Craft
Marketer Newsletter
Craft Business Ideas
Issue Number 30, April 24, 2004
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Part 1 of a
3-part series on
Selling Your Art and Crafts Items on eBay
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Part 1: Will your crafts sell on eBay?
Have you tried selling your craft items on eBay? Were you successful? Did you actually make a profit? If not, you may need to do a little research and try again.
Ever thought about cleaning out your excess crafting materials or old equipment? Instead of a weekend garage sale, put up a 7 day auction on eBay.
There are over 150,000 craft related items for sale on eBay right now. Sales of craft items on eBay have grown almost 60% in the past year.
In 2003, more than $38 million in crafts and needlecrafts supplies sold on eBay.
eBay now has more than 104 million buyers and sellers registered; 41,000 of whom are craft sellers listing items through auctions.
To give you a bigger picture of the demand for art and craft items, here are statistics gathered from analyzing eBay sales from 2003 and 2004.
• a craft item sells
every 9 seconds
• a scrapbook item sells every minute
• more than 48,000 bids are placed every day for artwork and
antiques
• more than 7,000 pieces of gold jewelry sell every week
• 40 cross-stitch items sell in an hour on average on eBay
• in Feb / March of this year, 4,107 eBay auctions with
‘Christmas ornament’ in the title completed successfully at an
average selling price of $17.34. Not bad for an off-season time
of year.
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Craft auctions and other examples cited here include listings of
art and crafts supplies, tools and materials, which can add
income opportunities in addition to selling finished craftwork.
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The first question to ask is how do you know if your craft items will sell on eBay?
And second, how much are people willing to pay for items like yours?
You can quickly learn the answers to these questions by going through the following steps....
Go to eBay.com. In the search box, type in the word or phrase that describes your art or craft item. As a recent example, I typed in “handmade jewelry” and was shown over 150 live auctions.
Next, you find yourself on the results page of auctions for “handmade jewelry”. Scroll down the links on the left hand side of the results page and click on the link for “Completed items”.
When I clicked on
“Completed items” for “handmade jewelry”, I was shown 300 +
completed auctions. I now can see there
is a demand, so I move on to further research.
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When you run the same search, your results will differ because
auction listings are in constant flux of being added and
completing.
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I need to know how much people are willing to pay for my “handmade jewelry” -- to learn if it is possible for me to make a profit before even consider listing my pieces on eBay.
eBay allows you to sort
completed auction listings by price. Just click on the link that
says “highest price”. Now your list of
completed auctions will be ordered by highest priced items
first, descending to the lowest prices. If the list shows lowest
prices first, just click on “highest price” again and the sort
order will reverse.
Based on the prices your research reveals, decide if you can profitably sell your items on eBay.
There's much more to
know about listing your items on eBay's auctions. Watch for next
issue's continuation. And if you
just can't wait . . .
S P E C I A L O F F E R
The above article is
excerpted from "SELL YOUR CRAFTS ON EBAY", a new ebook providing
more than 200 tactics, tips and tricks to sell your art and
craft related items to eBay's
millions of buyers daily. For more
details, click here
Have a great week!
James Dillehay
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