Debrief: Finding The Right Price Meet-Up

[UPDATE] Jetzt findet ihr hier dieses Artikel auf Deutsch.

Last night 9 Munich Etsians had the first of (hopefully) many meet-ups where we gathered together to talk business! Using the Fragebogen put together by MissusD we had a fruitful and open discussion about pricing our work.

Some of our key takeaways:

• When determining your hourly rate, you need to not only factor in your hourly rate but also your costs such as insurance, marketing time, space rental, and taxes (Gewerbe, Einkommen, Mehrwert, usw.)

• Ignore what other people are charging on Etsy (or any other marketplace) and determine your price based on value and your costs
  
  
• Factors such as methods of payment may impact what people are willing to pay. For example, if you are selling your products at a fair, and only accept cash people may not be as willing to pay for an item that costs over €100, whereas if you accept EC cards, people are not limited to the amount of cash they have in their wallets
  
  
• We need to think about pricing on value, and educating customers not only about the costs of handmade, but the stories behind our products and the fact that many of our items are OOAK (one of a kind) or unique in ways that mass-produced items aren't. As one participant said: "People don't have to be rich to purchase something, they just have to fall in love with it"
  
  
• Sometimes items can be priced to cheaply, and raising the price can actually increase sales. At least two of the group participants had this experience

It was very hard to separate the discussion from other aspects of being a small business, especially marketing. We realized we definitely need more meet-ups soon around topics such as blogging, Google, social media, time management, productivity and basic business best practices. A lot of these themes are being tackled at the Hello Etsy conference in September, but we'd like to get a jump on them ahead of time!