The Economics of Trading: Why it's so important I sold cards for soap

In case you haven't already heard, "The Economy" is in the crapper. "The worst _____ since 19__" has become the daily Mad Lib of the financial news, opening up employment to sports-averse statisticians while the rest of the world loses jobs and savings and all that nice shiny prosperity to which we'd grown accustomed.
We're broke, and if we're not broke we're afraid of becoming broke, so whereas a year ago we might have spoiled ourselves with the new cute handmade handbag for spring, now we're thinking more about toilet paper. But as soon as we don't buy the handbag, the person making and selling handbags suddenly has no money to buy the earrings she wanted from another artist, who can't buy the skirt, who can't buy the journal, who can't buy the soap, and on and on. So now that soap is sitting in its maker's house, the journal, the skirt, the earrings, and the handbag all staring back at their creators who have nothing to do but wonder if perhaps garbage collection wouldn't have been a better life path.

Most of the time when we buy things, we use money. Credit, cash, whatever, it's all the promise of numbers that can get us stuff. Let's go back to my Etsy fish swimsuit seller from previous econ ramblings. When someone buys a fish swimsuit, the artist can do anything she wants with the money: put it in the bank, stuff it under her mattress, use it to buy food and toilet paper, or spend it on the felted boogers she's been eying from another Etsy shop. The trouble with our current economic situation is that we're all so short on actual money, when somebody finally buys a fish swimsuit, there's little choice but to spend said money on food and toilet paper. We can understand and want to support our fellow artists, but at the end of the day, felted boogers are murder on the digestive system.

So what can we possibly do? Especially if we still have tons of inventory collecting dust on our shelves while we fill our "favorites" and wishlists with things we'd love but just don't have the money to afford?

Trade!

The felted booger maker might have an aquarium full of embarrassingly naked fish. She couldn't have justified sending precious rare dollars, but a two green mediums and a yellow extra-large she'd already made that they wouldn't accept as currency at the grocery store? Oh, happy day!

So how do you go about trading?

1. If you want something you can't afford/justify in money, approach the seller about a trade. A very simple polite convo with "Hi, I love your ____ and wondered if you'd be interested in trading for anything in my shop. I also have several children of varying ages and genders and a time-share in Guam..." The worst that can happen is they say no and you're in the same position as you were before you started. Assuming no one reports you for the whole child slavery thing...
2. Cruise the forums. Just searching for the word "trade" in the forums brings up a few gazillion threads from people looking to do just that. They'll often say what sorts of things they want, like clothing, gifts, bath products, stationery, sex toys, etc.
3. Etsy Traders. It's a big long list of trade-friendly shops, run by the Trade-A-Holics team. Some say what they want, some say what they have, some just have a link. It can be a bit daunting, but it's also the most comprehensive list I know.
   
4. The Etsian Trades message board doesn't get much activity, but it's another place to scope. Before stupid people squashed the soul of EtsyTools, they had started an amazing trade list with keywords so you could see what people had and wanted. I'm hoping someone will fill those shoes again, but it's a big job.
5. If anybody reading this knows of any other fabulous sites, please please please leave in the comments.
   
6. Chatrooms. Statistically, this is your worst bet since you're at the mercy of whatever random people happen to be online at the same time as you, but you never know. Just please don't go into a room blasting all caps "LOOKING FOR TRADE!!!!!" It's poor web etiquette. Sometimes people even set up specific trading rooms, but as long as you're polite, you can go into just about any room and ask, especially if you find a particular shop you like. "Would LOVE to trade for that ----->" while you put the coveted listing card up for the room to see is always a good way to go.

Somebody who isn't me really should set up a comprehensive trading site that could somehow allow for multi-party trades, so if the felted booger maker didn't want a fish swimsuit but did want plarn planters, and the plarn planter maker wanted fish swimsuits, the trade could still happen.
"That's why people use currency instead of just a trade-based economy," you say? True, but like I said earlier, we're all out of currency and all we have left are our many, many things that can't be used to pay bills but aren't making us happy, either. So let's get them moving around and making some happy again.

Now who wants to trade for something I can send to my almost 20-year-old brother at college and my friend who's totally reading this for her birthday?

Swimming in the Data Pool

Ok, it's mini-pricing lesson time, but this one will be very mini and very simple, to be expanded later possibly by request and/or payment, as I'm looking for ways to make more money and I see how much the few people selling spreadsheets are making on Etsy and I think that I need to start tapping that market, too, but in the places it's clearly not even being tapped.

Mini-lesson of the day:
Pool your data.

This goes well as a pun with my one-of-a-kind hand-sewn fish swimsuit seller, so let's go back to her. It turns out, she's not the only one on Etsy selling fish swimsuits. Of course, no one else's fish swimsuits are exactly like her fish swimsuits, but there's a school of sellers around and they've even started a team called Team Swimmy Suit. They want to pool their data because some girl with a blog told them that was a good idea, but they don't know what this means or how to do it.

Here's how to do it.

Make a spreadsheet. Google Docs is wonderful for this because you can create a single online spreadsheet that everybody is allowed to edit, either by invitation only or by making it open access.
On that spreadsheet, you want to make places to enter the date the item sold, the price for which the item sold (how you want to deal with shipping is up to you, but I like to give it its own column), and the very general type of item. (Oh, dear lord, she made an example!) For fish bathing suits, the team might decide to split it up into small, medium, and large with columns for one-piece versus two-piece and extra places to check-off special characteristics that might effect the price, like custom, recycled, or jewel-encrusted. (Team SwimmySuit example. No, I really didn't have time for this.)

Then, you want as many people as possible to fill in as many sales as possible. The more data you have, the better your pricing info will be. Lucky for everybody, it doesn't matter if you haven't been keeping track of your sales thus far, since Etsy does it for you on your sold orders page. In theory, everything you need to fill out a spreadsheet should be there: date sold, price (with shipping separate), and what the thing was.

When you have a lot of data, it's time to analyze. It's up to you what constitutes a lot...How frequently do these items sell and how many people sell them and how wide is the range of what's out there? Fish bathing suits may be less common than felted boogers may be less common than beaded earrings. You know your craft. Just keep collecting data after you've started analyzing, too.
Hopefully, someone on your team has taken stats 101. If not, find out if someone on your team is sleeping with someone who has taken stats 101, or is the parent of someone who has taken stats 101. If that, too fails, pay someone like me to do it.

The easiest and most useful stuff for you to learn from the little exercise is how many fish swimsuits sold over time for each price range. That's the info you can then use to decide where to price your own items at the real true "bestish" pricing point, or at least the closest thing you're ever going to get to it.
You'll also want to pull out of your data pool analysis whether or not your extra column check boxes had any effect on the price. There's shmancy stats things you can do involving "r squared" and other crap, or you can just tell the spreadsheet software to do certain things if a column has a certain answer in it and see if the final totals change (which is why I no longer remember any formulas I learned in stats or econometrics).
A good stats-knowing person will look at the data in a whole bunch of different ways and see what sorts of other useful things pop out, too. Holiday trends, time trends, if a certain user's items always sell for significantly more or less than other people's and taking them out makes the rest of the numbers make more sense, etc. I'm too ADDesque to do this crap all the time, but I do find it interesting in short spurts.

In the end, even with all this wonderful information, your pricing will still be up to you. It will never be perfect and will more likely be a range than a number, plus people may hold onto "people pay more for recycled fish swimsuits" like a superstition even if the data proves otherwise. But if you make something even vaguely homogeneous with a team, jump into the pool. It can't hurt.