Wednesday, June 17, 2009

How To Lose Sales

I'm always covering things to do on this blog, I rarely cover things you shouldn't do. I have to give lots of credit to everyone on Twitter who helped me compile this list. Most of these are obvious and hopefully none of my wonderful readers do these but there are some people who still do.

1: Lousy photo. Blurry, dark, yellow tinged, bad background, etc. these photos don't give customers a good impression aboNothing telut your products.
2: Ignore emails. Nothing tells customers you don't care than not acknowledging their emails.
3: Lacking descriptions. How is a customer supposed to know they won't have an allergic reaction to your soap without ingredients or that a shirt will fit without the size?
4: Shipping is more than the cost of the item or extremely high. Find a cheaper shipping option or adjust your prices to balance them out.
5: Poor spelling and grammar. One or two mistakes, especially if very common ones like it's and its, isnt going to be a big problem. Howevar if ur listing make no cents, you has a problm.
6: Don't offer Paypal. Yes, I know it's owned by eBay and therefore evil in many eyes but it is the biggest player in taking payments online so you need to offer it.
7: Smoke around your products or let your pets around fabric/fiber goods. Nothing will cause someone to never buy from you again more than an allergic reaction or icky smell. If you want repeat customers smoke outside and banish the pets from your workspace.
8: Underpricing yourself. This is very common and I know it sounds counterintuitive but it's true. Prices that are too low imply cheap construction and materials. If your products are high quality you shoudl be pricing them accordingly.
9: Outrageous prices. Okay, so in the are of handmade products underpricing is a far more common problem but you can overprice your work as well. $300 is perfectly reasonable for an original painting (depending on size & skill maybe too low) but not for a print no matter how high quality is it.
10: Don't fill out your profile and location. Would you want to buy from someone who's anonymous?
11: Threaten your customers. Don't fill your policies with threats and don'ts, keep things positive but firm. For example "Items are shipped as soon as payment clears" is much better than "If your check bounces you don't get your item".
12: Unclear policies. If you only ship on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays you needs to state this. Be simple and straightforward.
13: Don't organize your shop. 100 items with no sections/categories is hard to navigate when looking for something specific.
14: Make a bad quality product. Strange, unusual, creepy, even ugly (chinese crested dogs?) all sell great if you can find your market, but bad doesn't sell.

7 comments:

  1. Great post Noadi! People need to put themselves in the customers shoes. What kind of place, person and product would you be willing to give your hard earned money to? If what you're selling doesn't meet those standards, why would they meet anyone else's?

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  2. Great post, I am pretty new on etsy and I am always reading up on what to do and not to do. You have some really good points. I always type all my messaging in word first to make sure I don’t have any errors.

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  3. These seem to be more geared toward online shopping, but what about not acknowledging me when I walk into a shop? A simple "hello, thanks for coming in today," would go far in making me feel welcome.

    Something I've seen online that trys to mimic that type of experience are the arrival messages which say things like, "Hello, Googler. You searched for 'XYZ,' here's a few articles that are related to that."

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  4. They are geared towards online sellers. I thought I had mentioned it in the post but I guess I forgot to. I plan to do another edition of this list for selling at shows which would go equally as well for shops.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. While people may have different views still good things should always be appreciated. Yours is a nice blog. Liked it!!!

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