How I Started Selling Stickers Online During Quarantine

With less to do because of quarantine, I began to discover new things I enjoyed doing. One of these things is digital design. I still would consider myself a beginner, but I have grown a lot since I first began. With the designs that I drew, I decided to start selling them as stickers. By using Etsy and Redbubble, this is what I did.

As someone who does not own a drawing tablet or an iPad, I could not use the wonderful drawing app called Procreate. Because I have an iMac instead, I downloaded Inkscape.

After some practice drawings, I created my first sticker design. After spending about two weeks creating about 11 different designs, I checked out this website called Stickerapp.com because I did not have the proper printer to print stickers on my own.

This website allows you to upload any of your images and have them printed as stickers and sent to your home. After an about $200 purchase, I waited a couple of weeks for my stickers to arrive. During that 2 week waiting period, I worked on my Etsy shop. I came with my shop's name (DynamiteArtStickers) and put up all of the listings. Quick tip: when doing this, make sure to include a lot of relevant tags! This will help each listing get found quicker. Another thing that I learned is that to get your shop noticed, some of your listings shouldn't be generic. Have specific designs that people will search for, but that don't have many results. This will help you gain traction. I have a lot of generic stickers that don't get noticed because I am not on the front page of choices when searched. I have one specific sticker that most people have found me through because there aren't a lot of products about it in general.

I opened my Etsy shop when I was ready, and although my shop's traffic hasn't been relatively busy, I am working on different advertising methods such as other social medias and having sales/coupons. To save money, I have been sending them in regular envelopes rather than packages. Shipping becomes expensive, especially when you have to print out shipping labels. The only downside to this is that the orders can't be tracked.

During the 2 week waiting period, I was antsy to create and sell more stickers, faster. This is when I discovered Redbubble. If you don't have the means to purchase your stickers from Stickerapp.com, Redbubble will handle all of the printing and shipping for you; all you have to do is upload your art. The issue with Redbubble is, however, you make a lot less money. Customers have bought around $16.00 worth of product from my shop and I only get to keep around $2.00 of it. This is still a cool opportunity, however if you're looking to make a lot of money, don't rely on Redbubble alone.

I uploaded the drawings that didn't make the final cut for Etsy and a few extra things to my Redbubble. For Redbubble, there is a lot of competition. Getting to trends early and adding ungeneric tags will help gain traction. For instance, if you put the tag "vsco,"there are more than 200k results. For a better chance to be found, try more obscure tags that match your design better. For example, I have a rainbow flag sticker for sale to represent pride in the LGBTQ+ community. When you search pride, there are more than 300k results. However, when you search GSA (which stands for the Gender Sexuality Alliance and is a club found at a lot of schools), there are only around 200 results. So, if someone searches for GSA rather than pride, my sticker is more likely to be found.

With both my Etsy and Redbubble shop open and still fairly small, I'm excited to see where these businesses take me in the future and hope that this helped any of you with this process as well.