Advice on selling handmade soap

pinky 06

Hello fellow crafters! Does anybody know a good website to sell handmade soap and bath products? I have set up on etsy and I'm adding new listings slowly, but I'm not sure if it's suitable for Irish sellers. I also do local markets selling but would really like to branch into online selling too. I've had a look online but it's left me more confused! Also, mods could I post a link to my etsy shop to get advice from the crafters? I'd love to know what they think of my photos and descriptions!

Tiriel

Sure - we don't mind you putting a link into a post when looking for feedback/advice, once as you are not blatantly only posting to advertise We are a community here and I'm sure others will be able to advise.

If you do a search on this forum - I remember a poster gave a fantastic review/how to on her etsy shop - I found it really interesting. I believe (could be wrong) that it was Sapsorrow..

Edit: found the thread - might be of some help
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=83279015

pinky 06

Cork_girl wrote: »

Sure - we don't mind you putting a link into a post when looking for feedback/advice, once as you are not blatantly only posting to advertise We are a community here and I'm sure others will be able to advise.

If you do a search on this forum - I remember a poster gave a fantastic review/how to on her etsy shop - I found it really interesting. I believe (could be wrong) that it was Sapsorrow..

Edit: found the thread - might be of some help
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=83279015

Brilliant! Thank you I'll give it a read now. Here's the link to my shop... any advice welcome

Mod snip: URL deleted as per OP's request ☺

kormak

pinky 06 wrote: »

Hello fellow crafters! Does anybody know a good website to sell handmade soap and bath products? I have set up on etsy and I'm adding new listings slowly, but I'm not sure if it's suitable for Irish sellers. I also do local markets selling but would really like to branch into online selling too. I've had a look online but it's left me more confused! Also, mods could I post a link to my etsy shop to get advice from the crafters? I'd love to know what they think of my photos and descriptions!

Your product look nice but perhaps you need to look at your business and it's branding... There are plenty of grants available so maybe you should be directing your funds towards this area in order to reap the reward.
anyways have a look at what your competitors are doing...
http://www.thehandmadesoapcompany.ie/

best of luck!

Sapsorrow

Hi pinky! Welcome to the Etsy Ireland crew!

Have you tried joining any teams on Etsy yet? There are brilliant educational, support and promotional teams for everything from photography to SEO advice, I would really recommend you join a few and see what you can learn there! I particularly like the Etsy success and Etsy Ireland teams! You can also join teams where you can get shop critiques which are really useful at the start.

I had a quick look at your shop, the main things to work on for now are to get lots more listings up, work on your SEO and tagging ( you're not utilising all your title space or any of your tags as far as I can see), you need to seriously flesh out your item descriptions (provide answers to every question a potential buyer might want to ask) and you do need to work on your photos.

Etsy is a very visual site, successful sellers almost always have exceptional photography, so dabble with shooting in natural light and try downloading a free photo editing programme like Gimp to do some editing too! You shots look very yellow to me, are you taking your photos under artificial light? Try playing sound with your camera settings, you should have settings for daylight, shade, cloudy, tungsten light etc etc.. So see if you can make get the colours a bit more balanced!

For example the photo in this listing is perfect : https://www.etsy.com/listing/155624062/irish-luxurious-lavender-soap-approx?ref=related-0

Whereas in this listing there is a strong yellow hue and lots of strong dark shadows: https://www.etsy.com/listing/155223719/scrumptious-coconut-soap?ref=related-2

So maybe try and take your photos in the same place and at the same time of day as the first photo to recreate these results!

I hope that helps! etsy is a hell of a lot of work at the start, but trust me, it gets so much easier the longer you stick with it! Best of luck with it!

pinky 06

Hi, thank you so much for all of the advice, I'm going to retake the photos tomorrow in natural light as yes, I can see now that some look very yellow! I've also had a look at other soap sites and I definitely need to add a lot more to my descriptions. It's going to be a busy day tomorrow

Ana_Dublin

Hello everybody! I am new here so this is my first post, I really hope someone can help me cause I em getting desperate
I´ve started to make homemade soap and I am looking for shops in dublin centre where I can buy oils, essences, almond/coconut milk,etc. I´ve Goggled it so many times but I never get a satisfactory website. It seems there are only health shops but they sell almond creams which cost more than 10€.
Does somebody know where I can find an herbalist, asian shop with these type of things? Also, I am looking to buy 2lb of clear glycerin as I am about to finish mine.
Many thanks in advance!!!
Ana