SW Iowa | hobbyfarmer2014 - 9/21/2020 20:11
I am thinking about trying to sell a product, but I don't know how much to buy/produce because I don't know how much could/would sell. How could I check the market? Do I just produce a little bit and see what happens? I can only produce this once a year.
It's hard to offer great advice without any idea what sort of product you're talking about and what sort of potential market you're looking at (general vs specialized product, low price / high volume or high price / low volume, local/regional/nationwide audience, perishable/nonperishable, etc). But here are a couple thoughts/ideas.
1) If you're willing to throw some money at advertising, you can set up ads on search engines and/or social media platforms and see what sort of clickthrough rates you get. Write the ad as if the product exists and if they click have it send them to a "coming soon" contact form so you can try to collect their info. If you want, you can get more sophisticated and test different ad copy and see how that affects clickthrough rate to get some insights on what selling points (or prices) people find compelling.
2) Offer special pricing for pre-orders (or putting down a deposit on an order) and try to have some portion of production sold before you pull the trigger, or at least before you decide how much to produce.
2b) Depending on the nature of what you're selling, you may be able to do a campaign on Kickstarter or another similar platform to generate sales ahead of production, also. Definite pros and cons... and as I understand there is some strategy to making one of these deals successful, so do your research if you consider this.
Getting set up to ship is basically as simple as signing up for an account online with whatever service you want to use, plugging in address info, and printing off labels. Depending on what order volume you anticipate could be attainable, I might give some thought to how you want to accept orders/payment to make shipping as easy as possible. For example, you can generate shipping labels directly within PayPal (and if you think you're going to ship USPS, get better rates / different services that are not publicly available through USPS website directly)... I would guess their competitors have something similar, or you can get into webstore platforms where the sky is the limit as far as integration. |
Selling a value added product
