15 Things to Make and Sell Online
Last updated: July 2026
Quick Answer: The Best Things to Make and Sell Online Right Now
If you only read one section, read this one. Based on current marketplace demand, the strongest options for a new seller in Canada are handmade jewelry, soy candles, bath and beauty products, printable planners, and print-on-demand apparel. Each one has a low barrier to entry, a home-based production setup, and an established buyer audience on Etsy, Shopify, or a WooCommerce store. Digital goods like printables and templates need no shipping at all, which matters if you are testing an idea around a day job.
Comparison Table: 15 Things to Make and Sell Online
| Product | Startup Cost (CAD) | Typical Margin | Best Platform | Shipping Needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handmade jewelry | $50 to $400 | 50-70% | Etsy | Yes, small parcel |
| Soy candles | $300 to $1,500 | 60-75% | Etsy, Shopify | Yes |
| Bath bombs and soap | $150 to $600 | 50-70% | Etsy | Yes |
| Digital planners | Under $100 | 85-90% | Etsy, Gumroad | No |
| Printable wall art | Under $100 | 80-90% | Etsy, Shopify | No |
| Print-on-demand t-shirts | Under $50 | 20-40% | Shopify, Etsy | Handled by POD partner |
| Custom phone cases | Under $100 | 40-60% | Shopify, TikTok Shop | Handled by POD partner |
| Stickers | $150 to $1,100 | 50-67% | Etsy, Redbubble | Yes, low cost |
| Tote bags | Under $200 | 40-60% | Etsy, Shopify | Yes |
| Resin coasters and trays | $100 to $500 | 50-70% | Etsy | Yes |
| Pet accessories | $100 to $400 | 40-60% | Etsy, Shopify | Yes |
| Wooden decor | $300 to $2,000 | 40-65% | Etsy, craft fairs | Yes, freight for large pieces |
| Digital courses or templates | Under $200 | 85-95% | Own site, WooCommerce | No |
| Gift boxes and subscription boxes | $400 to $1,500 | 35-55% | Shopify | Yes |
| Greeting cards and stationery | Under $200 | 60-80% | Etsy | Yes, low cost |
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Best For Matrix: Match the Product to Your Situation
- No budget for supplies: digital planners, printable wall art, or a digital product built around your own expertise.
- You already sew, knit, or work with wood: tote bags, wooden decor, or knitted items using skills you have today.
- You want the fastest path to your first sale: stickers or greeting cards, since both are cheap to produce and easy to bundle.
- You want a gift-driven, repeat-purchase business: candles, personalized mugs, or pet accessories.
- You want to scale past a one-person shop: print-on-demand apparel or a WooCommerce store built around a digital product line, since neither depends on your own hands to fulfill every order.
Handmade Jewelry
Jewelry remains one of the most reliable things to make and sell online because material costs stay low while perceived value stays high. Polymer clay earrings, wire-wrapped rings, and beaded bracelets can be produced in small batches from a kitchen table.
Pros: low material cost, easy to personalize, strong repeat-gift demand.
Cons: a crowded category, so differentiation matters.
Pricing: earrings typically sell for $15 to $40 CAD; material cost per pair is often under $3.
Best for: sellers who enjoy fine detail work and want to launch with under $200.
Soy Candles and Home Scents
Candles combine low material costs with a built-in habit of repeat purchases around holidays and seasons. Wax, wicks, and fragrance oil are widely available from Canadian suppliers, and label design does most of the heavy lifting on perceived quality.
Pros: repeat buyers, strong gift-season sales.
Cons: shipping fragile glass jars needs careful packaging.
Pricing: a standard 8 oz candle sells for $18 to $35 CAD.
Best for: sellers comfortable investing $300 to $1,500 CAD in supplies and safety testing upfront.
Bath Bombs, Soap, and Body Products
Bath and beauty items sit in a category with a global market estimated at over $2 billion in 2026, and they carry a genuinely low barrier to entry since a batch of bath bombs needs little more than baking soda, citric acid, and molds.
Pros: loyal repeat customers, low per-unit cost.
Cons: Health Canada cosmetic regulations apply if you sell skincare, so label ingredients correctly.
Pricing: bath bombs sell for $6 to $12 CAD each; soap bars for $8 to $15 CAD.
Best for: sellers who want fast production cycles and don’t mind following labelling rules.
Digital Planners and Printables
Digital planners and printable templates carry some of the best margins of anything on this list, since you design once in a tool like Canva and sell the same file indefinitely with zero shipping. This is one of the easy things to make and sell online for anyone starting with a laptop and no workshop.
