Selling on ETSY

I need to grow my business...

Finding new products to sell is only half of the solution - where to sell them is a whole new story.

So here it is - the new match - a new product on a new platform: Nathan Halpern, an Israely artist whom I know for many years now, creates lovely clay sculptures of imaginary vintage cars that "has curves and wings" - lovely, one of a kind, pieces.

These sculptures are hand made and glazed-painted, burnet in high temprature (above 1,000 C).

I opened a new shop in ETSY. Must say it is a piece of cake - well done ETSY! Took some photos, rendered them (as I know how good they are for traffic generation) and uploaded new items.

Than... Nothing happened :-( welcome to the cruel world of ecommerce - it is time to promote my site and create traffic.  More hard work. More to learn - how to generate traffic to ETSY, how to sell art. Already started doing so on my Pinterest boards.

Here are some of my items on ETSY:

Kufiya-Shirt is Here!

Received the first two! What can I say, my wife is a genius (-:

One was made from a pure white kufiya with a classic Palestinian pattern embroidery (white embroidery on white kufiya) and one from a green kufiya with white Checkers pattern embroidery.

They both look really great on her. Tomorrow we are taking pictures and immediately listing it for sale on my ebay Holyland Treasury store and my own store.

Just one thing keeps me thinking. It is trouly a beautiful shirt, but has a strong political context here in israel, preventing it from being a plain fashion item... All around the world, kufiya is a "hot" accessory while here in Israel no one wears it.


What a pity.

Setting Up An Online Store

So far, I was doing some eCommerce on ebay, learning its secrets, understanding how to be a seller, find what to sell (tough one). Quite fascinating!

I felt its time to move on and have my own store. Sounds simple? Yes. Sounds like it.

First, I had to choose a name. What comes first? An available domain that fits my store name, or a store name that will match an available .com domain... (-:    Not so obvious!

I am selling some unique stuff from the holy-land - key chains, amulets, olive-oil soaps, Palestinian kufiya (shemagh) etc. Guess what? I managed to put my hands on HolyLandTreasury.com!!!

Did any one mention a logo? 

I took a picture of this nice pendant with my iPhone, played with it in Paint.NET for 1 hour, and here it is.

Then, I had to select a platform. I chose Auctiva and discovered a whole new world. It took me 2 days just to set up my shipping methods (weight vs destination). I am a programmer and feel comfortable with continues dull work that has to do with tables of numbers. But this one was a record. I simply fell asleep so many times.

Now, I have to move on to product upload. It is so annoying to do it over and over again for each selling platform. I wish there was a tool that simply uploads to all your commerce sites at once (that does not cost $200 a month..).

...I read what i had just wrote - sounds like an old wailing bitter lady, isn't it?!

See you tomorrow, with some more stories.
A.

Wow. I have a blog of my own. Now All I have to do is write about... what?

That's funny. I never thought I can do that, but after 40, every day is the last day of the rest of my life. As I'm 43 (+), I already lost 1000 last days.

I'm Assaf, 43. I live In Israel in Ramat Hasharon, married to Shani and a father to Shira, Alona and Zohar.

I fill my days (and nights, and sometimes I even manage to invent some extra, "undocumented" hours)  with 3 major activities. First the family (kids are 3,7,11), second my startup company  - face4place that aim to change the way consumers interact with businesses (yes, so am I, with the rest of the world, think I have the winning card) and third, eCommerce - I sell holy-land unique items on ebay, amazon and my own online shop - holylandtreasury.com

 In between, I'm consulting to paying customers (what can I do - kids have to eat) about Information integration (data quality, data governance, data in general). I had quit my job and become self employed  about a year ago, so I can free time to turn my dreams into reality.

So, tomorrow is another day - with new stories to tell dr. Blog.

A.