593. The 7 Best Places to Sell Your Products Right Now

When I started my product business and I launched my website right, I paid all the money, got a website created, launched it and thought if I build it, they will come. And nobody came. Hi, I'm Jacqueline Snyder and this is the Product Boss podcast. I've helped launch and grow thousands of product based businesses, even one of my own. And over the last 20 years, I've seen behind the scenes of businesses just like yours. Whether they are makers, manufacturers, artists, or food and beverage businesses. I have spent so many hours studying it all. I've discovered what makes them successful, what are mistakes they could avoid, how did they turn an idea into successful business? And what are strategies they have used to make more sales and be discovered by more customers. This is what this show is all about. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to become a million dollar product boss, or I'm here to give you the permission to chase your dreams no matter how big or small. All you need is the right mindset, a little courage, strategy and support and you too can be the next million dollar product boss. Let's do this. Hey, hey, Product Boss, welcome back. It's Jacqueline. I am so excited to dive into this exciting episode. Okay, so I can't tell you how often I get asked by people, I have this product, I have this idea, what should I do? How do I sell it, right? We come up with these amazing ideas or we get inspired and we're like, I can make that or I can sell that product. And then a lot of times we're not sure, then we're like, we find the easiest way forward. So I'll say that I'm grateful for, but that a lot of people do go on a site like Etsy, for example. Because Etsy is a sales platform, they do the majority of the marketing for people to know about Etsy, that they can shop on Etsy, right? Etsy does that marketing. They bring the customers to the platform and then you are responsible for getting people to discover you on that platform. Right? But they handle the transactions. They handle so many things on there. If you know my story, with my mom as a maker and as an artist and growing up, that was the game changer for her where she would sell to friends and family. She would go and do like little in person pop up markets, usually at like a church or temple during the holidays. But, but that was it, right? And she always was so afraid. She's like, I don't know how, like get a check from them, how do I pay my taxes? Like she always had These questions, and she had to figure it out on her own. And so a platform like Etsy kind of handles it for you, right? But here's the deal. When you sell on a platform like that, you're selling on borrowed land. Because we know and you know that if you've ever sold on a platform like that or something ever went wrong, a customer can complain. Someone can say, actually, this happened to one of my mom's bestsellers where someone was like, oh, it's a copyright infringement. It was a company from the uk and I looked up the product and I had nothing to do with it. But platforms like that oftentimes don't necessarily protect the seller or the shop as much as they do the other side. Super frustrating, right? I know people who have had stores shut down, had best listings removed, right? It's scary. And I don't want you to have all your eggs in one basket, you know, and then we can think about other ways that people sell. If you have a brick and mortar and you are relying on foot traffic, right? People to discover you and walk through the door, so much of where you are on a street or in a town, and word of mouth gets people into your store. Or maybe you're like me when I started my product business and I launched my website, right? I paid all the money, got a website created, launched it and thought, if I build it, they will come. And nobody came. And I did not know how to get people to discover me on the Internet. They didn't know to look for my company. Or maybe in the new way people are up on social media, like we start social media accounts and we're trying to get people to know about us and know about our brand and, you know, engage with us and sh. All the things. And then it's like, same thing. It's a little bit crickety, a little bit crickety. So it's really frustrating. I get it. And what I know, like, the biggest changeover for me, the thing that was, like, went from trickles, like very trickly trickles. I've got the words today, don't I? Just tiny drops of water coming out. If you imagine like a faucet that's, like closed, but it's got a little bit of a leak. That was like my sales, right? Just a drip, drip, drip, long pause, drip. I needed that faucet to turn on. I wanted to hear the waterfall, right? That's what I wanted my company to do. I was in it. I had invested into it. I invested my money, my time. Like, I had Limited resources, this thing's gotta work. Am I right? And so that's when I started thinking about, how can I sell my product and where can I sell my product? Where the customers are. That is such a big part of, like, where are customers built in? Because they were not built into the Internet. For me, when I had started my business, there was no social media in the way that it is now, in the way of using it for. For product discovery and marketing and all the things, right? We were still just following each other and saying, like, oh, look at that cute picture of your baby or your dog or your vacation or your food. So what I wanted to put together for you here were the seven best places to sell your products right now. Where can we get up and start to sell? And this is what I discovered in my business when I launched it. And I was like, okay, I built the website. It's there. But what do I do? Like, how do I start to make money? How do I start to make my initial $20,000 investment back and then build this business to the dream that I had in my brain? I remember doing a little quasi business plan, and