Pros: no inventory, no shipping, sell endlessly.
Cons: easy to copy, so a distinct visual style matters.
Pricing: digital planners typically sell for $8 to $25 CAD.
Best for: anyone testing an idea before committing to physical inventory. If you are unsure whether your own skill set fits a digital product, this guide on turning expertise into a digital product walks through the decision.
Printable Wall Art
Digital art prints let illustrators and designers sell the same file over and over. Buyers print at home or through a local print shop, so there’s no fulfillment step for the seller at all.
Pros: zero marginal cost per sale.
Cons: a saturated niche on marketplaces like Etsy, so a specific aesthetic helps.
Pricing: $10 to $30 CAD per design bundle.
Best for: illustrators and digital artists who already have a body of work.
Print-on-Demand T-Shirts and Apparel
Print-on-demand removes the need to hold inventory. You upload a design, and a fulfillment partner prints and ships each order as it comes in. It is one of the most saturated categories, so winning usually means picking a tight niche rather than generic slogans.
Pros: no upfront inventory risk.
Cons: thin margins per unit, heavy competition.
Pricing: a t-shirt typically sells for $25 to $40 CAD with a $8 to $14 CAD production cost.
Best for: sellers who already have an audience or a specific niche angle.
Custom Phone Cases
Phone cases remain a strong scalable item because most smartphone owners use a case and swap designs more often than most accessories. A print-on-demand partner handles production while you focus on design and marketing.
Pros: high repeat-purchase behaviour, easy to design in Canva.
Cons: requires ongoing design refreshes to stay relevant.
Pricing: cases typically retail for $25 to $45 CAD.
Best for: sellers building a brand around a specific aesthetic or fandom.
Stickers
Stickers are cheap to produce, easy to bundle into themed packs, and simple to ship in a small envelope. They also work well as a low-cost add-on for an existing shop.
Pros: pennies per unit to produce, easy upsell item.
Cons: low price point means volume matters.
Pricing: sticker packs sell for $3 to $6 CAD each.
Best for: new sellers who want a fast, cheap first product to test demand.
Tote Bags
Tote bags double as functional products and walking advertisements. Bold typography, humour, and seasonal themes tend to perform best.
Pros: practical, eco-friendly positioning resonates with buyers.
Cons: shipping costs eat into margin on heavier canvas.
Pricing: $18 to $35 CAD.
Best for: sellers with a strong design or messaging angle.
Resin Coasters and Trays
Resin crafts are one of the more visually striking categories, with buyers drawn to the marbled or geode-style finishes. Coasters, trays, and small decorative pieces are the easiest entry point.
Pros: striking finished product, good for social media marketing.
Cons: resin curing takes time and proper ventilation.
Pricing: coaster sets sell for $20 to $45 CAD.
Best for: sellers who enjoy a slower, craft-fair-friendly production pace.
Pet Accessories
Handmade bandanas, bow ties, collars, and toys tap into an audience that treats gift-giving for pets as a real category. These also make natural add-ons for a jewelry or textile shop.
Pros: emotionally driven purchases, strong repeat rate.
Cons: sizing variation across breeds adds complexity.
Pricing: $12 to $30 CAD per item.
Best for: sewers and crafters who want a joyful, low-stakes niche.
Wooden Decor
Cutting boards, personalized signs, and small furniture pieces stay in demand for weddings, nurseries, and kitchens. This category needs more equipment than most on this list, but it also commands higher price points.
Pros: higher price point per item.
Cons: requires tools and workshop space; freight costs on larger pieces.
Pricing: $40 to $200 CAD depending on size.
Best for: woodworkers who already own the tools.
Digital Courses, Templates, and Community Products
If you have expertise in a skill people want to learn, packaging that knowledge into a course, template, or paid community is one of the highest-margin side hustle products available. As we cover at Canada Create™, the format you choose changes both your workload and your ceiling, whether that ends up being a course, a template, or a paid community.
Pros: 85-95% margins, infinitely resellable.
Cons: requires genuine expertise and some marketing effort to find buyers.
Pricing: templates sell for $15 to $80 CAD; full courses for $50 to $400 CAD.
Best for: anyone with a marketable skill and an audience, however small. This niche overlaps closely with the broader digital product launch process covered later in this guide.
Gift Boxes and Subscription Boxes
Curated boxes work well for sellers who enjoy sourcing and merchandising rather than making everything themselves. Themed boxes around self-care, snacks, or hobbies convert well as gifts.
