Online stores and selling merchandise: Experiences & Preferences?

[MylCreates]

Although I probably won't be opening up a store any time until summer, I've been trying to look into places where one could set up an online shop and I've seen several artists use various stores for their merch.

Here's a rather interesting article highlighting some of the major names:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/websites-sell-art/

I'm somewhat torn between StoreEnvy & Society6 (I also find it peculiar that Etsy wasn't listed in that list above?).

There's a fine line between the cost of producing the product to be sold at a cheaper price or getting a larger pay for the product, and the hassle and time having to put into the product being made (and what it is you want to sell).

For those who have opened up a shop or start selling merchandise, where did you open it? What did you sell? What did you find/ sell the best? Did you produce it yourself or did you have a manufacturer produce it (any suggestions? )

As far as what I hope to sell in the future are prints, buttons, clothing prints, and plushies to name a few.

[Kayke]

I have a Society6 and a Storenvy. Personally, I make more money on Storenvy.

Since Society6 prints your stuff for you, they take a BIG cut of the money and in order to make a decent profit you have to charge a LOT... which I'm not down with because I don't want my fans getting ripped off.

I like the amount of control I have with Storenvy. I don't mind ordering my comics and prints and storing them in my home until I make a sale. The only thing that can be a pain is shipping, but since I sell small things it's not that big of an issue.

[AnnaLandin]

I've found it's difficult to gain traction on Society6. It's super-convenient and easy to use, but for some reason, sales are slow, even when I promote as hard as I can. I'm considering moving away from it, but I haven't decided 100% where to go yet.

I have friends who have moved to tictail-stores, and that looks interesting!

[kurisquare]

I set up my first online store in Storenvy, but now they changed their payment system and I can't connect my Paypal account to the store (I have a Premier account, and only Business accounts can connect to Storenvy...). I'm debating whether to upgrade my Paypal account to Business, or switch to a different online store website.

[UzukiCheverie]

I've got three shops set up - Gumroad, Society6, and TeePublic (a little excessive, but I'm still working on it).

My Gumroad shop is for all the milestone rewards that patrons may not want to pledge so much a month to get. So instead of pledging $3/month to get an avatar pack, they can pay $3 upfront to get the download file for it. It sounds redundant, but it's actually a good value to just pledge - once you do $3/month, as long as you stay at that monthly rate and don't go down to $1 (higher is fine tho lol) then you get all future packs as well; vs. if you buy the avatar pack, it's only version 1, and if you want any later versions, you'll either have to pledge or pay another $3 for the new pack. Same goes for wallpapers and such that are for sale - pledging works better for the long term, but if you want just one specific wallpaper or pack or whatever it is, and don't want to dedicate months of pledging, it works.

Society6 is for my prints and TeePublic are for my t-shirts, that's pretty much it.

I haven't personally found any results with any of these sites yet, but that's because of my specific situation - I don't offer a lot of prints and t-shirt designs and pledge rewards for sale yet, so there's not a lot to pick from. Plus my following isn't that large when you compare it to those who have successful stores (and my readership is filled with a lot of younger viewers who don't have much money to throw around; this is just something that happened lol)

I'm hoping that when I have more designs and products to sell and gain a bigger following, I'll start seeing more sales. Might even get rid of my TeePublic store and just sell all designs on Society6 (as they do tee's as well, but I don't have any experience with the quality of their apparel products; whereas I own like 2 TeePublic shirts and they're both awesome lol). It just depends where I get the most traffic and sales when they start to (hopefully) take off. I definitely like the possible benefits of using Gumroad so far, seeing as how I've purchased things from artists myself on it (I've bought a few of Sakimi-chan's tutorials and PSD's and brushes, it works for me because I just don't want to pledge $10-$20 a month for every tutorial when only a few of them actually catch my eye).

That's my two cents! It's definitely something you have to experiment with, find results with, and once you do, you can narrow your choices from there, figure out what decisions make sense from a business point of view, etc etc.

/thumbs up

[MylCreates]

Does the buyer usually pay for shipping depending on their location (like if they're out of country) or does that cut into the set price? >.>

[MylCreates]

Ooo, I've not heard of tictail at all! I wonder what pros/cons that has?

[Kayke]

You can set the shipping for different locations and you can also set it for different types of items which is cool. So you could make shipping for prints cost less than shipping something heavier, like books or coffee mugs or whatever.

[AnnaLandin]

I definitely like the possible benefits of using Gumroad so far, seeing as how I've purchased things from artists myself on it

Also good to know - Gumroad allows you to sell physical things via their site as well, so it's an alternative to things like StoreEnvy! I only sell PDFs on Gumroad myself right now, but I'll be experimenting with selling merch via them starting sometime next year.

