DIY Project Ideas for Making Stuff to Sell on Etsy and Elsewhere
Purses from Used Candy Wrappers. I was excited to open my gallery in the tourist destination of Madrid, New Mexico, but I didn’t have enough inventory. So, I bought from a wholesaler of handmade items from Latin America. Among the top sellers was a line of purses made from recycled candy wrappers. At first, they didn’t sell. Then I raised the prices and shoppers started buying. It’s true that shoppers for handmade expect to pay more. If the price is too low, they think the item is machine-made.
Etsy’s trend expert says more and more people want to use recycled materials or natural dyes. Etsy has seen a forty-three percent year-over-year rise in all categories for eco-friendly items. (Source: MarthaStewart.com)
A search on Etsy.com for “recycled” products brought back over 300,000 listings. But that doesn’t tell us which products shoppers are interested in. EtsyRank.com is a subscription service providing reports on keywords used by real buyers on Etsy and Google Shopping. (Search results reported below were gathered in late 2019. Your results will differ. Keyword search data changes daily.) Typing in the word “recycled” using EtsyRank’s Keyword Explorer tool revealed:
eBay.com is probably not the site you first think of for selling handmade items. But before Etsy lured thousands of handmade sellers away with lower fees, it was the largest online market to list handcrafted pieces. The data below indicates eBay may still be an option for some makers.
For instance, in a 30-day period (data from June, 2020) the following number of handmade items successfully sold on eBay containing the search terms:
- handmade soap: 3,447
- handmade jewelry: 8,066
- handmade knife: 39,134
- handmade quilts:5,732
- handmade wooden box: 827
- A search for the word “handmade” with the filters, “New,” “Sold,” and “US Only” brought back 821,180 product listings.
To research the market for items like yours. Go to eBay.com. In the search bar, type in your item’s most popular keyword phrase gathered from the research you did in Chapter 6. Then, go to the left menu bar on the search results page. Check boxes for “New,” “Sold Items,” and other filters you want. You may want to view only items from US sellers. If so, check the box “US Only.” You can also filter results to only include “Buy It Now” listings and not “Auctions.” Ebay will show you new items like yours that sold from “Buy It Now” listings in a recent month from US sellers.
After you have a search results page for items like yours, browse the listings. Note the prices, images, listing titles, and descriptions. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you can create your own version of winning listings. You don’t want to copy other listings, as it violates copyright, and eBay will reject duplicate listings.
Kind of silly video but some good ideas for easy do it yourself business ideas to make stuff to sell.