Adventures in Selling Greeting Cards - Part 1

Time for an update on my card-selling endeavours and a warm welcome to all new followers!

Back in November I decided to see whether there was a local market for my Christmas cards and I’m pleased to say that it went better than expected - in spite of my mistakes!

The Art Shop & Gallery, Abergavenny

Our lovely little ‘Art Shop and Gallery’ sold out of my Reindeer and Snowballing collages completely. As you can see from the picture (right) it's a tiny shop but packed to the gills with all sorts of goodies for artists to drool over!

 And a nearby newsagent who also sells all things Welsh, (below) re-ordered the photos of the snow on the mountains, with ‘Season’s Greetings from Abergavenny’ twice!

 

Welsh items for sale in the B4A newsagent's, Abergavenny

Considering how many people buy their Christmas cards very cheaply in packs, often Charity cards, I felt I’d done well and succumbed to suggestions from friends and relatives that I should build on this little success by offering my other, non-Christmas greeting cards for sale in local shops on ‘Sale or Return’ (consignment).

It’s always nice to see one’s greeting cards on sale in the shops – even nicer to hear that they’re selling well! But if, like me, you have neither a lot of money or time to invest, it may be useful to know about the difficulties that arose that I wished I had anticipated. (In the following four problems I encountered, there were clear solutions but it was nevertheless hard work and time-consuming and approaching the shopkeepers for the first time took me way outside my comfort zone!)

1. In many cases, November was too late to be offering Christmas cards. Several of the shops I tried told me at once that they already had their Christmas stock and didn’t have room for any more.

2. If you are showing the shopkeepers a catalogue of your designs, it’s a good idea to have several copies. It took me several weeks to visit half a dozen shops because the shopkeepers wanted to browse through the catalogue at their leisure so kept it for several days, preventing me taking it to other shops.

3. Make sure you have samples to show to the shopkeeper. I found the following pattern kept repeating itself – when I introduced myself the shopkeepers looked doubtful, when I  showed them my catalogue, they looked mildly interested but when I took out a couple of samples, one of them packaged, the other open to inspection, their whole attitude changed, their eyes lit up and they were definitely interested!  (It may be worth buying a few of your cards through Greeting Card Universe or Zazzle to use as samples, if you can get them at a time when there’s a special offer going – which seems to be much of the time!)

4. Try, if at all possible, to make sure that your cards are displayed in a good position in the shop. In one shop I found my cards down on a low shelf  between the counter and the window, with baskets of buttons on top of them - twice! Eventually I got them moved to a shelf where they could just about be seen but to get at them to browse would have involved asking the shopkeeper to get up out of his seat behind the counter – so I wasn’t at all surprised that none of them were sold!

In spite of all this, I decided to go ahead with offering my non-Christmas cards locally in January, having learnt from my mistakes. But it’s not been completely plain sailing so I’ll continue with my ‘Adventures of a One-person Greeting Card Publisher’ in Part 2 tomorrow...

Statistics, Analytics and Insights

When I began this blog back in January, I intended it to be, at least partly, a record of my experience of selling my greeting cards online. And I hoped that maybe others who were just embarking on this journey might benefit from reading about my ups and downs and gain some insights into what works and what doesn't. Inevitably, I suppose, I've drifted away from that original intention at times but last week, I made a sale that surprised me and brought me back into a more analytical mode. So, as it's six months since I started out with the PODstores and I've passed the 100 mark as far as sales are concerned, I put on my bean-counter hat, engaged my left-brain and took a closer look at my sales so far. I was looking for some hard facts that might point me in the direction that would most likely bring in sales both in terms of what kind of greeting card (or products) I should spend my all-too-limited time creating and also where the most fruitful marketplace is likely to be.

I'd already established that for me, Greeting Card Universe, brings me more sales that Zazzle, in spite of what appeared to be far more visits to my Zazzle Store.(Using Google Analytics, suggested by Ulla, has confirmed that the 'store visits' counter on Zazzle is wildly inaccurate!) But I wanted to know whether a pattern was emerging about which 'style' of design was most in demand.

First I'd better make it clear that I have no intention of giving up on the 'style' that is 'me' and trying to do something different because it sells better! But I do have quite an assortment of styles that I'm comfortable with and it might be more financially rewarding to concentrate my efforts on the one, or ones, that bring most sales.

Also, I think it's probably a good idea to establish who and where one's market is! A few months ago a friend of a friend, who had worked for a greeting card publisher, had commented that my designs would probably appeal to the 'older age-group' - no great surprise there, given that I'm not so young myself! So it was the sale of one of my age-specific birhday cards for a 30-yr-old through Greeting Card Universe last week that prompted me to look into this question of demographics more closely.

Looking through all my sales to date through Greeting Card Universe, I discovered that more than 25% of them were in the 'Pen and Wash' style that in many ways comes most naturally to me. The few greeting cards that I've sold through Zazzle have also been in this style. And, on the whole, they were either designs for that 'older age group' - or for children, arguably bought by that same 'older age group'!

         

So this recent one clearly bucked the trend!

In second place, with about 20% of sales, were my collages, though I think that 'statistic' was slightly skewed by the large number of sales of my Christmas Snowman Collage -

    

All the other styles were represented by just one or two sales each, with a strong bias towards the floral designs.

     

       

It's a very different picture when it comes to sales through my 'partyplan' venture, Kitchen Table Cards, where sales have been more evenly spread across my various different styles. But my little analysis of my online sales, as well as being useful from the point of view of which medium to take further, maybe goes some way to explain why I sell more through Greeting Card Universe than through Zazzle.

I may be completely wrong here, but my impression is that Zazzle caters for a much younger generation of customer, a generation that is more interested in the 'trendiness' of their T-shirts' logo than anything else. As with my floral mugs, my 'pretty' T-shirts have been favorably commented on by other Zazzlers but haven't been sold. I created this one last week -

'Sweet Peas' Ladies Spaghetti Top by helikettle
Buy t-shirts at Zazzle

- and somebody commented that it 'deserves to do well'. But so far, no interest, which seems a shame. And it leads me to ask whether that 'older age group' is actually shopping for T-shirts at Zazzle. Seems unlikely to me! So am I wasting my time making 'pretty things' for the Zazzle marketplace? I'd like to hear whether other Zazzlers' experiences are at all similar.

Is there anyone out there who succeeds at Zazzle with floral designs?

Meanwhile it's time I was planning some new 'pen and wash' Christmas card designs - with us 'Silver Surfers' in mind....