If you’ve taken time to develop your crafting, you might be wanting to find ways to make money with cosplay. One such way, is selling costumes. Now it’s not as simple as just “selling costumes” since there’s a few ways you can go about doing so. This guide will teach you how to sell cosplays in a few different ways.
Private or Personal Commissions
Since individual cosplayers will sometimes buy their cosplays, you might be able to make it for them for a price. While they can go to retail stores, they can also request cosplays to be made for them via commissions. There’s an abundance of ways to take commission requests. Commissions can be run through DMs, contact or Google forms, Ko-Fi’s commission tabs and more. You then determine your rates and create a price. You need to factor in the the materials cost and how long it will take you to make the costume. All that and your hourly rate will help determine your pay.
Sponsored Cosplays
Cosplayers are able to get paid from companies for sponsored opportunities. Sometimes this involves creating entire cosplays for them and modeling at premiers or conventions. You want to calculate the cost for these costumes similar to how you do commissions with materials and labor. However, you typically get to keep the costume in the end. You will most likely need to have some sort of following on social media to get these opportunities.
Premade Costumes
You can make costumes and props and then list them for sale. These are different from commissions since you won’t have an initial request for it. Instead you create inventory ahead of time (or on demand) and customers can purchase the set item from a store front. This requires a platform to host your store. You also will have to come up with pricing based on materials and labor.
Platforms to Sell Costumes
- Ko-Fi – This is the platform I currently use for my storefront. It’s a multifaceted platform that gives you the ability to have a store page. You will pay processing fees for using Stripe and/or PayPal to accept payments, but there’s no listing fees. There is a 5% platform fee on all sales but you can bypass that by paying for Ko-Fi gold which is $12 per month.
- Etsy – Etsy offers great SEO optimizations for the platform to help get your products discover. This platform can be a little more costly to sell on since there’s a listing fee, transaction fee and payment processing fee.
- Shopify – This platform can be easily intergrated into your website and fully customized for a unique storefront. You have to have a subscription to use Shopify. The lowest tier is $5 per month and then ranges from $29-$2,300 depending on the size of your business. There is still payment processing fees as well to keep in mind, making this the most expensive platform to use.
- WooCommerce – This extension can easily be integrated into your website. It’s compatible with other WordPress plugins to pair with it for things like shipping, payment processing, analytics and more. While this extension is free, some of the pairable extensions aren’t. Also, website hosting and domain names will have a reoccurring subscription cost and there will be transaction and processing fees depending on forms of payment you accept.
- Fourthwall – This platform is easy to integrate with all content platforms for sales, discounts and more. It’s free to list your physical items on Fourthwall. However, if you decide to create merchandise that is fulfilled by Fourthwall, part of the cost of the item goes to them and you have to determine the margains for your profit.
- Big Cartel – Create a custom store front on their free, beginner plan. This let’s you have up to 5 product listings with one image each. However, to list more you can pay a subscription fee of either $15 or $30. This platform doesn’t charge a listing fee or transaction fee. Keep in mind, they utilize Stripe and PayPal which do charge payment processing fees.