Things to help small volume sellers

@ryanteck I was going to send this to you as a PM but thought it would be interesting to open the floor. You had mentioned that most people are making/selling as a hobby. I was looking at the data, and found some interesting results-

For sellers with at least 1 order:

• All time- Median is 5 orders
• If you look at new products in 2014, the median is
  up to 12 orders (moving in the right direction)

@ryanteck you are right, majority are in the small volume range. For those products with 12 or more orders, they have gotten at least 1 order within the first 7 days. So as a cue for long term success, if you get an order in the first 7 days, you are on the right track.

So we’re thinking of ways to help sellers get that first order within 7 days. Also how can we help sellers go from 5 to 12 to 24 orders.

With that, what could we do to help successful sellers? Does that mean helping with inventory? have a solution for fulfillment? I’m interested to hear your thoughts as there are 3 groups as we see it:

Getting started - Sellers that have 0 sales
Growing - Small volume to larger #s
Scaling - Successful but going from 1k+ to 10k+

I’m not really sure. I would say I’m in the Growing stage. I get around 2-3 orders a week across Ebay, Amazon, Tindie, Shopify etc.
Its enough to keep the company running and to cover costs.

I wouldn’t say fulfilment is an issue for me, nor stock.

Do you have stats on the income sources for the top sellers?

[quote=“ryanteck, post:2, topic:594”]
income sources
[/quote] What are you looking for? Types of products, keywords, traffic, placement on the site?

Mainly how do sellers get their income. Social media, referrals, Tindie PR etc. That should then show us how to improve visits into our tindie stores.

Off this bit: Do you track abandoned carts?

We do have data on abandoned carts -

We know the overall numbers, but tracking an order to a source is tricky (but hugely valuable if we can make it accurate).

Googley analytics has nothing?

I really think the key factors are (1) do you have something people want (2) does that something get publicity widely enough to fuel interest up front and (3) it has to be the right time of year. I tend to think summer might be a dead time but I think it picks up in fall peaking in Dec and ramping back down by March.

Case studies:

1. Propeller board. Got mentioned on Hack-a-Day when there was a Kickstarter. Also SFE launched their own Prop board (mine had been in development for 3 years prior, btw) and I posted a comment about mine, later retracted because it was uncool, but all that brought in a big initial volume of sales. Demand has trickled off some. I think it’s limited demand, and limited visibility but it does ok, overall

2. ATtiny board. Had limited visibility other than from my blog, but has been in demand and is my best selling design to date because of it. I think digispark and trinket have have taken over the limelight but there’s still a niche for it

3. microSD had initial fundraiser, did ok, but not much demand. It’s convenient for what it is, but too targeted, or focused, and other solutions tend to be cheaper. Also the flip lid uSD holder may turn some away. I personally love it but, what do I know?

4. ATtiny841 board. Publicity, sorta, on Arduino forums, but not enough. And limited demand (until someone ports the Arduino core to it), so… it’s sold a few but never took off

5. TurntableStrobe was a huge hit on Audiokarma.org as I suspected it might be. The site is big so lots of publicity targeted to just the people who want/need one. Product took off pretty big initially, still selling in a reasonable trickle.

Now compare that to something like ryanteck’s Pi gear which got massive publicity from everywhere. I’m guessing that generated a pretty big initial spike.

Another factor is Tindie itself. New products can quickly come up on the radar and fall back off if the product is too niche, marketplace is too small, price is wrong, product description isn’t good enough to quickly show people what it is and what it’s good for.

To my mind, for something to take off really big and stay that way you’d need it to have publicity at the right time of year, with enough interest built up to draw in buyers in enough volume to put and keep the unit on the front page of Tindie for awhile until it goes semi-viral. I’m hoping that happens to OpenMV cam and to my PIPduino that I’ll be putting up in a few months, but we’ll see.