Selling products

Hand crafted items

[4css]

Eventually I would love to get some of my crafts that are in boxes in the basement online to sell.

My problem is, I have never been able to find the answer on how to price for shipping the items.

Do you give a general shipping price? Say I pick the farthest place from me and use that as a guide for the shipping price? (use that for all the items, of that weight?)

I have a scale that only goes up to 5 pounds. I doubt that anything would go over that amount, but in case it did are there reasonable priced scales out there? Do they hook into a shoping cart somehow with software that would calcualte the shipping costs? I think I would deal with usps as I have recieved their boxes for shipping.

This is something that would be a bit before I started as web design is my main goal in learning now and becoming successful at it. However, I dont wish to let go of that other creative part of me that did woodworking, florals and candles. And eventually a few oil paintings as well.

Funny how life works out though. I started learning web design in order to sell the crafts online, and totally got hooked on design. :)

[8foldpath]

Ideally, you're going to want to get the weights of all your items and just store those in a database with your other product information. Then, then it comes to checkout, use something like the UPS API to calculate shipping in real time.

However, since you said you're working with crafts, you probably are making quite a bit of margin and your items are probably very unique. You might just want to charge either 'Free-Shipping' or implement some tier based price table (Items between $50-100, Shipping = $10)..

[4css]

Hmm the tier based is pretty interesting. I suppose I need to add databases to my learning list? Is there a particular databse that is preferred?

I'm dabling a tad in php, teaching myself as i have the rest of what i know. Would php be something that would become useful with this?

Unique? Well some of it is. I have one item that is really unique. I created only one of them as a gift to a very good friend. He got the one and only (and if he wishes he can verify quality of the things I do and did do). Were there time I would get them out for christmas, but there really isn't by the time I send for the stuff to make it. It took a while to find the supplies for them since I have been out of the crafting for about 7 years.

btw thanks for your reply. I am thinking that there is going to still be a bit of learning for me as of yet with this all?

[8foldpath]

Well. now that I think about it. your easiest route would be to do a Yahoo store or similar service. This way, you could just stick to CSS and make it look great and focus more energy on creating. 'Yahoo-store' would take care of everything for you (shipping estimating etc), product listing and if you like, they offer MySQL support (which would be a database I think is good to learn). Plus, they support PHP so you'll be able to use what you're learning.

By using Yahoo, you'll get some sales for a fairly small initial investment in your concept. This seems important to me. Then build from there. There are a lot of really great ecommerce stores out there that use yahoo store. I used Yahoo for awhile and then I moved on pretty quickly but I'd still recommend this path.

[4css]

Thanks once again. Your advice is greatly appreciated!