The Pros and Cons of Selling in Your Own Store

image credit: freedigitalphotos.net

Have you ever considered leaving your consignment store and striking out on your own? It can be profitable to host your own webstore and it’s really great to have the freedom to design on your own time and schedule but here are additional items to consider.
Pros of Your Own Store

• You keep 100% off the profits (after payment fees)
• You are totally in charge of what products you produce, how you package and how you market them
• When people come to your store, they are not “distracted” by other designer products
• All your marketing efforts are funneled to one place
• You know who you customers are
• You can segment your mailing list to offer promotions to people who are great customers or to entice those who have not purchased lately (or only ever got freebies)
• Easier control over promotions (such as Buy My Store or Free with Purchase)
• Complete control over store categories, display order, featured products, coupons, gift certificates, etc
• Opportunity to develop a comprehensive web presence for your brand, if you choose (by adding a blog, gallery, etc)

Cons of Your Own Store

• PayPal will be taking a cut that you may not have had taken out of your designer commission before. It is a little more than 30 cents per transaction plus a percentage of every sale
• Additional costs:

web hosting (usually something beyond a basic/starter package)
possible SSL certificate for store plus additional fee for dedicated IP address
possible paid shopping cart software
add-on modules for free shopping cart to make it more user friendly
professional installation and customization (skinning) of shopping cart
professional maintenance of cart software (e.g. version updates, security patches)

• More time spent learning how to run and administer the store
• More time spent on customer service issues like download resets, server issues, browser compatibility, etc.
• You cannot depend on anyone else to drive traffic to your store – you will be the one in charge of ALL advertising, search engine optimization, etc.
• More time spent on site management such as backups, front page styling

I personally recommend that even if you do not have plans to open a store, you should at LEAST register the domain for your designer name. At minimum, this prevents someone else from controlling that domain, and grabbing the search results for your name … or worse … sitting on it in order to sell it to someone who could really use it (you!) – at a much higher price than what it would have been.

Do you have pros and cons to add or experience to share? Comments are welcome (below)

Advertise Your DSD Sales and Activities for FREE
The iDSD forum at DigiScrapAddicts is now open. All registered users can post information about any DSD activities: sales, giveaways, contests, challenges freebie, etc. This is a great opportunity to get the word out about your designs and promotions.
Check it out HERE.

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The winner of last week’s giveaway is shown below. Kathleen, I sent you an email – please reply to confirm and I will send you the coupon code.