Selling on Tindie?

What is tindie?

It’s a market place where one can buy and sell electronics kits, project and printed circuit boards.

I setup my shop in 2014 just as an experiment. It is an awesome learning experience, I got to know things like how do digital marketing, SEOs and email lists and things like that which as an electronics engineer I was oblivious to.

Here are some questions and their responses I was asked by a friend while he was setting up his shop, I’m hoping this article will be helpful to others who want to set up their shop on tindie.

How is Tindie as a platform like any quick tips ?

I really like it, they have good organic traffic, you also get google analytics for your store. You don’t have to pay anything for listing your product, they charge a small percentage only when your product is sold. Rather having my own store and maintaining and dealing with payment gateways, giving a percent to tindie make a lot of sense, especially if you have few products. They have an exclusivity clause, so the product you are selling on tindie, can’t be sold else where on web. If you want to sell it elsewhere like eBay, you need to retire the product from tindie first.

How to ship internationally? Local carriers seem too expensive. What would you prefer?

I ship via India post, using the registered mail service, to ship one PCB cost about Rs.70 to 90 depending on the country. You also get a tracking number. Their service is pretty good, I’ve had customers receive their purchase in 6 days. Till now I’ve shipped to Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, France, UK, India, Portugal, Norway and United States and one customer’s purchase was delayed. Go India Post!!

Are there any currency conversion charges levied on sellers?

You have to link your PayPal account in order to receive the payment. Say your product cost $10 with shipping, tindie will take I think 5% and charge about $0.5 processing fee. The payment stays with tindie till you ship your product, you can transfer it to you PayPal account anytime, regardless of the amount. PayPal will transfer will convert and transfer it to your bank account.

How to price the product?

I generally use a mark up of 2.5 of the cost to manufacture. Have a look at this article by David Jones of EEV blog.