Making Wooden Toys to Sell Online
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Learn How to Make Popular Wooden Toys
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People love hand-crafted wooden toys that feature durability, good craftsmanship, and safety. The most popular wooden toys include wooden trains, trucks, building blocks, and rocking horses. You can also make wooden pull toys, wagons, and doll houses. White pine sands easily but doesn't splinter when you cut it so it is often used for the main body of hand-made toys. However, turnings and wheels last longer when they are made from a harder wood like birch or hard maple. You can even produce your wooden toys using all hard wood like cherry or oak but this makes the toys much more expensive. Start with a pattern or, if you can make your own pattern, cut it out of hard plastic or firm cardboard so you can use it over and over.
Produce Enough Wooden Toys
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If you have a bandsaw, a router, a sander, and a drill in a clean, well lit workshop and you are good at making wooden toys, you can market them to customers around the world using an online store. First, decide how many different wooden toys you will sell. Become very efficient at making each toy so that it works, is absolutely safe, and looks amazing. Predict how long it takes to make one of each toy so you can consider the cost of your time in the price you will charge. Add the cost of all the materials. Decide whether you will mass produce enough toys to have an inventory for your stores, whether you will take custom orders to make toys to be shipped within a certain period of time, or if you will offer both options to your online customers.
Open an Online Store
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Research your online store options. You can open an eBay store by agreeing to a monthly subscription, or you can sell individual wooden toys on eBay without having a store. If, however, your decision to sell wooden toys online will be your business, there are other online store options such as QuickBooks Point of Sale, Frantools, and Squash POS.
List Each Toy in Your Online Store
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Take digital photographs of each type of wooden toy you plan to sell in your online store. Use the online store wizard that came with your store software to list each toy. Upload the images. Set the price and indicate how many of each toy you have in stock. Be sure to use friendly, fun text to describe your products.
Drive Traffic To Your Store
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Even after you have produced the wooden toys, opened an online store, and listed each option, unless you drive traffic to your store, you won't make any money. If you opened an eBay store, your products will display whenever a prospective customer searches for wooden toys. You can enhance the number of people who know about your online store by using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and your own website or blog to promote it. Buy adwords and trade listings with parenting and teacher sites. Make up a business card that directs customers to your online store.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
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If your customer service is as excellent as the quality of your wooden toys, satisfied buyers will recommend their friends to your site. Ship the toys within 24 business hours of receiving a cleared payment. Allow customers to return toys if they don't like them. Respond to emails and telephone messages within 24 hours. All of these measures build your reputation as a business person with integrity and will help to grow your wooden toy online business.
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