Selling Art Online: How many products are too much?

Another lively topic on the Etsy message boards is the subject of how many products list on your online store. Many newbie shop owners usually border on too many or too few. Shops that have too few items look bare and uninteresting and people will leave because they feel like there’s nothing to buy. Shops that have too many items are overwhelming and people may leave because they can’t make a decision on what to buy.

So this begs the golden question…how many items should you put in your online store or shop? Some artists say that you should have a least 20 items in your online store…others say at least 50…others swear that you must have a 100 or more. So who’s right?

Well, like many things…it depends.

1. What kind of items are you selling? If you’re selling paintings, then it’s a bit difficult and overwhelming to have over 100 paintings to sort through online. Not to mention that it wouldn’t be too feasible to have that many paintings in inventory. So you’ll probably want to be on the 20 item side of the equation. But what if you’re selling something like jewelry or wearable accessories? In that case, people do expect to have a wide range in choice, so you’ll probably lean toward the 30 to 50 item range.

2. How complex is your work?- If your work is very complex and your customer has to take their time in order to appreciate each piece, you can get away with having 25 or fewer items in your store. On the other hand, if people can peruse through your work fairly quickly, then you can comfortably have online inventory in the 30 to 75 item range.

3. How fast is your turnover? if you’re lucky enough to have a very active online store where you sell your items fairly quickly, you want to make sure that you have enough items so that your shop doesn’t look bare after a couple days. However, if you don’t get a lot of turnover in your store, you may want to be strategic about how many items you put out at a time so that you can regularly rotate out older items for newer inventory.

4. How fast can customers see all that you have to offer? Customers that are really into your work should be able to see what’s in your store in a reasonable amount of time. You don’t want your customers to stop looking halfway through your shop because you have too much to look at. And on the other hand you don’t want your customers to be done with your store in 30 seconds either. Generally you want customer to spend between 5 to 10 minutes going through the inventory in your online store.

5. Test it! Of course all of these things are just suggestions. The best way to figure out the right balance in your shop is to test it yourself. Add more items to your store and see how well you do. If you have a lot, trim your inventory and see what happens. A great way to measure this is to actually have a friend or customer sit down and go through your store and time how long it takes them to view the items in your store. If they’re doing in less than 2 minutes, you should think about adding more items. If they look tired before they’re done, you should really consider scaling back.

So your turn…how many items do you have on average in your shop and how did you arrive at that number? How well is this working for you?

Tagged as: ecommerce, selling art online, selling crafts, selling crafts online