

Ask HN: Selling online - huherto

I have two friends that want to sell stuff online. They have asked me what to use. Do you have any recommendations, they know very little about technology and they have little money. One of them is going to sell clothes for dogs and the other one Christmas ornaments.
======
j0ncc
These two items sound like they fall into the <http://www.etsy.com> category.
I've never used the service myself but it comes highly recommended from a few
friends who have used it.

Apart from that, there's always ebay.

~~~
timf
My wife sells on etsy, recommended. Products sounds just right for it.

~~~
dcminter
I've bought a few presents on Etsy. Currently the customer experience is good
(particularly nice personal touches from the vendors).

I worry about its future (will it fill with rubbish when the bulk vendors find
it?) but at present I give it a warm recommendation.

------
ecommercematt
Assumptions: They have limited funds. They lack the ability make a presentable
site based on one of the many open source commerce platforms. Their lack of
skill (and presumably cash, too) prevents them from gaining traction with
Google Adwords and/or equivalent(s).

This leaves public marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Overstock, Etsy, etc.

eBay and Etsy sound like the best options. Etsy will be good because of its
focus on small, handcrafty items. eBay will be good because of the sheer size
of its user base. I don't have any experience with Etsy, but I'm assuming it
is similar to eBay in many ways. The key to success with eBay is to not just
pick what you want to sell and list it and hope for the best. Instead you need
to spend time analyzing how other people are selling identical and similar
items. What are they titling them? When are they scheduling the auctions? Are
they bundling multiple items? How long are their auctions? Fixed price? eBay
store?

Analyze the hell out of your competition, and experiment. You can use one of
the bulk listing and schedule management tools like Turbo Lister, but you'll
likely want to record information in Excel (or equivalent) and start parsing
what's going on. The improvement yielded by careful analysis and
experimentation over simply listing what you want to sell is tremendous. The
people who succeed on eBay by selling a lot of items have optimized their
strategy based on detailed research. They don't simply use custom html
templates for their auctions, and diligently respond to customer inquiries.
They analyze everything to death and adjust their methods based on what they
learn from their extensive analysis.

------
rishi
I started www.FlyingCart.com its good if you want to create your own online
store. It is not a market place like ebay or etsy. We also don't take a cut of
their sales.

------
jackowayed
ah yes, selling Christmas ornaments in January. Business will be so hot it
doesn't matter what website she uses.

But seriously, I don't know much on the topic, but ebay will almost certainly
get them the most views. A lot of people use just the buyitnow feature, so
they get all of the traffic of ebay but are selling for a set price.

Main drawback is that they probably take a bigger cut than other sites.

------
mseebach
I've been playing with a business idea for a while, that I think would be
appropriate for a situation like this:

For ease, I'll call my product, "the processor" and my client "the seller". I
define a microformat on top of HTML that defines a product. Name, price, maybe
options/attributes, very simple. This can be added to a blog-post, myspace-
page, anyone on the web with minimum HTML access. Place a link to my service
on that page that says "put in basket". The processor examines the referrer,
creates a session with a cookie, adds the product, and returns the visitor. On
the seller-page, there's a bit of javascript that pulls the basket from the
processor and displays it, along with "show basket" and "checkout" links.
Checkout runs on the processor, on an unbranded page, maybe even with some
"magic" pulling the layout of the seller-page, and integrates the sellers
Paypal or Google Checkout or whatever payment service. Business model is to
charge some fee or percentage on all orders above a certain threshold.

Does it make sense? Could it work? Does it already exist?

------
aliasaria
Another option is Shopify (shopify.com) if they want to create more of their
own store, but have their own brand. Etsy is pretty awesome, true.

------
espadagroup
I wrote some of my experiences here:

[http://espadatalk.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/producing-
marketi...](http://espadatalk.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/producing-marketing-
distributing-and-selling-a-physical-product-online/)

------
AndrewWarner
Isn't it a bit late for Christmas ornaments?

~~~
huherto
Yes I know. I thought the same thing. But she really loves Christmas and
really adorns her house, I suppose she is thinking about next year.

------
matthewking
shopify.info seems pretty good, easy to get setup and lots of power for later
on.

~~~
reidman
Although I agree that Etsy is the best for this particular situation, Shopify
is great for larger-scale sales. We're filling 500-1000 orders per month with
their software and having no major issues, except for quibbles about missing
features. And since they have an API we can't really complain too loudly.

------
3KWA
ebay