I had calculated that if I sold 7,500 cuffs, I'd make a million dollars. That was my number. I was like, oh, 7,500 doesn't seem that hard. It does when nobody is buying from you. But in my head, I was like, oh, that's only 7,000 ish cuffs. I could do that. It was that silly naivete. I looked at it and I said that. But then I was like, nobody's buying. Where do I go? How do I sell? I really needed to discover what was the best way for my business. Let's jump in and talk about it. The first sales channel to sell your products right now. And while I say that and having an e commerce site was hard for me, I. I also believe that it's essential. So why do I believe that it's essential? So the first place to sell would be by having your own website. Why? Because you own that website. Imagine it being your own little piece of land on the Internet. Imagine Main street usa, or Main street wherever. You live in this world, and it's the store that's there, right? This is your little bit of real estate. This is your shop that people can come shop from. It's something that people can't take away from you. God forbid it ever gets hacked. But despite that, you have the URL, right? Like, this is your website, this is your store. So when you meet people, you have a place to send them to shop from you. You get to develop your brand, you really get to stand out amongst the competition, right? You get to create this virtual place for people to buy. You get to charge what you want to charge, you get to run promotions and it's a place of discoverability. So imagine you're out with somebody and you know, you're wearing a bag that you made and someone comes up to you like oh my God, that's so cute, where'd you get it? And you're like, oh this is mine. I make bags like this or I sell bags like this. Oh wow, where can I get it? You know you'd be like, well you can go to Etsy and find me. And this is my. It's so hard to find shops on Etsy. I can't even tell you. Like I don't know if they've improved that site but if I was like to type in your name, do I find it? Or you could be like, well you can go on Amazon or you can, I don't know, find me at the local market on Saturday, like you have all these things. Or you could say, you know, go to myshop.com Here it is. Oh cool. Thank you for sharing that with me. Oh amazing. You know, and be like, hey, I can give you a friends and family discount. Like use this code. So easy. You can have coupon codes, you can reference people to it, you can drive traffic there and you can build your email list on your own e commerce site which is another core fundamental thing that I truly believe that you need as a product based business, really any business, because what are the things you own? You own your email list and you own your website that can't be taken away from you. Meta can go down, TikTok can disappear from the States, like all of social can disappear. But if you have an email list and if you have a website, you got something there, right? So I like to think of it as like the foundation, as my like security, as my safety net. By having these things there may be right now it's not transacting the way I want it to do, but I plan on building a money making machine, right? I plan on getting multiple sales channels and then long term this like momentum will build and then people will start to buy from me. And that's exactly what happened for me with my brand. I had the website but I didn't have the customers so I had to go to where the customers were. So let's go to what I did next. Okay, so first Place to sell, place that you want your products up on is having an E comm site. Now I'll just tell you really quick. I love Shopify. I love Shopify. And if you go to the productboss.com shopify, we actually have a link for a free trial for you if you're like, hey, I want to go discover there are so many platforms out there that you can be on. But the reason I really like Shopify and I'm going to double down on this is because it's built to grow with you. It has like so super user friendly templates that are meant for E commerce. The email platform that I love collaborates really well with it. It's got so many extensions and apps like the multi, multi, multi million dollar product businesses that I know are on there as well as startups. We've had meetings with Shopify, they've been on the podcast. I remember them saying like, and this is how I started my business. I had to do coding and I had to like get a, an E commerce like cart, like a shopping cart and attach it to another type of website. I think I use like 3D. Cart was the company that I used. I had to code, I had to get designers. It was a whole thing. So you get to override all of that with using a tool like Shopify because they are the number one for E comm. So I'll drop that link down below, but that's there for you if you want it. All right, so the second place that I would recommend or like an easy place, a place for you to get feedback right away, if that's something you're looking for, is to jump to in person, in person markets. Now there are a lot of you listening that you're like, I do them and they are exhausting. I get it. But what you're doing to start is not what you're going to do forever. I just want to put that out there. And one of the fastest ways that I've ever had feedback, I've been able to pay attention and understand what people want, what they desire, what they like, what they don't like to get in a conversation was at in person markets. So what I did when I had my brand is I started going to shows like Unique LA or the Rose bowl flea market. There was like downtown art fairs that you could get a booth. So that's what I did. I was like, where can I go? Listen, my parents used to sell denim and jewelry back when they immigrated to America at flea markets here in la. So I am just repeating, repeating it. Right. I have no problem with it. I love the energy of in person. Now, if it's every day of every weekend and my whole business