The Cocoon

Top Tips for selling on MyEhive.com

I am not sure which of my items to sell?

Sell your bestsellers, why? Because if they sell offline (do you have a market stall or your own ecommerce site?) and you have good photos, they will sell here too! If you don’t know which items to list - try a few. Generally the bestphoto of an item sells the item. Selling paintings? Hang them on the wall for scale - get your friend, dog cat to stand next to them for scale. Selling jewellery? Make sure you put them on a model to show scale, this is really important. Selling cards show them with an envelope. etc. Selling clothes, put them on a friend or dummy model, show close-up full length shots. Check out your favourite lifestyle magazines - how do they shoot their products to make them tempting as possible?

I don’t know how to photograph them well?

#1 Make sure your photos are in focus! Don’t put badly lit out-of-focus shots in your shop. Show scale, be creative with backgrounds. Experiment with colour and style, daytime light is always better than a nightime flash unless you are an expert. Use a lightbox. Experiment with cropping and editing photos with Gimp. It’s FREE! Show your products in situ.

How much should I charge for my handmade items?

If you are charging £40 for a pair of earrings why? Are they made of Sterling silver are they hallmarked, are they silver plated are they hypoallergenic, do they have a unique selling point? Are they part of a collection? What kind of photo and description would make you buy them? Are earrings your bestsellers or do necklaces and chokers sell better?

Once I have listed my items how can I promote my shop?

a. Use your unique myehive.com URL ie [http://keebo.myehive.com] to publish on your business cards, add to your email signature, use it every time you post a link to your shop on the internet, every time you post your link on the internet, to stumbleupon, twitter, facebook, in blog posts, Google picks up your link and adds it to search, it massively improves you chances of being found! No links on google for your shop? No sale!

b. Keep your Url name simple, ie [http://keebo.myehive.com] no dots or dashes. Fill our your profile name and location - Leave contact details on your profile page, do not print your home number or address, just a mobile number or email number will do, just so if you make bespoke items customers can contact you re orders and repeat orders!

Do you have any tools I can use to promote myehive shop?

Yes we do. If you click on Badges & Tools on the left hand menu here at the Cocoon you’ll see a whole bunch of badges you can use on your site, including our myehive-mini tool. This does not use javascript so it will work with most blogs. Try them out, grab the html code and cut and paste it into your website or blog code, experiment to see which ones look better,  it out. For the Pollinator or MyEhive-mini tool login to your MyEhive account and head over Shop Settings Menu —> Pollinator.

These are just a few to get you started we’ll be adding a few over the next couple of days! So stay posted.