When I started selling my products on Creative Market, I would continually submit products to be featured as one of Creative Markets free goods of the week. After many rejections, I just assumed that getting one on my products featured as a free good wasn’t going to happen for me so I stopped trying. Eventually, a full schedule at school took up most of my time and I wasn’t really creating new products anymore. By the end of 2019, my schedule cleared up so I decided to post a new  product in my shop on December 30th. On the same day, I decided I was going try to submit that pattern as a free good and from February 3 – February 10 the product was offered as a free good. During that week, my product was featured in a weekly free goods email that was sent out by Creative Market to all of their users. It was also featured on Creative Market’s website in their free goods section. Along with my free good product, Creative Market also featured my shop as well as four other products I sell in the same email and on their website. Before I started submitting free goods, I had done a lot of research and read many posts about how offering a free good dramatically increased a shops sales on Creative Market. At the very least, I knew it would give my shop exposure. After the week of offering my product as a free good, I learned a lot about the general market for my products on Creative Market and I wanted to share that information with other shop owners who are thinking about offering a free good on Creative Market. Before we get into that, lets look at some of the stats from my shop during the week of my free good being offered on Creative Market. 

Stats

The product I offered as a free good was my Neon Bananas repeat pattern. This product was in my shop for about a month and had 0 sales and around 30 views for the month before it was offered as a free good. After being offered as a free good, this product shot up in both views and likes. Views shot up to 12,404 and likes went from below 5 likes to 212 likes. To compare this to my most viewed product at the time, that product had 233 views and 27 likes. During the week of offering my product as a free good, I knew almost instantly that this product was not going to result in a boost in sales for my shop. When I woke up the morning of February 3rd, I went from getting 1 like every few days to having 20 likes almost instantly, however, I had no increase in sales. During the week, I ended up making $28.2 selling 6 products during that week. For those of you who follow my shop updates, you would know that this is a slight increase in my sales as I usually sell between 0 and 3 patterns each week. By the end of the week, Creative Market will tell you how many times your product was downloaded as a free good. My product was downloaded 25,411 times. Another significant increase for me was reviews and comments on my free goods product. I had 46 sales in my shop before offering a product as a free good. Of those sold products, I had no reviews or comments on any of my products. On my free goods product, I now have 7 reviews and 9 comments. 

Why is this Important?

If you read Creative Market’s guide to free goods it says that while most shops experience an uptick in sale, likes, reviews, etc. that is not guaranteed. instead you can expect to gain invaluable knowledge about the market for your products. What I learned from offering my product as a free good is that there is a market for patterns on Creative Market. Interestingly enough, I had 25,411 downloads of my product, however, only 12,404 people bothered to click on my product. Of those 12,404 people who viewed my one free product, less than 1,000 of those views resulted in views of other products and only 6 of those views resulted in a sale. Before I offered a free good, I got a little discouraged as I thought there wasn’t a huge audience for patterns among people who didn’t own a business that could sell my pattern on fabric, stationary, etc. Just the 25,411 downloads alone let me know that there is a market for pattern designs, however, I realized that I needed to do more research to figure how successful Creative Market shops were selling their designs. What I found out is that the most successful pattern products were sold in bundles. I also realized that I needed to make more unique patterns and pattern collections if I wanted to increase my sales. The main benefit of offering a free good was that I was able to see what people really thought of my products and how I set up my product files for use. I was getting almost no feedback on my products to let me know that the layout of my files were easy to use for people who were not familiar with Adobe Illustrator. Just a simple “thank you!” or” very nice!” let me know that people were able to easily use my product. 

Would I Offer A Free Good Again?

My decision to offer a free good again depends on the product. I expect that after over 25,000 downloads of my Neon Bananas pattern that I won’t have many sales of that pattern in the near future.  I would definitely not want to offer a bundle as a free good as it will decrease my sales on all of the products I offer in the bundle. I do think, however, that offering a free good does offer invaluable insight into how I can improve my shop. It also increases engagement in my shop so I would definitely offer a free good again. 

If anyone has offered a free good before and wants to share their experience with offering a free good on Creative Market, leave a comment down below.