Like most of us in handmade, I’m always terrified to raise prices. But lately sales are so slow I can’t see how it would hurt that much. Everything about selling costs more, from fees to shipping, to the cost of materials and yet I’ve barely budged on prices since joining. For example, my best seller since 2015 was $40, today $46. And I hemmed and hawed each time I added a buck…
I think it’s time to do some pretty big increases, like 20% ish across the board. Has anyone else done or considered big increases like this?
Yes. Most of my product is based on Silver which has increased 97% from June last year. And for those who offer “free shipping” on FBM, add the 3 postal increases we will see this year. Of course sales have tanked and off shore sellers are advertising and Hallmarking 925 Sterling Silver for Silver plated product
We are 100% FBM and do some handmade. I too think I need to increase prices a bit on some products but am not sure if raising the price on Amazon is better than just charging the customer a nominal shipping charge and see if that causes a big decrease in sales. We do free shipping on Amazon now and have let increased shipping costs eat into profit more than I would like. We probably couldn’t get a 20% increase(on Amazon) on many of our products due to competition but want to test the waters on getting away from free shipping.
I increased prices across the board by 5%. I don’t think I could go to 20%. I am looking for ways to save money in other areas, though, and to encourage the sale of higher-value items.
As a bookseller, who has offered “free” shipping since AMZ allowed professional sellers to make their own shipping templates, we’ve been increasing prices right along as USPS becomes less affordable. Increased pricing, dependent on the item, doesn’t seem to be reducing sales.
Used to be about 95% of our inventory offered free shipping w/ larger/heavier volumes charging between 4-6 bucks for shipment. The latter books NEVER sold-even when decreased pricing on the actual book. Go figure!! So we changed several years ago to 100% free shipping!! Most of those stubborn titles are now gone.
U.S. buyers( we don’t sell internationally) hunt for the words FREE SHIPPING-and don’t stop to think that someone must pay for it, Admittedly, as a consumer, I do it myself!!
This must be infuriating! I remember there was an Amazon seller who was a jewelry maven, posting often on the old Amazon seller boards, but she seems to have disappeared.
We are 100% Free Shipping FBM. When setting our price, we use the formula …
What do we need to make on the item + all handle costs + all fees + shipping costs
Because shipping costs have gone up, we have to adjust the price and usually attempt to do it just once a year. When we do the price increase, we increase the shipping to the new pricing and add $1.00 to $2.00 because we know that it will go up with the holiday shipping surcharge and then again in the following January (normally has happened in the past). We then figure out how the increase in shipping will effect the fees, the related increase, and try to do a little to offset those additional fees.
We have one competitor that we know will set their price $8.00 to $10.00 cheaper than ours but then adds on shipping. When you do the math, they will be $1.00 to $2.00 less than us. However, we offer 2 times the amount of customization then they do. So we set the pricing and let them follow our lead. It hasn’t hurt our sales (and probably not theirs), but it also means that we are never in a race to the bottom.
We have been aroung longer than the competition … so it is nice to see they are paying attention and following suite.
I set my prices based on what I need to make a profit, and I don’t pay attention to anyone else’s prices. My prices are generally higher than the competition, which usually charge shipping.
We have been raising prices due to shipping costs. Past, Present and Future. This since we offer “free shipping” sure we do…
Another idea, @aerides we also targeted our products made on demand, that are actually handmade but never sold that way. The low volume sales products, that no one else sells, even the asian basin sellers, we increased those in a big way, as much as 30%.
The offshore sellers, will do R&D (Research and Duplicate) on our popular items, not the ones that have low sales. I thought, why not!
Guess what it worked! Higher profit, more revenue. Relaxing 5 day handling time locked in.
All my items are made on demand (though in1 day) and I do not have high enough sales to have ever attracted duplicators, nor would my general price point. So, as far as competition, I have only someone deciding they like a slightly different style (or cheaper thing) anyway, no one offering the exact same thing or worrying about the buy box.
I went ahead and raised most things about 10% yesterday.
$40 in 2012 is $58 today. So I won’t feel bad, if anything I’ve been underpaying myself for years had inflation and silver stayed “normal.”
I suspect you might be thinking of the well-missed @Style (aka @Stylephyle), who created the warmly-received May 2015 & October 2015 Tutorial threads “Tips for Surviving in the Jewelry Category” & “SURVIVING IN THE JEWELRY CATEGORY - Part II” - and who was also quite knowledgeable in many another subject.
On Groundhog Day, 2018, when Amazon switched the ASF from the Jive Platform to the Discourse Platform (same software suite now hosting us here in the SAS), the old URLs were reformatted, & Style’s two tuts were available (respectively) here:
With the advent of the NSFE on 012623, one of the consequences was the broadscale deprecation of access (direct, or by re-direct) to previous threads that were created in the Age of Jive, and that appears to be the fate those excellent tutorials (among others) were consigned to as a result; much of the value contributed by seasoned & savvy sellers of her sterling caliber was lost.
Our friend @oneida_books, who knows Style IRL, reported some years back that Style left when she finally got fed up with Amazon’s never-ending crapola.
As Style was wont to post, re: Amazon’s imposition of a $5000 ‘bond’ as a Gating Fee for participation in the Fine Jewelry Category:
Some years back, Amazon - on the hush-hush, mind you - did away with the Gating Fee; naturally, chaos ensued, as is starkly illustrated by NSFE discussions such as these three, from 101723, 020224, & 042525, respectively, created by another of the experienced Fine Jewelry and Gems sellers:
When nothing subsequently changed with the sheer & blatant fraud - which STILL hasn’t changed down to this very day, as our friend Wade o’ Orcas alludes (if anything, it’s gotten even worse) - the jewelry sellers in that thread (and many another, both there & in related biz-discussion) came to the most-logical conclusion, which is perhaps best summed-up in the initial (and only) post of that OP’s 2025 discussion linked above:
That wasn’t the first time that TPTB stifled Susan’s earnest efforts - more than a few of us probably remember how she’d already been stiffed in the SWMNBN debacle, and there’s a good deal of discussion of how she was apparently ‘borged’ in this 112323 SAS thread:
If one reads that ‘nested’ thread in its entirety, they’ll see that Susan was almost-invariably successful in solving that ever-troubling problem - Amazon’s refusal to simply prohibit Seller Feedback being posted in that & a few other similar situations, in the never-ending pursuit of the core corporate “Customer-centric” policy - by cutting through the silo-mangled red tape, right up to the point of her last post there, made Veteran’s Day of 2024 (111124, link, NSFE).
When she went radio-silent there as well, I thought it likely that Seattle’s panjandrums had stifled her yet again; that was one of the last 105 replies she made, and only 11 days later came the last-known post from the SeaMod profile, this one of 112224:
I don’t know how much of a role, if any, that any of this might’ve played in Susan’s decision to follow Style’s suit by severing her ties with Amazon, but I do know that a scant few months after that last post, Oneida gave us the heads-up that she’d ridden off into the sunset w/ this 021925SAS thread:
