Handmade Shop Policies - What you MUST Include | With Etsy-Specific Guidance

you know those things in your business that are like super important but also super boring that's what we're here to talk about today specifically your shop policies please don't run away i promise you i'll try to make this as interesting as possible but also it is actually really really important so this is something that you should not gloss over or skip over or forget about and i want to encourage you today to think about why it's important why it's going to protect your customer and also why share policies and how shop policies are important for you as a business owner so hello welcome back or if you've never seen me before welcome to my channel my name is jess van den i've been selling my own handmade jewelry under the ethereal label since 2008 and i've been fully self-employed since 2010 so over the years running a business you are going to come up against problems whether they're problems of your making or problems of your customers making either way you're gonna have a problem or two or five or ten or twenty depends anyway the best way to deal with these problems is to actually have a policy for dealing with them before they arise because this makes it so much easier and so much less stressful to deal with problems when they arise if you have a policy in place that your customer could have been aware of let's be honest most of them probably haven't read them but they're there and then you can use those policies to help you make a decision as to what to do when these problems arise okay so that is one of the reasons why policies are so important they protect you they protect your customer they lay out the expectations of what you will and won't do for your customer so what exactly are your policies what do they need to include that is what i'm going to cover in this video today it doesn't matter what venue you sell on where you sell online i strongly encourage you to set up a policy document on your website now if you sell somewhere like etsy they have policies sort of forced upon you you know you have to do what they say they have a list of policies you have to make drop-down decisions on but if you have your own website or yourself somewhere else chances are you just have to set up your own policies page and i'm going to cover the stuff that you really need to have on that page right now okay i'm just going to start with the policies that etsy makes you deal with because they're all things you have to deal with anyway and for those of you who do have an etsy shop you're going to want to make a decision as to what to do with these policies so the first one is processing time so this is the time from when the person makes the order to when you are going to ship the order you want to make this nice and clear to people because you want to set the expectation as to how long it's going to take them to receive your order and their order i should say okay so have a processing time in your policies in your about page or wherever is you know obvious to your customer i like to have them in the descriptions of the product as well now obviously if you have ready-made products not such an issue because you're just going to ship them straight at the door but for those of you like me who do products made to order it's really important to have this processing time there now very important here what you need to do is you need to under promise and over deliver let me repeat that you need to under promise and over deliver for example say it usually takes you two days to get something made make your processing time three days make it a little bit longer just to make sure if something goes wrong in your life there's a lot of orders you know you've got a bit of cushion there you've got a bit of leeway my processing time is one to two weeks and it has been for years i still make plenty of orders right i know especially in this day and age people you know you think that people expect things now right now but i find if you set the expectation with your customers that something's going to take a little bit longer because it's handmade it's crafted especially for them you know you are making it for them they are usually much more receptive and understanding of the fact that it takes time for you to make the thing yes you're occasionally going to get a customer who's like i want it yesterday and you have to decide whether or not to take that order on now just as an aside from the etsy policies one of the extra policies i have is an overtime fee so how i phrase this is this is a fee that you pay it will get you your order made within one to two working days and in the post and it's an overtime fee because we don't let people like jump the queue so we actually work overtime hours to get your order made rather than just our normal working hours and sometimes people take advantage of that because they just you know they are running late and they want to make sure they get their order in time so consider having some sort of overtime fee rather than letting people jump the queue without giving you any compensation for it or stressing you out and making you work extra overtime hours to get their order at the door the next one is estimated delivery time again remember under promise and over deliver so look at all the processing times from you know how long it's going to take to get to certain places your local post postal service should have these listed on their website for me it's australia post i just hop on and go and look through and go okay for this zone they say it's going to take this long for that zone it's going to take that long and then i put that in my estimated delivery times again with usually a little bit of a buffer on on the higher side of things because i would rather somebody know you know or think it's going to take them three weeks for their order to arrive and then it arrives in two than the other way around because the first way is how you have happy customers who go my stuff arrives sooner than i expected fantastic the other way around is when you have unhappy customers who complain about their order being late okay so remember to set those expectations early and remember to under promise and over deliver the next thing is customs and import taxes now there are a few a few difficulties with this um there are some countries that expect you to actually gather this money for them which is frustrating by selling somewhere like etsy they kind of take care of all that for