One percent

Is my pricing right? Can anyone give me tips on getting a sale? I’ve not had a sale yet, what am I doing wrong? Help! How do I get a sale?

Haven't we all read this kind of post before?

This post will probably be quite long, It’s not the complete answer, but it will help, Remember that underlying everything, your items will only sell if there is a buyer who want’s it. If you have made something that’s rubbish, it wont sell

It doesn't matter what you are making, your item will only ever appeal to 10%, 5%, 1% or 0.001% of the population.
(excluding fellow sellers)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if every time you listed something, it was viewed once and purchased?

Lets not worry about what it is, let just call it ‘the item’.

So we can now agree that your item will only ever appeal to certain % of the population. Now lets make a figure up of 1%. So you need 100 people to view it, for 1 to say, "I would like buy that." The other 99 will say that is pretty, nice, etc. Then move on.

We are now happy that 1 in 100 will like it enough to buy it. But for some reason, that person does not have the money to buy it then and there, but she may have the money soon and will be back then.

So the first 100 people, who view your item, generate the 1 who might buy it, but they don't. You now need another 100 to view it to generate your next 1. This happens, and this one is a student who just can't afford it at the moment, they agree that it is priced more than fairly for what it is, but they are skint.

It is probably at this stage with Mrs. Right just around the corner and three clicks away from finding your shop, that you have a crisis of confidence and drop your prices, close your shop, stop blogging, stop promoting - any or all of these.

By using the ‘Manage your items’ tab under your account, you can see how many times an item has been viewed, you can also use Google Analytics to help with this. For sellers on folksy, the percentage should be higher than 1 percent

So you need to remember that you need people to look at your shop, the more people that look, the more chance of the 1% seeing your item, and having every other factor in place to buy it, now you have been following the advice of other sellers, you tweet, facebook, and blog, but what more can you do? The key question to ask is, How can I get visitors to the site to view items in my shop?

The next few posts will deal with the answers to this question

This post owes a lot of content and respect to Chris Parry, a jewellery who sells on etsy, and his own website

www.chris-parry.blogspot.com
www.flickr.com/photos/chris-parry
www.chris-parry.co.uk

Woody