Last Updated on Mar 6, 2020 by James W
If you make and sell crafts, you need various ways to make your product more purchasable for your customers. Whether you sell your product at a local outdoor market, or through local small boutiques, there are ways that incorporating eCommerce into your business can not only improve your sales, but also make your bookkeeping more efficient, leaving you with more time to focus on creating and selling your product.
Using eCommerce to Improve Production
If you don’t keep track of each item as you sell it, in order to see how much of each item you sold, you will have to count all of your inventory at the end of the day and then subtract your sales from a record you made before the day began. While it seems easier to just sell a product throughout the day without keeping track of it, this can be inefficient for your business overall. If you were to find that you sell many of one item at this market, but you don’t sell very many of another item, you could adjust your production and inventory, which will increase your sales and your profit margin. An eCommerce method of sales would keep track of exactly what you sold and when, making it easy to review your sales after a big day and help you recreate or enhance those some profits the next week.
Taking eCommerce to Your Customers
The use of eCommerce is also incredibly beneficial to your customers, which in turn makes it beneficial for you. You need to start accepting credit card payments, even when you are selling at places like an outdoor market, if you want to increase your sales and profits. This can easily be done with the incorporation of eCommerce programs such as one that allows you to swipe credit cards on an iPad or tablet device. You can even use a smartphone for these types of applications, but you have to get the right equipment. This will be an investment that can greatly increase the amount of product you sell. Many people don’t carry much cash with them, and therefore are unable to buy from merchants that only accept cash. Also, even if customers do have cash, you can increase the amount of each sale by giving them the option to spend more money than they have on them by using a debit or credit card. Your eCommerce program will keep track of your sales and send money to whatever account you designate. The added bonus is that you don’t have to deal with as much cash during each market day as you might have before.
Using eCommerce benefits you in multiple ways, from organization and record keeping to the increase of sales due to accepting various methods of payment. While you will have to make an initial investment in a credit card swiper and an eCommerce program, the benefits will likely help those investments pay for themselves in a small period of time.