you but if you do have your own website this is something you're going to need to research and look into i'm not going to go into it in this video but you just need to make a statement about how you handle customs and import taxes and duties so it may be that for the countries you're selling to that the customer has to pay them upon entry other countries that maybe that you've collected them for them but just have this disclaimer that tells people how they're going to have to deal or you're dealing with the customs and import duties around their country the next policy is payment options you need to have a policy telling people how they can pay you right so do you take paypal do you take credit cards do you take direct deposit do you take after pay or any of those things will square so just have it really clear on your website ahead of time in your policies section what methods of payment you take because that'll help your customer decide if they can buy from you or not or which method of payment they would prefer to use to buy from you the next one's very important and it's returns exchanges and cancellations okay so you need to decide ahead of time whether you will accept returns or not and in which case for which products you will accept returns or not how much time the customer has to make that decision so can they tell you in five days 10 days 20 days 30 days um exchanges will you when you accept you know do you accept returns and do you do a refund do you do exchanges uh you know of goods instead uh cancellations how long after the person orders is are they able to cancel their order so you know if you're someone who has stuff ready made somebody orders and you ship it out the same day you need to make sure your cancellation policy basically states that they can't cancel once they've ordered because you might already have had it out the door whereas those of us who have a bit of time there can actually say hey you can cancel within 24 hours or something like that and get a full refund of your order you just need to remember to take that into account when you are making somebody's order if you do have you know a 24-hour cancellation period don't start making the order within the 24 hours give it that time to go by before you start actually crafting the order now this is not just something you can make up you actually need to look into the consumer laws in your country because they will probably have specific laws around what you can say here so for example australia has the extra australian consumer law you can find it online if you're an australian i don't know what other countries have but i know they have these laws so make sure to have downloaded and read the customer the the consumer law document in your country to make sure that you are legally abiding by all the things you need to be abiding by so for example here in australia if somebody buys something from me and then you know i've sent it to them and they or i haven't even sent it to them but usually i have so i've sent it to them and they're like i don't actually like this can i return it i'm like no i'm sorry you can't i don't accept exchanges uh sorry i don't accept returns for change of mind which is in accordance with australian consumer law and i actually put that in my policies to make it clear that by law i don't actually have to accept a return from you if you change your mind so please be sure that you really want this thing before you have ordered it so look into the laws in your country make sure that your policies are in line with those laws and you won't have hopefully any issues there the last thing that's important to consider is a privacy policy these days a lot of countries require you to have a privacy policy where basically all it is is you outline what you're going to do with the person's data right does the per does your customer have the right to contact you and ask that you remove them from your database to remove their personal details all of that sort of stuff don't stress out here you can easily find performance for this online just search you know online shop privacy policy example and just basically kind of steal from somebody else's with a bit of changing obviously to make it your own and make it appropriate to your business but there's plenty of examples out there you can even go look at my etsy shop and see what my privacy policy is i'm pretty sure i basically um copied most of that from an example that etsy gave and just changed it to make it you know proper for my website and i did the same on my own website i've got a privacy policy on there so just have that information there um just to abide again by the laws that require you to deal with this information in a certain way all right so now let's cover some extra things that i think should be in your policies but that aren't in like the etsy policy section on etsy i put these things in my faq section which like comes up straight after the policies but be aware if you do sell an etsy anything you put in this faq section as a policy etsy doesn't technically see it as a policy so if you do get into a dispute with a customer and you go hey i've got it there my policies it's uber like no you don't because it's not actually technically in your policy document however obviously on your own website you can do whatever you want with your policies so i would advise you to include these things there now i already mentioned the overtime policy so we'll skip over that because i've already talked to you about it the next one is shipping options so i like to explain my shipping options to people in my policy page like if you're in this location this is the sort of shipping you can expect to have right just makes them easier it easier for them obviously on etsy they already have that in the shipping section so that's a bit separate but it's just good to have it written out for people on your own website so again they know ahead of time what sort of shipping options they can expect from you the next one is packaging and gift wrapping do you offer gift wrapping how do you package your items give them a bit of an idea here of what it's going to look like when it arrives is it going to be giftable uh you know is that an up an optional upgrade they can purchase it's proper gift wrapping just you know this is not super important in the scheme of um dealing with problems but again i think it's just a really nice thing to do for your customer ma to make it easy for them to decide oh yeah this is going to be a good