Lessons

Lesson Info

Wholesale

At the wholesale uh this was invaded in twenty fourth and twenty thirteen as of twenty fourteen they went out of beta which means that if you want to join etsy hole so you have to pay them one hundred dollars fee upfront um after that it's just the sort of normal transaction the stuff um I got in free during the beta there are stats I'm sorry there are not stats for wholesale yet there are on ly stats for the retail shop through etc s o u you can't really find much out I've heard people say that you can kind of deduce some things about your wholesale shop through the web analytics through google but it's not specifically separated out so it seems like it's really hard to track any wholesale stats at the moment um I joined aa almost a year ago now um during the beta uh and I put together my my wholesale shop I've had a couple of enquiries but no sales through this uh I know other people who have sold like gangbusters through etc wholesale um I have not and I think that that's uh mostly ...

due to the fact that uh I do not make these products myself anymore I have outside manufacturing help and etc allows that now um so I thought well deck I'll put him up on there we'll see what happens it was the beta it didn't cost me anything uh but it turned out not to be useful or profitable to me it's a closed system s o you yourself if you have a net see wholesale shop can send out a link that anyone can use to view your store but otherwise people need toe have been approved like buyer's account retailer account in orderto access etsy wholesale so this is not available to the general public unless I send them a link um specifically and the reason for that is that it shows the wholesale prices in addition to the retail price so the retail price is the one of the top forty dollars wholesale is typically half of your of your retail eso it's twenty dollars here seventeen fifty etcetera etcetera um and the reason that if he does not want wholesale prices to be available to the general public is because among other things uh it shows customers but you can still make a profit selling this for twenty dollars as opposed to forty dollars and then so then customers are like well then why are you charging me forty dollars when you only need to be making twenty dollars to be profitable? Um they want to pay the wholesale price even though they themselves are not retailers um so this keeps all of your wholesale prices uh private um I'm showing them just for the sake of this now it keeps people from buying for me that's fine whatever uh I don't think it's a secret the wholesale prices are half of retail prices maybe that is to some people probably not to anyone watching today who has an actual creative business um but this keeps them secret from the general public without you having to set up a new items so you can just take a retail item you have and add it to your wholesale line sheet and then it becomes something that's available for wholesale and it doesn't automatically take your whole shop and then make it available for wholesale you choose specifically I want to sell these things on ly wholesale I want to sell these things on ly retail I want to sell them in both places um and initially I thought well ok also everything wholesale right? Why not? Um but then I realized that when I went to the main wholesale page where they will show three items per shop that it looked really scattered and inconsistent it was like, you know, one plush toy and then a set of buttons and then a print and it was like, who is this woman like? What does she do like she's just some rando making stuff uh with no riel aesthetic unifying her she doesn't make just one type of product I mean it was a mess it was ah whole mess um so then I decided to just put the plush in there with the buttons down at the bottom so that when it shows uh the little sort of summary of my wholesale shop at least it looks like oh she's a plush designer I'm looking for that or I'm not not like I'm not going to dig through there and see if there's something that maybe I can carry in my shop um that's more work than any buyer wants to dio so um I would say going wholesale is on ly worth it if first of all you really can afford to receive the wholesale price for things um if the wholesale price is not profitable than you cannot have this in your wholesale line sheet and if none of your products are profitable at the wholesale price you should not have a net see wholesale shop um and secondly if the things that you wholesale are consistent so I have the plush design I have these buttons and then I have a bunch of these prints of you know, various drawings or props that I've made um they're all sort of very different and um you know, if you pick just a few from each category and stickem altogether and they don't have some other aesthetic unifying them it just looks like a mess and nobody's going to participate in that um so if I had plush toys and buttons and prince and they all had the same kind of illustration on them like um you know you're an illustrator so you have cars and you have prince and you have comic books and if you decided to you know like turn one of your characters into a plush toy if you decided to put them on buttons than that would make total sense as a cohesive wholesale collection um but this does not think this was just a hot mess uh so you need to think very carefully um about etc wholesale in particular question yes yeah there's actually take the same like commissions out of whole cells they dio when we sell retail yes, I believe they do ok, I have to double check that because I myself have not had any sales on here so I did look it up it some point um but let me let me go back and look at that again. Um you don't well yeah, so under the the etc wholesale you'll have sort of four sections um you've got purchase orders and I want to talk about that from a bookkeeping standpoint. First of all, um what is a purchase order aah! Purchase order is somebody promising to buy something from you or wanting requesting to buy something from u s o when they put in a purchase order you on ly have this at the wholesale level when somebody puts in a purchase order you don't put it in as sales or income yet because a purchase order has to be approved by you the seller um because when it comes to wholesale there are lots of rules and considerations that are involved, so for example maybe they want to order, you know, a thousand of each of these I don't have a thousand I can't fulfill that purchase order so I don't approve it or I have minimum quantities set up maybe you can on ly get the wholesale price if you're ordering three or more ten or more