the product at least double the costs. Of course, you can sell it at greater than double.

Compare other similar merchandise: Check the expenses of what other craftspeople promote merchandise similar to yours. See in case you are pricing according to industry standards.

Consider your customers: Will customers be willing to pay the set price for your product? To discover if your costs are aggressive, display your product to friends or own family and ask them what they would pay for it.

Preparing your homemade merchandise for sale: photos, titles, and descriptions

You've created products for your future customers and set a reasonable rate. Now, there's one greater step to take before selling them online. Firstly, you need to put together your handmade merchandise for the net marketplace. In the digital world, your merchandise wants to attract online customers. Get desirable product photographs.

Tips for at-home handmade product photography:

Use a high quality smartphone camera

  • Use natural lighting
  • Remove background with a tool
  • Optimise your image size
  • Use multiple images from different angles

When it comes to promoting your products online, product descriptions act as a salesperson on your product. Therefore, by no means take this task too gently!

Many companies make the mistake of copy-pasting product descriptions. Here are a few short recommendations to get your product to talk and convince them to shop for from you:

  • Include keywords associated with your product that shoppers seek on Google.
  • Write approximately every small detail of your product – length, size, materials
  • Use sensual words – You are promoting a stunning homemade product. So let your product description speak about how fantastic it's far by including sensual phrases as opposed to keeping it typical.

Create an online shop: Start promoting your handmade merchandise on-line

  • Your handicrafts are prepared to sell on-line. Selling on your online store is the best manner to begin promoting handmade merchandise online in 2021 and the past. As a handicrafts business, your online store will act as your advocate - build trust and get more customers.

Packaging and shipping

For a hand-crafted business, humans count on the packaging to be appropriate and special. Customers love outstanding packaging and your emblem turns into memorable if you pack in something apart from only an uninteresting brown container.

Akash Gehani

Co-Founder & COO, Instamojo

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