Heads up! This post may contain compensated links which means I get a small tip for telling you about awesome stuff I love!🤘
If you're selling handmade products online, here's my best advice on how to save yourself time and money while making your creative biz HIGHLY PROFITABLE!
Because there's a BIG difference between a profitable handmade brand that looks premium and a craft hobbyist brand that looks amateurish.
That difference is that one is a savvy, money-making Marketician who knows how to get traffic and turn it into sales, while the other is a starving artist.
You'll never realize the self-reliant AF alternative lifestyle of your DREAMS if you stay broke, right?
So let me share the most important insights I've gained after 18 years of selling online to help you DO IT RIGHT.
Whether you're just starting out or you've been at it for a while.
Marketing expertise is what you need to make sure every product you list is WORTH it. Every product you list SELLS (repeatedly is possible!)
And the good news for creative people like you?
I make marketing FUN! Hexotica is all about BANISHING THE BORING! We want bewitching brands! Sales sorcery! Marketing that works like MAGIC!
So let's get started.
Continue reading, OR if you prefer listening while you're hands are crafting, sewing, glueing, wire-wrapping, sculpting, modeling, forging, or assembling, click below for the podcast version! 🪄 🎧💫
Prefer to watch instead of read? Watch the YouTube version here (it'll include visual examples of what a premium brand should look like!)🪄 📺💫
Selling Handmade Products Online: My Uncensored Personal Opinions
You can find a million boring blogs on how to sell handmade stuff online. Or you can use AI. But nothing is going to compete with someone who has personally done the work themselves and come out the other side.
I ran my handcrafted gothic-burlesque jewelry and accessories brand online for 8 years. Then I became a social media manager for the next 9 years, working strictly for online business clients who had high-converting sales funnels.
I'm now a marketing educator offering marketing audits and mentoring.
So my advice comes from both my personal and professional experience in the online marketing trenches. My goal is to save YOU time, money, and sanity so that you can become self-employed fast AF. Profitable sooner than later. And all while doing what it is you LOVE to do: make handmade products.
So let's quickly cover some of the basic burning questions you may have...
What's the best site to sell handmade items?
The best site is YOUR OWN DAMN SITE.
All the other marketplaces, like Etsy in the US or MadeIt in Australia, are your marketing spokes.
Treat their fees like marketing ads. Your goal with being on those platforms is to attract the people who have never heard of you or seen your creations and get them into YOUR world. Returning to YOUR SITE. Not back to your Etsy shop.
Usually, there are restrictions against sharing your website links in any emails. So you do it through what you send in the packaging. Slip a promotional card or brochure into the packaging with a thank-you note and an incentive for them to go to YOUR WEBSITE. Like a coupon code or discount, or a free gift.
And then you ALWAYS want to have an amazing, BEAUTIFUL website with premium branding.
That's so much more important for handmade product sellers than service sites. Plumbers and roof tilers can have basic AF, very pragmatic sites, but you?
You need captivating.
Especially if what you're selling is more of a want than a need. More of a luxury than a solution to a problem.
So your site needs to be on something like Shopify. Shopify is
Or if you can't afford Shopify, start it on Systeme for FREE! They are way cheaper than Shopify, and they have everything you need to market TF out of your site; it's an all-in-one sales funnel site.
What's a sales funnel? A sales funnel is the golden brick road your customer walks when they first see your product, to when they are referring their friends back to your shop.
It's the software you need to build the 5 essential foundations of marketing that I'm about to teach you.
What handmade item sells the most online?
The handmade item that sells the most online is the one that is marketed the best.
It's the one that was listed using SEO and AIO/GEO to see what people were searching for, first of all. It has professional branding, transformative sales messaging, and a powerful traffic strategy.
When you're a Marketician, you always know what's selling best on every site.
You know how to scope out your competition, outspend them on ads, and make damn sure every customer you create is going to come back to YOU if they need what you're selling again!
You can become an EXPERT at knowing what is selling the most online. It's just a matter of reading the data available to you on sites like Everbee for Etsy. Or Google Trends.
This is what I teach people how to do!
What's the hottest-selling craft right now?
The hottest-selling craft is the craft that's marketed in the hottest way.
Did you know there is a guy who put WATER in cans and made it into a $1.4 BILLION DOLLAR company??? Water. FN WATER!!!
His thinking was, ''Why should junk food brands and energy drinks have all the FUN? Let's put WATER into cans and sell them like energy drinks?''
And abracadabra, Liquid Death was born. The coolest fn water available on the market. They are having more FUN selling water than most amusement parks or toy companies are having. Their social media posts are insane. Just bonkers mad. You see? Marketing can be SO much fun, you just gotta think outside the BOX!
It's never WHAT you sell.
It's HOW YOU SELL IT!
