Choosing A Product To Sell

I have three awesome websites. The only trouble is that selling guitar strings on two is much more difficult than I planned on. For one thing, the first thing I thought of when considering selling them was the fact that there are millions of guitar players world wide. I mean how many guitar players do think live in your city or town? Or how many do you think live in New York City or Houston, Texas? Or in Rome, Italy? More than a few.

The other factor is that my husband is a musician and plays the guitar. Now he is VERY critical of his strings. But since selling strings and learning about them, I have found that not all guitar players are like him. In fact, a family member who plays his guitar all the time, didn't even know about the different gauges or materials they are made with. Then I found out that many guitar players who buy a new guitar just use that set of strings that came on their guitar. They will replace them with the same brand and gauge instead of trying something else. Or they NEVER change them!

Plus, one of the best reasons I liked guitar strings was that they are small and easy to package up and ship. Shipping costs for most items is very high and eats into any profit you can make. Buyers don't understand why they have to pay for shipping. or especially why they should have to cover our cost of the bubble mailers, the labels, the ink and the transaction fees. But if the sale from them doesn't cover that and allow us to make some sort of profit.........what is the sense of selling to them? Just for the fun of it? Hardly!

So when you pick a product to sell on your site, eBay, Bonanza, etsy, or Amazon, what are the factors that help you decide what to sell? And how do you figure the shipping into your product? Then how do you price it? These are all questions I am pondering these days. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.

Copyright © 2011 Kathleen G. Lupole
All Photographs Copyright © 2011  Kathleen G. Lupole

How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Business

String Baby on Bonanza

I have opened a second booth on Bonanza for selling my guitar strings. It seems to me that a separate booth focusing on the strings only would be better for those sales. The other booth, katlupe's Booth is for selling used items, mostly books and CDs. 

I am also writing a blog for selling guitar strings called String Baby. The thing about the blog though, I am not a musician myself and any dreams of my husband, who is one, writing a blog......is long gone. He just does not have the time available. I found a site some years back that offers free articles written by other authors on different subjects. They let you use their articles for free if you just make sure to link back to them. So I am doing that for my String Baby blog, and it looks quite nice. The articles I am getting for this are all written by musicians. So that takes care of that problem.

On Facebook, I have a page for String Baby. I started it awhile back and need to get working on it in the next day or so. A good week-end project! If you go to that page please, "like" me! I will be working on it soon. I also have a page on myspace but have not been there in months so I won't add that link here.

My husband does String Baby's twitter page, so I am not doing that presently. But you see how all these little things add up to bringing more people to your site? That is what Social Media is all about!

 

Copyright © 2011 Kathleen G. Lupole

All Photographs Copyright © 2011  Kathleen G. Lupole