of each of these different items and they only want one of each well then maybe it's not worth it for me to charge the wholesale price and then you know, pack it up and ship it out so I don't approve that purchase order either. Um once the purchase order is approved by you, then the buyer gets invoiced via etc and that's when you enter it into your ledger as income that's when you count it as an invoice is when that purchase order gets approved and the invoices sent to the buyer via etc wholesale that's when you'll enter it in as sales in your income spreadsheet um this is the line sheet organizer um this basically lets you move things up or down in order of priority if you have lots and lots of different products and you want to organize them into smaller collections you can create a collection here, which is a lot like the categories feature in a retail shop um I don't really have enough to create collections like I said it's a little bit of a mess um I just did it you know, for a goof to see what would happen would this actually be great? Um and then you've got your wholesale profile, which again I'm not going to go into that's more like the banner and you know, the story of you and your shop and how you make things and where you live and blood of luck uh and then the wholesale policies, which I do want to look at because I mentioned them a little bit earlier when we talked about the shop policies, so as part of the bonus materials for this class, there are some sample shot policies they include both the retail shop policies and wholesale policies and they're a little bit different from retail ah, because they include things like payment terms, how long someone has to pay you after they order in a retail shop soon as somebody orders they pay you either through the direct check out or the papal it doesn't typically take them very long um although I have in my retail shop policies to like if it takes you longer than I don't know what it is two weeks to pay for an order I cancel the transaction I re listed because clearly you weren't serious or you died or something um this is typically much longer ah with retailers eso my payment terms are such that and it's a little hard to see but um if you're a first time buyer from me your payment has to clear before I send you anything because I don't know you from adam I have no idea if you pay on time I don't know anything about your shot I don't know what your credit history is like s o for first time buyers they need to pay up front before they receive anything if you're then uh ordering a re up if you're placing a re order then you can get you can apply you can ask me for net thirty terms and net thirty just means um thirty days after the date that the's worshipped some retailers will ask for net sixty the really big retailers you know like anthropology or target or whatever well typically be anywhere from like net sixty two met ninety I've heard of one instance of net one hundred and twenty days after they've gotten the products that they will pay you um and that's really a symptom of uh them having these huge complicated accounting department's uh more than anything else so they'll typically have like sold out of all your product months before they ever pay you for them so they've gotten that money um anyway, I also have been here that if an order is cancelled after its ship it's the buyer's responsibility to return the canceled items unopened at their own expense so the order something for me and then you cancel it and I've already sent it to you I'm not eating that shipping cost you got to send that back to me and they had better be in the same state that I found them um so other things that are included in here so I've I'm showing you the payment terms and the payment methods but there's also policies about shipping method and cost if somebody buys something from you wholesale do you cover the shipping? Do they cover the shipping? How long does it take for you to ship things out to them? What method do you typically use? Um what happens if things get damaged in shipping? Um are their minimums do you do consignment? I typically don't do consignment through etc wholesale um I have done consignment with a couple of like very local shops where I know the owners and I trust them to send me money on time because consignment is very hard to track um you have to know how many of each product you've sent to this consignment shop and then you have to keep track of how often they're supposed to be sending you statements and bills in sarah statements and checks so you have to know well, this shop is supposed to tell me every quarter this shop is supposed to tell me every week this shop is supposed to tell me every month um this shop does it every two months and then follow up with them if they haven't sent you the materials that they're supposed to um that's just too much headache for may I can't keep track of all of that so unless it's a very local very responsible shop, I typically don't do consign that but I know a lot of people who have businesses that are almost exclusively sold on consignment and that's perfectly fine umm it's just sort of a cost of doing business so I wanted tio show you what a sample purchase order looks like. Like I said, I have not received the purchase or decide to take this from etsy's website where they show you how it's a wholesale works. So this is like a sample purchase order from a sort of vintage g looking goods company and this is a company that sells all different kinds of things they sell clearly jewelry um some sort of weird souvenir I don't know it's like a pigeon tag and like a pigeon feather in a glass bottles he's really gross and like probably unhygienic um this wouldn't key necklace and then a candle holder so they sell a bunch of different, really brandon things, but their branding in their aesthetic is all very consistent, right? The styling is all the same, the lighting is the same, the colors are very consistent. So this works as a collection, even though it's a lot of different items. So this looks a lot like an order form. You've got your quantity, you've got your unit price and then your total and it all adds up at the bottom. And, um, so this right now we have under canceled orders, but maybe this would be under open invoices. Maybe this is accepted. So when it's a new purchase order that somebody sends into you, a buyer sends in it's under new. Once you've accepted it, it goes under here. Then they get sent an invoice by etc and that's in open invoices until it gets paid. And then it's under completed. And if it gets canceled because they didn't pay or you didn't approve it or whatever that it ends up in the cancel orders.