[MylCreates]

Oh cool I wonder if there's much difference between the two platforms for physical items...

[el_fury]

I haven't been selling merch for long, but the DIY/Etsy approach seems like the best approach when you are starting out. Stickers, for example: a lot of businesses that print stickers FOR you require you to order a minimum of X stickers. Sometimes that minimum is 1000. Someone like me can't expect to sell 1000 stickers, so ultimately I'd be losing money and would end up with a pile of stickers I don't need. Instead, I print and cut them myself in small quantities, and sell a large enough quantity of those to make a profit.

Some of those print-on-demand business models that take a huge cut don't seem beneficial unless you are someone who is already popular and selling thousands of products.

But keep in mind, I freelance for a living, so my schedule is more flexible. Making stuff yourself can be very time consuming. =|

[MylCreates]

owo how do you usually gage how much you need to stock up? Do you like put up polls asking what people would prefer to buy or launch kickstarters for such things?

[AnnaLandin]

Some places - Storenvy is one of them, AFAIK - lets you do pre-orders, where you make a post about a thing you're thinking of making, and then people preorder it, and you use the money you get from that (+whatever you wanna spend on extra copies) to pay for the printing/creation of it.

I've never done it that way myself - I've only recently started creating merch; before this, it was only print-copies of comics - but it's a nice way to gauge interest and get funding for smaller print-runs of stuff.

[MylCreates]

Hm, I feel as if customers would have to put in a lot of trust to put in money for a pre-order. I suppose the money would only go through if they were guaranteed what they pre-ordered for? >3>

[AnnaLandin]

Like I said, I haven't done it myself, but I believe the money goes through regardless, and if you fail to meet your goal (say, you need 20 preorders to have enough money to print), you would have to refund people. Awkward, yes, but better than guessing how many copies of something you'll be able to sell, and mistakenly making far too many that end up not getting sold.

[fanyart]

I have been using Zazzle for a long time, and it works fine for me, though I have nothing to compare it with. I have there mostly random animal pictures that people seem to like, and also some merch for my old comics but I don't remember it selling very much. But it could have been because I never did any promotion to my store there so most customers came from the site itself - so of course they didn't know my comic characters.

They have a very wide variety of products, I guess even too much, one can easily get lost in them. And even though you can customize your store pretty much, it doesn't help navigate customers through the vast number of products :/ Here is my shop so you can see for yourself: http://www.zazzle.com/fany001

There's a serious problem with the management of Zazzle itself though - it seems like their only goal is to offer as many kinds of products as possible, which has been hurting the website/service really bad in the last few years. As a result there are many technical bugs and rushed features that don't work the way they're supposed to, and heaven help you if you encounter a problem and turn to support.
In the past though, the website was simply great, so if you don't plan on posting many products, are a US citizen and don't expect a support to help you, Zazzle should work for you very well

[el_fury]

Depends... I have learned to start with a super low inventory, like 5 items, and adjust how much I produce after that based on how many sold.

There's also a "made to order" option when you're listing, plus a setting where you say "Shipped within X days of ordering". So you can manage your customers' expectations that way.

As for knowing what products people will like, it's hard to know. :\ I don't poll anyone, but I'll sometimes write in the description of my comics "I'm thinking of turning this into a magnet/sticker..." and if the people respond with "OMFG YES" I know it will work as an item in my store lol.

[MylCreates]

Oh nice
It looks kind of like Society6. Do they take a certain kind of paycut for things?

[fanyart]

But on Zazzle you don't need to pay any set up fees - you can start with zero capital, which is very nice

They have a base price for each product where their own royalty is included and you add your own royalty in %. The default is 25% but you can adjust it as you want even for specific products, but can't be less than 5%, and if you go higher than the default royalty, Zazzle starts taking some of the "extra" royalty (not sure how that specifically works, though, I always go by the default royalty). Unfortunately, they don't allow base price purchase, even if you set up a product for direct access only, you can't take the royalty to 0%, which is annoying when you are commissioned to design a shirt and the customer wants to purchase it on the site - you have to deduce those 5% of royalty from the payment for the commission :/

There's also one thing about Zazzle I forgot to mention - they often have sales, like 80% off prints, 50% off shirts etc, which isn't really good from the royalties point of view, but very attractive from customer's point. When I had an exhibition some years ago, I caught two of those 70-80% off prints sales and thanks to that I could get many things printed.