u/libra_kind

Hello! Poking my head in here again!

After my last post, I decided to really get into trying to figuring out the whole vending thing, but another question came to mind:

So! I have an Etsy shop, and I would like for some of that stuff also be sold at the event I want to try to sell at next year. But I was curious as to those who may be doing that, how do you manage inventory?

I know with Square, you can sync up your listings to your Square so it can keep track of inventory, but.... how exactly does it do that? How does it know what items get bought in person for it to keep track? Do you have to manually do it? Is there like buttons for you to press in the square app to be like "Oh this person bought this button in this style" and it goes to update the Etsy listing of how many there is? I'm just curious.

I don't have a Square device or the anything atm so I can't really look into it rn.

Or maybe you don't even do that and you just manually log what's sold and go to edit the listings later?

Hello!

I figure I'd join here and poke around for some insight.

I vended at a local furry event I staffed my friend was in charge of. Well, sort of.

It was the event store, and I asked if I can be in charge of it since I was interested in vending, but wanted to see what it was like. So it wasn't my stuff I was selling, but most of the stickers that was for sell was my art at least!

And honestly, I kind of enjoyed it! I was worried I'd be boring but having a lot of people come by, and the people who were tabling next to me being fun folk to talk with made it better. So I thought, I'll try vending at this event next year!

But here's the part that makes me worried: I'm not super confident if people would be interested in what /I'd/ sell.

The event store was doing good because like .... people enjoyed the event. They wanted memorabilia of said event, and so they were happy to grab stuff.

Now, I do have an Etsy shop, that has a lot of sales. I'm proud of it, but it's mostly custom made stuff for people's characters (fursuit badges, OC keychains and buttons, stuff like that). I have other stuff like keychains, stickers, bases and other premade things, but those don't really sell much. It's been made very apparent when I took a good chunk of said custom stuff down due to being back in school, work being a killer and just wanting more time to work on other things.

I don't want to make custom made things at my table. I take too long and would like to be things people can get then and there. I might offer the badges and maybe icons, but I'd like to have mostly merch at my table. And considering I'm not someone who's interested in a lot of the more popular media that's going around, fan merch wouldn't be super varied/be of media that's popular. I'm just worried I'll make stuff no one will care about and people won't buy.

So I guess I'm just curious if anyone here has been in a similar boat, and what did you do to get over that fear to do your first artist alley/dealer's den? Or did you wait til you felt like you could offer stuff people want?