Pros: can source rather than manufacture, strong gifting appeal.
Cons: higher upfront cost to stock a first batch.
Pricing: $35 to $90 CAD per box.
Best for: sellers who want to build a recurring subscription revenue stream.
Greeting Cards and Stationery
For illustrators and hand-lettering artists, greeting cards, planners, and stickers round out a stationery line that sells well both online and at craft fairs.
Pros: low cost to produce, easy to bundle.
Cons: seasonal spikes mean uneven cash flow.
Pricing: $5 to $12 CAD per card.
Best for: hand-lettering artists and illustrators building a stationery brand.
How We Chose These 15 Products
We prioritized products with a genuine home-based production path, realistic Canadian pricing, and an established sales channel on Etsy, Shopify, or WooCommerce. We excluded ideas that require commercial kitchen certification or specialized licensing in most Canadian provinces, since those add a layer of complexity beyond a simple side hustle.
Choosing Where to Sell: Etsy, Shopify, or WooCommerce
Etsy gives new sellers built-in search traffic, which matters most in the first few months. Once a product line proves itself, many sellers move some or all sales to their own store to keep more margin and own their customer data. Canada Create™ readers frequently ask whether that move is worth it before hitting a certain revenue mark, and our comparison of when a handmade brand should outgrow Etsy lays out the signals to watch for. If you do move to a self-hosted store, our side-by-side on Shopify vs WooCommerce costs for a Canadian store and our breakdown of Shopify vs Etsy margins for Canadian sellers both help with that decision.
Sellers running a WooCommerce store who plan to list the same products on Google Shopping or Facebook should also look at our guide to the best WooCommerce product feed plugins, since a clean product feed is what gets a small catalogue in front of new buyers.
Pricing Your Products the Right Way
New sellers routinely underprice their work. A reliable formula: materials plus an hourly labour rate plus a share of overhead like packaging and platform fees, then a margin on top for reinvestment. Competitive research matters too; check what similar items sell for on Etsy before setting your own price, and resist the urge to compete purely on being the cheapest option in the category.
Marketing Your Handmade or Digital Products
Instagram and Pinterest carry the most weight for visual products like jewelry, candles, and printables, while TikTok Shop has become a genuine sales channel rather than just a discovery tool. As we note at Canada Create™, a consistent posting habit around your process, not just your finished product, tends to build trust faster than polished ads alone. If you are further along and considering a paid product launch, our digital product launch playbook covers the launch sequence in more depth, even though it was written with B2B sellers in mind.
Small business owners in Toronto building a storefront around any of these products often reach a point where a proper e-commerce build outperforms a marketplace listing alone. Canada Create™’s e-commerce web design services in Toronto are built for exactly that transition.
Troubleshooting Common Problems
- No sales after the first month: check your photos first. Buyers judge handmade goods almost entirely on image quality before they read a single word of your listing.
- Margins feel too thin: revisit your labour rate. Many new sellers forget to pay themselves anything for their time.
- Can’t decide between two product ideas: launch the one with lower upfront cost first, validate demand, then reinvest in the second.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the easiest things to make and sell online for a total beginner?
Stickers, greeting cards, and digital printables are the easiest entry points because they need minimal equipment and low upfront investment, often under $100 CAD to get started.
What is the most profitable thing to make and sell online?
Digital products like templates, printables, and online courses carry the highest margins, often 85 to 95%, because there is no material cost or shipping involved once the file is created.
Do I need a business license to sell handmade products online in Canada?
Requirements vary by province and revenue level. Many provinces allow a sole proprietorship without formal registration below a certain income threshold, but it is worth checking your provincial government’s small business registration page before you scale beyond a hobby.
Should I sell on Etsy or build my own website first?
Most sellers start on Etsy for the built-in search traffic, then move some sales to a Shopify or WooCommerce store once they have proven demand and want to keep more margin.
How much money can you realistically make selling handmade crafts online?
Outcomes vary widely, but a consistent seller putting in a few hours a week can often clear a few hundred dollars a month within the first year, while dedicated full-time sellers in strong niches report substantially more. Treat early estimates conservatively and reinvest profit into better materials and marketing.
Related Resources
- When Should a Handmade Brand Outgrow Etsy?
- Shopify vs WooCommerce for a Canadian Store
- 7 Best WooCommerce Product Feed Plugins
External Resources
- Starting a business in Canada, Government of Canada
- Cosmetic product safety requirements, Health Canada
