After the thrill of making those first few sales wears off and you take the time to calculate your actual profit --- you might be shocked at how little you actually earned --- if anything at all. 

Tallying up the cost of your materials, listing and processing fees is easy for most. It's the evaluation of your time that gets tricky. This is twofold in that most of us suffer from an inferiority complex of some sort when it comes to objectively valuing our products AND handmade goods just take longer to bring to market than those that are mass produced. 

When I first got started, back in 2006 I charged $10 per hour for my time. As the years went by and the quality of my product improved I slowly bumped that up to $20 per hour. And, today, when calculating an hourly rate for my services I start at $35 per hour. 

The trick to pricing your physical products profitably is offering a well rounded selection at multiple price points so that you can up sell. 

For example, you might offer diaper bags for $150-$225 and they take you 3 to 5 hours to make + the cost of materials (4+ yards of material, interfacing, hardware, thread) + listing and selling fees that average 15% per sale and then make pacifier holders to sell for and burp clothes from the fabric remnants which you already expensed in the pricing of the diaper bag to increase your overall profit margin. 

Think macro vs. micro when it comes to pricing and before you know it that redline will be black!

I hope that was helpful to you! Please let me know what other questions you have about selling, pricing or marketing your physcial products and I will do my best to answer those in a future blog post.