ShiftyThrifting: Selling Merch and Shipping from Home
I’ve been selling @shiftythrifting Junk Boxes - our curated secondhand mystery boxes - since 2017 using different platforms with different levels of success. I moved to Fourthwall in 2022 and my teeny tiny business has only grown since then! Fourthwall is free to use and you get ALL the money from your home sales except for the credit card processing fees. I don’t miss the fee structure from our previous hosts, so I thought I’d write up a little guide on how easy it is to get started.
Essential Tools for Home Shipping
Things you need to start shipping from home:
- A scale, and it doesn’t need to be an expensive or large one! Even a kitchen scale works for small stuff.
- Packaging and packing materials for the product(s) you’re selling.
- Access to a post office and/or a printer.
- Funds set aside for postage. You’ll get this money back with your Fourthwall payout when the month rolls over.
- (Optional but handy) A ShipStation account.
Setting Up Your Storefront
Make yourself a store if you haven’t already. You can sell print on demand, digital stuff, and your own inventory in one place but today we’re talking about selling from home, so add a product and pick the middle option.
You can customize everything about your product on this page, from adding size and color variations, the materials used to make it, size charts, inventory, and more. Get an accurate weight of what you’re selling in its packaging and add that here. Hit save and you have your first listing. Gonna be selling a variety of products? You can duplicate the listing with the meatball menu! Change the name, photos, and anything else that needs changing and have your second listing up in a couple minutes.
Creating Collections
Fourthwall’s Collections feature lets me put my Junk Boxes in their own little section where I can set them to hidden or mark them sold out if I get sick or am on vacation. This lets me easily turn the self-fulfilled part of my store off while folks can still purchase print on demand and digital stuff and sign up for memberships.
Shipping Simplified
Didi protip: If you are in the US, the US postal service will pick up your outgoing packages free of charge on any regular mail day. Just set up a pickup on USPS.com!
When you’ve made your first sale, you can either make the label yourself or connect directly to ShipStation through Fourthwall’s app integration. That’s brand new and I love it so far. My labels pop up in ShipStation about 24 hours after a purchase, giving people a little window of time to adjust their order or make changes before I ship it.
At that point, all that’s left is handing it off to the postal carrier of your choice! Boom, you’re done!
A Final Note: Why Fourthwall Was the Best Choice for Me
A final note from me, I moved ShopShifty to Fourthwall so I could have one address for ALL my merch instead of splitting it between Patreon, a print-on-demand store, and the Junk Box store. It’s proven to be the best choice I’ve made in years and has saved me a ton of money in marketplace fees, Paypal’s cut, and web hosting charges. This has genuinely been the easiest way to sell my merch!