JIT (Just in Time) is a term used in industry and describes the philosophy that it's inefficient to maintain large amounts of inventory, and better to produce products 'Just in Time' - in other words, after the products have already been ordered, rather than before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_%28business%29Lately, I had been spending a lot of time developing products, in my case, wedding invitation templates, then building the whole series into a kit, printing it, photographing it, bundling it, listing it and then crossing my fingers hoping it would sell. This has limited my time and kept my 'product catalog' too small.
It dawned on me that it would be better to just come up with a design, use Etsy's fantastic new 'copy' feature on a listing, get it listed and monitor the amount of hearts it got (as well as convos, and hopefully sales) and spend more time on coming up with new designs rather than production.
I have been doing this for about two weeks now, and it's a revelation! It's really clear which designs are going to be the 'winners' and which I shouldn't spend any time on. I've already sold one, and it was not a problem to simply produce the template after the order had been made. This may not work for every product type, but I imagine it would for a lot, think of coming up with a quick prototype or study that is good enough to list, but would need a little refining before you can sell and ship it.
I like the Craft Cult feature that provides Heart Ratios to Views, but there seem to be a lot of other helpful tools out there too (see the thread below this one). I wrote more about it on my blog here:
http://www.empapers.com/using-etsy-and-craft-cult-for-jit-deliveryEnjoy!
