How To Sell Your Handmade Jewellery Online

Over 2,000,000 individual jewellery items listed on Etsy make the social marketplace an extremely crowded field for jewellery makers. When we ask jewellery makers if the site is a good fit for handmade jewellery, the answers we get are all over the place. In some ways, selling there demands that jewellery makers exercise skills that may be a little rusty.

Before you figure out how to make your work stand out online, you need to figure out whether you want to sell your work at all. There is a wide range of jewellery on offer in virtual storefronts, ranging from £1 to £100,000. Obviously most jewellery makers will fall somewhere between these two extremes.

So who’s doing well online? Jewellers who use more precious metals, such as platinum and gold, and sell high-ticket items are lukewarm at the moment. Makers who use silver or alternative materials say it can be a lucrative market. While it’s tempting to dismiss Etsy and other sites as being glutted with low-effort, low cost goods, there is a solid core of well-made handcrafted pieces and the buyers who are willing to pay for them.

Before you begin, go onto Etsy and similar sites and check out your competition. Who is your competition? Are there other people who are doing a similar look or design, or working with the same materials? What are they doing right and how could they improve?

Pay particular attention to your prices. Look at the price point you want to hit and then look at your pieces. Check out the prices other jewellery makers are charging, and see how those prices compare with the range you are hoping for. Look at your materials, production, packaging, shipping and labour. If you can’t make the price point without forsaking a profit, either raise the price or reconsider the piece. You need to be competitive, but you have to cover your materials and labour – it’s clear that many Etsy jewellers are not doing this. People are willing to pay a fair price for a product. Don’t under value your designs or labour. After all, you are a professional. If you don’t make a profit to keep your business going then you will go out of business.

Make sure your store reflects your online image, your packaging materials, your marketing materials and your jewellery designs. Consistency in everything you create is important. If you specialise in handmade rings make sure they follow a certain style. When someone opens your package, make sure the style they are holding and the style of what they saw online match.