relies on it, that gets to be a lot. And there's other ways to solve for that. But if you're looking for direct feedback, if you have a product and you're not selling and you have a website, because guess what, you go, people walk up, you get in a conversation, they start to discover the product, you start to see what people are leaning towards and what they want. Right now you're starting to get information of, like, what's your best seller or developing what you're known for. And my friend, hot tip, you better be building your email list when you meet real people in real life, because when they walk away from your booth or your table or your display, they're gone. Poof. Forever. I don't care if they're following you on Instagram or on TikTok, because guess what? They have to engage with your content for the algorithm to show it. So they're not going to find you. So many times I'll like, screen grab or do a little bookmark save. Because I'm like, I want to come back to this and I know it's just going to disappear into my algorithm. And so do me a favor and do you a favor and do them a favor by collecting email addresses. And part of what I teach inside of our signature program Multi Stream machine is how to grow your email list and then what emails to send. But this is like just so crucial. I need to say it to you here because I can't tell you how many people I'm like, do you have an email list? No, I haven't started it yet. Right. Or are you emailing? No, because I don't like getting emails, so I don't email people. Now, this is a whole other podcast episode, so just ignore this side tangent. But I hope you're getting what I'm laying down here, which is getting in front of other people, other people's audiences, and then capturing their information so that you can contact them and market to them. Because if you do not contact them and market to them, you're not going to sell, you're not going to make sales. Right. And the whole point here is that we're making products that we want to sell. So that would be my first place I would be doing in person, direct to consumer, to the general customer. All right, product boss, I have a serious question. Does it ever feel like you've Tried everything and you still aren't making the sales you want to be. Or maybe you've poured countless hours, days and nights, there's been tears into your product biz and you're starting to think that maybe you're just bad at business. I mean, trust me, I have literally been there. So I'm here to tell you that you aren't bad at business and that selling your products doesn't have to feel this hard. So what I've seen from coaching thousands and thousands of product based business owners like you is that they just don't know how to get their products in front of more customers to make more sales. And listen, I get it because I used to have that exact same issue with my product biz until I figured out the one thing that took my business from one or two sales every two weeks to people I knew camera to making six figures in my first year of business. That's right. I was able to take a piece of fabric that I folded over three times and turn it into a six figure international success which was worn by countless celebrities all in just one year. And the best part is that I did it without spending a single cent on ads or having an audience or a following or an email list to sell to. Now listen, I want this for you too. Which is why I'm sharing my secrets so you can learn how to turn your product based business into a money making machine that provides the stability and financial security that you're looking for. And it's all happening inside of my free masterclass, the three part framework to building a consistent, profitable, revenue generating product based business in 2024. So if you're ready to get clarity, get profitable and take that next step, all you need to do is head over to the productboss.com/framework to save your spot. Again, that's the productboss.com framework. Or you can just click the link in the show notes and I'll see you inside. All right, now back to the show. The next thing that I did that I would recommend to you too is wholesale. And I love wholesale. And there's two ways that people are doing wholesale right now. One, and I know a lot of you are probably doing this, you might be on the website fair like fair.com or my good friend Ali Krigsman. She's a co founder of Bulletin Co. Both are places that are different than how when I was running my business where I would either contact the stores directly or I had a sales rep or a rep group or a road rep that represented my brand and would go around the country, you know, we had one in Japan and then they would get me orders, like wholesale orders. So there is that kind of wholesale and then there's fear.com, which like it basically cut out the middleman so cut out the rep and allowed retailers to discover brands through a website. Now the feedback that I've heard recently and listen I'm all in for tools and ways to help but again it goes back to exactly what I said about Etsy. I do not want all your eggs in one basket. So. So I know a lot of you are on fair or getting on fair and some of you find it to be working well, some of you have had issues with it. There's like different things in it that maybe like you're dealing with like the learning curve or when they make returns. There's just stuff that's not as typical in wholesale that is happening on these platforms because these platforms are trying to problem solve for the retailers and problem solve for the sellers like the brands. But there's gaps in it in a lot of ways and sometimes I believe and I've heard that the quality of the buyer on sites like these is maybe not as great because they could just be a random person, they could be another like small business like us that we're just trying to figure it out and they're buying from you online. So you know it's, it is what it is and it's a tool. So I would only have fair