Does having small ticket items (say under $1) available for customers to find & buy help or hurt our site?

[Kevin_McLeish]

I feel really silly asking this question to begin with, but... as a music store, we have a lot of "smalls" for products, like a guitar pick.  We sell picks for $0.50 each, or a single clarinet reed at $0.79.  Some believe this is too small, finicky, and cumbersome to have listed for sale on our site.  To me, I wholeheartedly disagree with the notiion of excluding "smalls" for a plethera of SEO, customer service, & online SALES reasons... Also we offer USPS shipping to offer low shipping costs on small goods.  Can I really be wrong about this?  Thanks, Kevin

[EGOL]

We have items on our sites that sell for less than $1.

People buy them.  We occasionally get a sale for hundreds of these items.

Lots of people toss them into their shopping cart just like people purchase magazines and candy bars in a grocery store checkout line.

Surprisingly, we frequently see people buy just ONE of these items and pay our minimum shipping and handling charge of $6.99.   I guess I have done pretty close to that myself a couple of times, so I should not be surprised.

You know about USPS shipping - which is very important for these types of sales.  But, consider offering a discount if people buy multiples.  Like one guitar pick for 69 cents... three for $1.79... ten or more for just 49 cents each.  Most shopping carts have options for these types of prices.

Our challenge for some of these items is "How many to hold in stock?"...  We have gotten huge sales for some of these items that have a long lead time for us to get.  So, after getting huge sales for a couple of these I spent $10,000 to stock up on one of them.  It is kind of a joke at my office...they trickle out at a few a week with an occasional sale for a few hundred.  The woman who does shipping says... "YAY... we sold one".  We have enough to last until I retire and I am protected from price increases and we never have to order them.  Fortunately they don't take up a lot of space.

I am not advocating sinking a load of dough into inventory... but try these small items and I bet you see them sell.  Guitar picks...  If I had a music site, many I would be selling them in all different kinds... and the inventory could fit into a shoebox. 

[Kevin_McLeish]

Wow - thanks for the answer EGOL!  This makes good sense to me and helps me firm up in my mind that this is a good direction to keep going on.  Thanks again!!  Kevin