choice and it's all about you know again setting those expectations and maybe convincing them to choose you over somebody else if you're like everything i send is beautifully wrapped and you could give it as a gift sounds like an upsell option to me the next one is a missing item policy as far as i'm concerned this is a huge oversight in the etsy policies they really should allow you to have a policy for this uh i think it's an incredibly important one to have basically what is your policy if something goes missing in the post okay what are you going to do so how long does a customer have to wait for you to say that it's missing so you might have a domestic time and then a international time i think mine's like 30 days domestic and 60 days international which i think i've extended during covert to like 90 days or something and then what happens if it never turns up if it never arrives and it never returns to you what is your policy my personal policy is i replace the item once always check with your customer the address always double check that they gave you the right address there's no mistakes in it get them to confirm the address before you send again so i always send the product to them again uh once if it doesn't arrive the second time then that's that you know it's obviously either they're fraudulent or something weird is going on in this the system but generally speaking that is my policy uh so you have to decide what your policy is going to be there are you just are you going to replace or refund is usually the two options because as much as it sucks it's you know sure the thing is out of your control it's in the postal system it's still your responsibility to get it to them uh even though it's out of your hands so you know remember what you can do if that does happen is claim it with your post office so actually submit a claim form um if you had insurance if you didn't every postal service is different but you should be able to hopefully get some sort of compensation from the postal service for losing the item right and hopefully that will sort of help you recoup your costs a little bit it doesn't happen that often i think you know everybody who sells online has had stuff going missing i've had stuff go missing over the years definitely probably probably a couple of times a year maybe once or twice a year something just disappears even with tracking sometimes which is really frustrating and it just never shows up so it's really important to have this policy in place and it's also good because sometimes people just get a bit anxious especially if there isn't tracking or if the tracking is showing delayed and you can just sort of reassure them and go hey this amount of time is normal for something to be in transit uh and if it doesn't show and then you can reassure them by saying if it doesn't show up in this time this is my policy so you know i will send you a replacement or give you a refund okay so i generally i prefer to encourage you to replace rather than refund because you are less likely to get people being grifters and fraudulent in that case right if your policy is like hey i'm just going to refund you it doesn't turn up you're kind of incentivizing people bad people to just claim it hasn't turned up and get a refund but if you if your policy is not to refund but to replace well they have less incentive to to try it on with you basically so i encourage you to consider having a replacement policy rather than a refund policy here and that's pretty much it those are really the most important policies you may like to have some you know faq further information that is specific to your business are there certain things people need to know about your particular products about how they travel about how they wear about and you know intricacies of your return policy like i have a special return policy for wedding rings that if people get the wedding rings and they decide they don't like them they can send them back and order another set for me at a slight discount you know something like that um what you know with rings i have a resizing policy because obviously if people get their ring it's the wrong size what what happens you know so i have a clear policy on that that you know it's their responsibility to get the right size and that i don't refund a real replace if you get the size wrong um and that but that i do offer resizing and i should tell them the fee in my you know policies document what how much that's going to cost them so think further than what i've just talked about here if there's anything specific you know do you sell clothes like or like lingerie or swimwear that can't be returned for hygiene reasons or earrings all of those sorts of little details should also be in your policies but that's going to be specific to your particular business all right that is it for another video hey if you want to get access to a whole bunch of free downloads that i have available including my 25 essential tips for handmade business success head on over to create and thrive dot com forward slash start here and by subscribing to my email list you will get access to a bunch of those freebies and you'll also get an email from me every week telling you what's on the podcast what's it on the youtubes what else is happening workshops that i'm running all that sort of fun stuff and i'll keep you in the loop as to what's going on and of course if you enjoyed this video please do give me a big thumbs up it really helps me know that i'm on the right track and helping you out it helps the youtube algorithm know that other people might find this useful and make sure if you haven't already of course to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss any of my future videos on how to have a thriving and profitable handmade business thank you so much for watching again i will be back soon with another video and bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Jess Van Den

Views: 1,273

Keywords: handmade business, handmade business policies, etsy policies, etsy shop policies, etsy shop policies 2021, handmade shop policies, online shop policies, online shop policy, etsy tips for selling, etsy tips and tricks, etsy tips 2021, jess van den, create and thrive, setting up an online shop, setting up an etsy shop 2021, setting up an etsy shop step by step, etsy privacy policy, setting up a handmade shop, handmade business tips, handmade business advice, craft business

Id: -U7B1VlE-3o

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021