That's your marketing magic.
Your sales skills as a Marketician!
Where to sell handmade online in Australia?
On your own damn site. ON. YOUR. OWN. DAMN. SITE!
If you want your creative business to support your lifestyle, you can't build your headquarters on competition-saturated enemy territory.
Online marketplaces, social media, hell, even Google now, they can and do screw business owners over all the time. With simple changes in an algorithm or AI mistakes.
You make a beautiful shop with professional branding, and you do Australia-based SEO research to see what Australians are searching for online.
Then you create SEO-optimized listings for Google, AI, AND social media (because that's a huge thing now - every Threads and Instagram post you create could show up in a search result if you're savvy with it!).
Same deal for the US, Canada, the UK, everywhere else in the world. If you want to know where to sell in your country, it's anywhere that you can get your WORDS to work like WITCHCRAFT to attract exactly the people who are typing those words in.
So you can SELL direct from an Instagram account now.
You can SELL from a Madeit shop, or a free website like Systeme, or a fancy one like Shopify, or through any other online site.
It's NOT about the site, lovely guts! It's about the SEO keywords you use to describe your products.
They just have to cut through the internet to create that golden road between your buyer and your bank account!
The Absolute Biggest Mistake You Can Make When You Are Selling Handmade Products Online
Back when Hexotica was an Etsy, eBay, and Shopify e-commerce business (which is how I started out!), I made one CRITICAL mistake that I now make DAMN sure anyone who works with me does not make.
I assumed email marketing was hard, boring, complicated, and not as important as blogging or social media.
So I did not build my email list.
Now, what happened is that I spent 8 years selling my handmade crafts, always on the front-end: online sites and alternative markets. That worked.
But it's what we Marketicians call a dangerously unoptimized, hard AF business model.
You always have to keep listing, keep fighting for SEO rankings, keep spending every weekend at craft markets...
It's a lot of hustle.
But there was always a better way to make sales with LESS HUSTLE for way MORE RETURN...
Come a little closer so you can hear me now....EMAIL!
EMAIL MARKETING IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ONLINE MARKETING.
Yes, even in 2026. Even if YOU do not ever open any emails yourself, and YOU have 50 million unread ones piling up in your inbox.
Lots of OTHER people are still opening, still reading, and still BUYING from emails.
Email marketing works. And you cannot run an online business WITHOUT a strong email marketing game!
So why not make it FUN for yourself and learn how to do it right?
For a quick training on how to do email, check out Email Marketing VS Newsletter: Simple Explanation for Creatives Who Don’t Do Boring Biz Jargon.
You make more money when you have BOTH a strong front-end and backend marketing game.
SEO and AIO/GEO keywords alongside premium, professional branding to scoop up followers and buyers into email.
Then, automated emails with sales funnel systems, transformative messaging, and never-ending sequences to nail the sales in the backend. Zero competition, and no stress that a single algorithm change is going to topple the whole business overnight.
YOU own your beautiful website and your beautiful email newsletter.
And you make it FUN!
This is where I can help you out...
Here are a few tips for selling handmade products online that I won't allow you to leave this page without reading...
So, as I promised before, there are 5 essential marketing foundations that you need to build to make your online marketing WORK:
- Attraction - your signature systems of branding, messaging, and your offers (the things you sell)
- Interest - your walkaway workflows of content creation on a weekly or monthly cyclical basis
- Conversion - the system that turns your traffic into subscribers and buyers
- Retention - all the ways to keep people coming back into your world with killer experiences.
- Advocacy - the system that's mostly out of your hands, as it's the word-of-mouth reputation that buzzes along after you've taken good care of the first four foundations
When you build each of these foundations well, you'll save yourself a LOT of time and money otherwise spent on social media posts or paid ads that do not convert into sales.
Strategy and well-designed marketing foundations are the cornerstones of crafting a highly profitable creative business.
Would you like to know how well you've built each foundation so far? Or get the lowdown on how to make each one work even better?
That's exactly how I can help you with my S.W.A.N. Audit and Treasure Map.
With the audit, you'll learn what IS working, what is NOT, and where the hidden ''treasure' may be within what you're already doing (that you should do more of!)
You'll finally have the clarity and confidence you need to make a highly profitable, brand online! And you'll also learn about the S.W.A.N. Transformation Marketing Strategy.
S.W.A.N. stands for:
- Signature Systems
- Walkway Workflows
- Analytical Amplification
- and Ninja Networking
It's my 4-part framework for helping your online business go from crafty hobby to premium online brand.
Not ready to get an audit just yet because you've only just started selling handmade products online?
No worries!
Sign up for my FREE S.W.A.N. Transformation Marketing Strategy Guidebook to learn all the steps you need to know to start and grow an online business! 👇
