Pricing is a difficult to handle if you’re selling something popular without any difference from the same products from other sellers. You will be forced to charge what other sellers are charging. And many time that doesn’t work either because someone is willing to sell it for even less.
Once again, go through the branding step that we have mentioned. Branding is a great way to be a leader when competing. Get a few things right and you will look much better than your competition, allowing you to charge higher rates.
Competing on a unified marketplace like eBay and Etsy is difficult because your potential buyer is looking at your competitors at the same time. To have a good control on your pricing you need the buyer to be exposed only to your product. This is possible with your own website. However there are ways to control your selling price on Etsy and demand the premium price for your work.
These are a few steps that you need to follow.
Be unique. We spoke about this in the beginning of this book. How can anyone compete with you on pricing if they are not making what you do. This leaves you free to decide how much you want to sell your craft for.
All throughout this blog we have been giving your strategies is to be different and unique. Many people think that to be unique you have to come up with a game changing idea.
If you can that’s wonderful. But more often it is a simpler matter of implementing strategies such as telling a story behind the product, creating an impressive and inspiring self-profile, creating a blog etc. You should make every effort to avoid your craft from getting generalised and clubbed with others.
Get your unique selling point across. You may have good reasons for charging a premium price for your art. But is your buyer getting this message?
Unless the buyer understands the things about your art that you would like him to value, he will not understand why he has to pay more for it. It is your job to get the message across to your potential buyer.
Write great descriptions, click great photographs, start your own blog etc. All these things help the buyer recognise the value of your work.
There are many strategies used by experienced sellers to get the price they want from the buyer. Read more about it in the “Art and Craft Income Handbook”. You will learn about controlling prices by creating scarcity, excitement, hope and other similar psychological triggers.
When selling on Etsy resist the temptation to charge what everyone else is. Instead work towards prepping the buyer to pay what you want to. This is called pre-selling and is done by communicating with prospective buyers, and even get them to participate in product creation.
Email marketing is our crucial tool in doing this. We have already mentioned that email marketing is an extremely effective tool in getting high return on investment.
It is a highly effective way of developing your own database of customers and converting them to customers in the future.
Do read more about Email Marketing in the “Art & Craft Income Handbook”. It is a very important topic that deserves your attention and integration in your business as soon as possible.
