Ugh....Postage!

I sold my first mosaic online! How exciting! I have put all the mosaics I have for sale on a website called Etsy. Etsy is great. I pay 20 cents to list something for four months. If I sell it, Etsy gets 3.5% of my sale. I have my own little "shop" at www.jennywalters.etsy.com. Check it out if you're interested. I'll have more for sale after Christmas, but our family has decided to do a "home made Christmas" this year, so I have been spending all my time making some cool things for my lovely family members and don't have much for sale right now. I'm going to start making coat hooks in the future. To the right I put a picture of the coat hook rack I made for our dogs coats. If you want one, let me know!


Anyway, I really wanted to write a quick entry about a business lesson I learned yesterday. The first mosaic I sold online was to a lady in Maryland. She purchased the blue and white tissue box (pictured in an earlier blog) for $35 plus $10 shipping and handling. I clearly hadn't thought the price through. After tallying it up yesterday, I realized that my extreme modesty had cost me quite a bit. Let me break it down for you:

Tissue Box: $6.00
Glass: $15.00 (about)
Grout: $3.00 (about)
Box (for shipping): $1.50
Role of bubble wrap: $13.00
Shipping: $22.00

I had no idea how much it would cost to ship a package like that, let alone how expensive shipping materials were. I didn't even account for the 3 days it took me to create the actual tissue box. I simply priced the item based on what I would want to buy it for (I have always had a hard time putting a proper price on things. I have this problem with practically giving things away...). So for $60.50 I made and shipped a glass mosaic (plus the $1.50 I owe Etsy in commission). It cost me $15 dollars to make a beautiful mosaic for the woman in Maryland. Merry Christmas Samantha R.! I'm sure you deserve it! And I'm considering all this a valuable lesson learned.