and bulletin as a tool in my tool belt as one sales channel or platform to be discovered on. But what I love and truly believe in is wholesale, wholesale, regular wholesale and when I say regular wholesale for those of you out there that are like I didn't know you could do wholesale outside of fair, which I know is bonkers, but that's how much it's like come into the zeitgeist of product people is the way I teach how to do wholesale. And I teach this step by step inside of multi stream machine where it's like how do you create a store list? How do you discover stores to sell to? Where would you sell? How do you find their information? How do you find out who the buyers are and then how do you contact them? What do they need to see to potentially enter into a relationship with you and then how do they buy from you? And you can go two ways, right? Like you can go through the method that I teach and then send people to fair to transact and then you're not paying Any commission, or you can do it totally off a site like that, which is like the old school way of processing transactions and taking purchase orders and all the things. And then the other way that you can do wholesale. So I did wholesale in two ways. First, I did wholesale with finding a sales rep. I went knocking on doors at showrooms. I think fair is kind of. And the pandemic has kind of shifted the market again. But in downtown la, I went to the fashion area. I went into the fashion buildings with where the different showrooms were, and I knocked on doors and I was like, hey, I've got a brand and I'm looking for a repair. And that's how I got my first rep. And I went through several different reps. And representatives of your brand do take commission, and that's great. And that's okay because that's how they get paid. And when they get commission, they are driven to make more sales for you. Who would give $1,500 for every $100,000 someone made you? Nope. $15,000. My husband was laughing at me. I was like, babe, do you know how much I have to use my calculator for, like, easy numbers? I was like, yeah, I'm doing it on, like, podcasts and I'm doing it live. And I'm like, my brain is going faster than the numbers can calculate. I should really just look at my calculator and do that before. But I'm free flow thought here, so you know what I'm saying? Like ten thousand dollars for fifteen hundred? Yes. A hundred thousand dollars for fifteen thousand? Yes. So the way I first started was I had a sales rep and a showroom, and they went on the road, they contacted stores, they did wholesale trade shows and all that. And then I did it myself. So that is one of the places to sell. So I said wholesale. And it could be an online sort of thing where you're contacting them online and you're doing it like just picking up the phone and calling. The other way to do this is in person, but B2B. So shows like New York, now Coterie, if you do the Atlanta market, Dallas market, there's a market in Nashville, I think, or in Tennessee, there are different markets that buyers will go to and you pay a booth fee, and at that booth, you will then make sales, hopefully. And I recommend to you, and this is something that a major sales rep had also recommended to our students, was sometimes before you make the investment into the show, because they can be quite costly, you could go and walk the show first so you can go to an event, you can go to a show as a guest, walk around and see if it's got the vibe, talk to people, say like would you recommend the show? And then you can choose to do the next one. So, so that would be another in person selling wholesale business to business. Okay, so let's talk about another place to sell your products right now. So I've covered E comm, I've covered in person direct to consumer, wholesale, online and then wholesale in person. Another place to sell would be Amazon. Amazon has a built in customer base. It's insane. I think one in four households in America have Amazon Prime. Obviously if you're listening around the world depending on if Amazon functions well like you know, like in the UK or in Canada, you know Amazon's a little bit different than in America where we get everything delivered every day, all the time via Amazon. And that's also another way that if you are overseas, like I coached one of our students, our multi stream machine students on this. She's, she was selling cosmetics out of Australia and she wanted to get into the US market and I said well why don't you get on Amazon in the US and all she has to do is ship from Australia to the fulfillment centers in at Amazon and then Amazon will do the distribution for her so she doesn't have to ship every order. Right, same thing with someone in the uk. She also, she was making products for chiropractors and same thing she wanted to enter the US market actually in Canada too. And so Amazon was the way to enter the US market where they could make it available to people in the US because Amazon is such a strong marketplace for us here and that they didn't have to deal with individual sales to individuals and dealing with like import and export and all the things. And then if you, wherever you are, if you want to sell to the Amazon in your country, what's cool is that it has a built in customer base. People go to Amazon to search things. They go on and they type in, I'm looking for, I don't know what I just bought my husband like shibs, things that like balance out like a platform obviously books, clothes, shoes, like my daughter just got running shoes on Amazon, all sorts of things. I get this like rosemary oil on Amazon. So people are buying stuff on there. So that is a great platform to get onto. And yes my friend, every single one of these platforms most likely will have a fee associated but that's the cost of doing business. And then the other fear that you might be having about a platform like Amazon is, people are going to copy me or knock me off. They're only ever going to copy you if you're really, really, really successful. That's part one, part two. If you are really, really, really successful, then it's your job to stay ahead. Like no matter what. If you're selling online, direct to consumer on your own website, on social media, wherever you're selling, if you get really successful, people will copy you. It's part of being in business and being successful. So don't let any of these kind of thoughts get in the way of you considering what would resonate with you and your business. Right? Like what would be a cool platform for you? I love Amazon. For people who are like, I want a little bit more of a hands off approach to my business, meaning they only have to ever deal with shipping the product into Amazon and then Amazon handles fulfillments and returns. And so you're more so doing the techie tech stuff, not the constant like customer service returns. Even marketing. Like you don't really need marketing. So front forward if you have it happening on Amazon and you're only shipping when you need to ship and restock Amazon. Okay, so I love that for that. All right, so let's dig in the last couple ones here. Social and social shops. We have a student of ours right now that sells art books and she cleared like a million dollars in 10 months on TikTok shops. Kind of bonkers. And I don't know that TikTok is right for everybody. And I think you have to know how to play the game on there and you have to know what kind of content to create. But things go viral and sales happen. And I've seen this happen for my students. I have a student that is a psychic that also sells crystals and tarot cards. She crushes it on there. So many people crush it in different ways on a platform like that. So social shops like TikTok or like Instagram where they've allowed for the integration of E Com happening on there and in fact even TikTok right now is doing live sales so you can host your own live show and sell live, which is kind of bonkers, right? Which is like QVC hsn so you could have your own show. So social shops, if that is the game you want to play, and I say game like you want to get into that and you like it and you want to learn about it and it and it's a calling to you, then that would be a place to do it. I will tell you that in all the ways I'm sharing with you right now, you also don't have to do social. I'm giving you permission to say that's not for me. And that's okay because these other ways that I'm teaching you are other ways that you can make sales. So the final one is through other people's audiences is by working with affiliates or creators. Let them do the selling for you. So you partner with affiliates or creators and then you work with them to become partners with you to sell your products. And that is a way that then again you don't have to do a lot of the marketing, you just have to do the relationship building, the relationship management, the way to reach out to them, to find the affiliates to talk to them about potentially doing it. Right now we have another student, he has a jewelry company, he sells pearls. So shout out to Brian if you're listening. And he has like this handful of affiliates. Their creators are influencers and they're affiliates to his brand and they are women that are 50 plus and he's like, they crush it, like crush, crush, crush it. Because his product, the product market fit fitting with the women that are talking about it and them being like the example to other women that are following them. They sell so many units of certain ones of his products it's unbelievable that they're his bestsellers because of these creators and affiliates. So that would be another place that you can sell. So to recap for you the places that we talked about, we've got number one E Commerce, two in person direct to consumer, three wholesale, four in person business to business wholesale, five Amazon, six social shops and seven affiliates and creators. So if this was helpful to you to be like, huh, I'm interested, right? Right now maybe you're only selling on one sales channel and maybe it's working, maybe it's not. Maybe you're afraid that all your eggs are in one basket and if something happens, what will happen to your business? And so if this sounds like something that's so great for you, I'd want to invite you to something that is super exciting that we're doing over here at the Product boss and we are actually hosting a free training. It's a brand new training, you have never seen it before. So if you've been in my trainings, you've never been. And it's called the three part framework to building a consistent profitable re revenue generating product business in 2024. So what I'm going to do is we're going to go over these sales channels and we're going to talk about how do we get your business to turn into a money making machine and we're going to talk about how you can get more visible, how you can get more sales and how you can build your money making machine. And I'm going to talk all about that. So if you're like, yes, I want this and you want to come join me inside, I'd love to invite you in. It's totally free and totally brand new, so all you have to do is go to theproductboss.com framework and get all signed up and I'll drop a link in the show notes to make it super easy for you. All right my friends, I'll see you in the next one. Thank you for being here and listening all the way through the Product Boss Podcast. If you love our show and it has helped you in any way in your business, would you mind doing two things for us? Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode and leave us a review. Reviews help other product entrepreneurs know that this is the place to be to grow their businesses and realize that they're not alone. And we know that you all know that a five star and honest review helps you sell more products to more people. So you know that your reviews help us reach more listeners around the world. 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