When my business was first starting out, I wasn’t sure how I should price handmade jewelry. I knew I wanted to make a profit, but I wasn’t sure how much money I should be making or even how much I wanted to make.
Now, I have come up with a few key points that you will want to consider when pricing your handmade jewelry. My hope is that it will make things easier for you! Bonus: In this post, I share my strategy for not losing money by making shipping free for buyers! Be sure to stick around!
***Please note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means that if you purchase from any of the affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This really helps me out and I thank you if you make a purchase!
What to consider when you price handmade jewelry
- Material costs
- How long does it take to make the product?
- How much profit do you want to make?
- Shipping costs
Step 1. Material costs
First, you will want to take into account how much you are spending on materials for that piece of jewelry. This step may require some math. (Stick around until the end of this post if you want to see an example of all 4 steps!)
When you are finding the cost of materials for your jewelry piece, I recommend saving your receipts! This way you don’t have to remember the cost of everything you buy and can easily look back on it later if needed.
Step 1: pretty simple, right?
Step 2. How long does it take you to make the product?
This is the step that may make all of the work that you put into making your jewelry worth it. I think that the longer it takes you to make a product, the more you should charge for it.
For example, while I might charge $5 (not counting the cost of materials) for something that takes twenty minutes to make, I may charge $15 for something that takes me an hour and a half to make.
If you are spending a lot of your time making a piece of jewelry, make it worth your while. Don’t price your items so low that it feels like you are doing a boatload of work for nothing.
On the other hand, you don’t want to charge too much for an item that you can make really quickly and with minimal effort. Although you want to make sure that you are getting enough money for the work that you do, you don’t want to rip off your buyers and make something too expensive. That isn’t fair to them.
Step 3. How much profit do you want to make?
This step really depends on how much profit you want to make and on you and where you stand with your experience as a jeweler.
If you are just starting out, you may just want a few dollars of profit, not counting the money you charge for step 2. If you consider yourself to be more advanced at jewelry-making, then maybe you will want more profit from your jewelry.
When I first started out, I just wanted to focus on getting my name out there and getting experience with jewelry-making. I didn’t really get a whole lot of profit in my first few months. Then, I raised my prices a little bit when I thought that I was getting better at making jewelry and when I started to get more sales. You can do the same thing!
Remember: your prices don’t have to be set in stone. You can always change them if you start to think that maybe they are a little too high or too low.
Step 4. Shipping costs
If you don’t need to ship your jewelry to buyers, then this step doesn’t apply to you and you are pretty much done!
If you do ship your jewelry, like me, then this step is really important. You can choose whether you want to offer free shipping to your customers or whether you want to charge for shipping. Or, you can do what many people, me included, do when they have to ship orders. Charge more for your jewelry, then mark it as free shipping. Let’s cover these 3 options individually, shall we?
Free shipping
Free shipping is something that everybody loves but is not always practical for you. Usually, it costs me about $4, give or take, to ship my jewelry. If I were to offer free shipping, I would be losing about $4 for every order, which adds up.
On the bright side, buyers will probably be more likely to purchase your jewelry if you offer free shipping. I know I would be. That is great, except for the fact that you are losing money. Free shipping is really just something that you will have to consider, then decide for yourself if you want to offer it.
Charge for shipping
When you charge the full cost for shipping, you won’t lose any money because of it. That is great for you, but not very appealing to your buyers. Especially if shipping is expensive.
Something that I used to do a few months back is to charge for about half of shipping and just pay for the rest myself. While this still isn’t as appealing to potential buyers as free shipping, they would only have to pay about $2 for shipping.
Unfortunately, that means that I was losing $2 for shipping every time I got an order. Better for me than free shipping, but still not the best.
My shipping strategy
I actually learned this strategy from another online seller and found that I preferred it to other shipping strategies. It is the strategy that I currently use when it comes to shipping my jewelry.
First, I see how much it will cost to ship my jewelry, about $4. Then, I add that $4 to the cost of my jewelry. Then, you can mark your item as free shipping. This way, you are not losing any money because you just added to the price of your jewelry.
The downside to this is that even though you now seem to offer free shipping, your jewelry is now more expensive. Again, it is really your call on what you should do with shipping and you should do whatever you deem best.
Example of how I price handmade jewelry
Alright, now that you have seen the 4 steps for pricing your jewelry, here is an example of these 4 steps put into action! Hopefully, it will answer any questions that you still have!
Step 1. Material costs
Okay, let’s say that I want to price a ring. The ring is made out of 6 inches of 20 gauge wire and 5 beads. Time to do some math!
The 20 gauge wire that I used costs $5.50 and comes with 12 feet of wire. I am using only 6 inches of wire and I need to find out how much that 6 inches costs based on the wire costing $5.50. To do this, I will divide $5.50 by 24, which is about 0.23. This means that the wire for each ring costs $0.23.
Now for the beads! Lets say that I buy a package of 50 beads for $3.25 and I need 5 beads for the ring. Instead of finding how much 1 bead costs, I am just going to find the cost of 5 beads at once. I will divide $3.25 by 10 and get about $0.33 (I rounded up).
Lastly, I will add the cost of wire for one ring, $0.23, and the cost of beads for one ring, $0.33, and I end up with $0.56. This means that the materials for one ring costs $0.56.
Note: You may also want to consider the how much it costs to package your jewelry and add that in to your materials cost. Also, check out my post on how to package jewelry orders!
Step 2. How long does it take you to make the product?
Alright, let’s say that it takes me about 30 minutes to make and package this ring. Even though it doesn’t take too long to make, it is one of the more tricky ones. Because of this, I am going to add $2.00 to the price to make it worth the effort.
Step 3. How much profit do you want to make?
Right now, with the price of materials and the 2 dollars that I want because of the effort it takes to make the ring, the price of the ring is $2.56, and I want to make about $3.50 of profit per ring, so I am just going to make the price of the ring $6.00 even.
I feel like that is a fair price for both me and my customers, do you?
Step 4. Shipping costs
Okay, time to consider shipping. Since it usually costs me about $4 to ship my jewelry, I don’t just want to make my shipping free, because then I wouldn’t really make a profit. I also don’t want to flat out charge my customers $4 either, though.
Instead, I am going to add the $4 to the ring, making it $10, then mark shipping as free. This way, customers will be more eager to buy my ring because it has free shipping. Even though this made the cost of the ring go up, I feel confident that it will still sell because $10 is still pretty cheap for a ring.
What do you think?
Well, that’s about it! Remember, your prices don’t have to be set in stone. Feel free to change them as you see what is selling and what isn’t. If you have items that you find are selling a lot, I would raise the price a small bit. For the ones that aren’t selling, feel free to lower your price!
I hope this post was helpful! If it was, please let me know! If you still have questions, I would love to answer them to the best of my abilities! Please don’t hesitate to comment or contact me.
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Remember to shine bright and spread the light! See ya!
