How to Start a Business Selling Postcards Through the Mail

Starting a business is never easy, and selling postcards through the mail is no different. In order to get your postcard business up and running, you'll need to decide what type of postcards you'll offer, how you'll ship them, and much more. If that doesn't scare you off, then it's time to start planning your business.

Things You'll Need

• Postcards

Instructions

1. Confirm a reliable supplier for your postcards. You can either hand make them, or use a printer, but either way you need to be sure that you have plenty of postcards available to fulfill any possible orders.

2. Set up a website for your postcards. You will need to purchase a domain name, as well as a hosting service that will allow you to run complex scripts such as secure credit card transactions.

3. Take high-quality photographs of each type of postcard you have, and post all the photographs on your site. Selling postcards relies heavily on offering a product that catches a customer's eye, so be sure that your designs are captured accurately online.

4. Find your most popular postcard design, and design a message to write on that postcard that advertises your website and postcard services. Print up many* of these postcards, and mass mail them to a potential customer list. (*Many will depend on the scope of your operation. At the beginning, this may be a few hundred people locally. For a big business, this will be many thousands of postcards.)

5. Offer to send out the postcards for your customers through the mail if they like. Allow customers to choose a design, to enter their name and address and a recipient's name and address, and then to enter their message. You will create the full postcard, message included, for them, and send it through the mail. You can charge extra for this service, but people may still use it due to convenience.

Tips & Warnings

• If you don't want to set up your own site, you can start by selling postcards through a site like Etsy.com.