How to Design & Sell Cell Phone Skins

You may have seen the customized skins on laptops and cell phones that have been poppping up over the past couple of years. These are made from the same adhesive materials from the 3M company that are used to cover buses for advertising. Now you can use the same stuff to personalize and protect your laptops and cell phones, and if you are feeling a bit entrepreneurial, you can even sell your designs.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Computer with Internet access
• EBay account

1. Design your skins. You can go to UniqueSkins.com and upload photos for your designs. The photos should be high resolution, of about 125 DPI (dots per inch). If you don't know what this means, you can simply load the photo up into a program such as Photoshop or GIMP and check the DPI there. Once you've uploaded the photo, you simply pick the model of cell phone skin that you want to create and drag and drop the photo on top of it.

2. One of the easiest places to start selling your skins is on eBay. You simply create an account and sell them on auction. You will pay a listing fee, which can cost anywhere from 15 cents to a few dollars, depending on the price of your items. UniqueSkins.com will drop-ship your order, meaning that you never have to touch the items yourself. As of 2009, they charge $2.95 to ship anywhere in the world, so make sure to include this in your shipping fees.

3. Create an eBay store. As of 2009, this will cost $15.00 a month to list up to 500 items. The advantage here is that customers can buy things from you directly without having to wait for an auction to end.

4. Sell on iOffer.com, another auction site. You can import your auction items from eBay to iOffer.com. On this site, you don't have to pay any listing fees. You only pay when the items sell.

5. Create an e-commerce store. A good place to do so is on Auctiva.com. This is a service that allows you to import your products from eBay directly into your own online store. It has an inventory management system, shopping cart, and as of 2009, it only costs $9.95 a month.

References

• UniqueSkins
• Auctiva
• EBay