Cheap Beads For Making Jewelry

When you buy as many jewelry beads online as I do, you often learn how to spot a good deal when you see one. I often look for the cheapest price per bead when I’m comparative shopping a different online jewelry supply sites, but lately I’ve been paying a lot more attention to online beading stores that offer free or discounted shipping.

Shipping charges can be especially expensive if you’re only ordering a small number of beads. I once ordered $10.00 worth of beads and jewelry supplies (seed beads) through a website and ended up paying $8.50 just to ship them! That means my cost per piece nearly doubled by the time my order was complete.

There are, however, some quality jewelry supply websites that offer free or incredibly inexpensive shipping on a regular basis, and those are online beads stores I find myself going back to more and more! Here are a few:

Artbeads.com – FREE shipping with no minimum order: I don’t know if this was always the case or not, but Artbeads.com now offers free standard shipping on any order for the United States. That means that you can buy $1.00 worth of beading supplies and, as long as you don’t mind a short wait, you’ll get it shipped to you for free! They also offer free priority shipping on any orders of $75 or more, which I’ve taken advantage of a couple times in order to get a jump start on a big craft show that I decided to attend at the last minute. Artbeads is quickly becoming one of my favorite online stores to shop at for jewelry supplies because it’s easy to navigate and has a great selection. They also offer $1.00 shipping to Canada and have some relatively inexpensive international shipping rates as well.

CreateForLess.com – Free shipping on $100 or more: If you’re buying a lot of craft or jewelry supplies, then you may want to consider taking advantage of free standard shipping at CreateForLess. They offer free standard shipping on any orders of $100 or over. This isn’t quite as generous as the shipping offer from Artbeads, so I tend to keep a list of items I need from CreateForLess and then order them all at once to get the free shipping when I can. The nice thing about CreateForLess is that they do offer much more than just jewelry and beads, so if you’re a particularly “crafty” person with a lot of different interests and creative endeavors, then you might be able to get a lot of your shopping done in one place! And don’t worry if you are primarily a bead jewelry maker: they put all their beading a jewelry making supplies under one category so they’re easy to find!

Amazon.com – Select Free Shipping on Bead and Jewelry Supply Orders: Amazon.com’s shipping policy is a little more complex than the previous two examples, but you can still get free shipping on a lot of beading and jewelry supplies. Amazon.com is famous for it’s $25 or more free standard shipping pledge, the free shipping only applies to items that are fulfilled by Amazon.com. That means that if you go to Amazon.com and order a dozen different things (a few CDs, some beads, some house supplies, a pair of shoes) then some of the items in your order may come with free shipping, but some may carry an additional shipping fee.

One bonus trick with Amazon.com: if you really find yourself in a bind and need your jewelry supplies quickly from Amazon.com, then you may be able to sign up for a free one-month trial of Amazon prime. That gives you free two-day shipping with no minimum on a variety of Amazon.com stocked and supplied items. If you don’t like the service, then you can cancel it within 30 days. If you do like the service and find yourself ordering a lot of things from Amazon, then it only costs $79 per year and it can substantially decrease your shipping costs if you regularly order things with express shipping from Amazon.

Remember that “standard” shipping is usually the slowest way to get your package, so don’t rely on the free shipping offers if you positively need something quickly. I’ve had standard shipping orders take 3 days to arrive and I’ve had them take 13 days to arrive! There are just a number of shipping factors that you can rarely control.

But for the price (free!) I would strongly recommend going with as many free or discounted shipping deals as you can when you’re order your beads. That will lower your cost of production and may, in some cases, even allow you to sell your jewelry for a little less than you normally would.

If you make your own jewelry to sell to others then you know how important it is to keep your costs low while still being able to offer your customers lots of beautiful jewelry made with decent gemstones. Instead of lowering the quality of the beads and jewelry supplies you use, you may want to consider buying mixed bead and gemstone lots online!

Check out this fun mixed gemstone lot!

There are actually several advantages to buying a large mixed lot of beads instead of just buying individual beads for specific projects:

First, it’s actually kind of fun to open a package or strand of beads and be completely surprised at what you get. You’ll end up with a lot of beads that you may not have an immediate need for, but in a month or two you’ll smile when you go rooting through your loose bead box and find a random gemstone that you would have never ordered but fits perfectly into the necklace or bracelet you’re working on at the time.

Second, it really is a good way to lower costs while still saving money. Sure, you won’t be able to use every single bead every single time, but most bead lots put together similar beads and gemstones so you have a pretty good idea of what kind of quality you’re getting.

Third, I’ve actually had some luck creating similar bracelets and necklaces using the beads and gemstones from a mixed lot. They didn’t match exactly in color, but I was able to build a whole series of pieces that I advertised as “Unique!” while they all were still clearly made from beads of the same size and shape, just with different and complimentary colors.

If you’re looking to buy some great affordable beads and gemstones at a discounts, and you’re adventurous enough for a little surprise, then buy a mixed lot of beads and get ready for some creative (and money-saving) fun!

I wanted to thank everyone who participated in our program to help raise some money to donate to breast cancer research and education by purchasing bead jewelry making supplies, books and software through various programs. I posted the full results of our breast cancer charity jewelry purchases here, but here’s the bottom line:

Together we helped raise $110.34 in the month of October for the Susan G. Komen Foundation!

Thank you to everyone for participating and please remember that you can always use your jewelry making skills to raise money for this and other causes at any time of the year through many different means!

October is officially known as Breast Cancer Awareness month, so you’re going to be seeing a lot of pink products out there over the next few weeks. Things like pink blenders, pink shoes and even pink toiletries will all be sold and marketed to people who want to have a portion of the profits from their purchase go towards fighting breast cancer!

I was going to turn this site all pink, but I decided to try to help people in a different way: I will give away a portion of all my jewelry supply sales for the month of October to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Here are the details:

100% of the Jewelry Making and Beading Commissions I receive from Amazon.com will go towards breast cancer research during October 2009!

Amazon’s Beading and Jewelry Making Store – 100% of all my commissions for jewelry supply and beading items sold through the above Amazon link will be donated to a national breast cancer awareness organization! Yep, that’s for all of October 2009! Just use the link above to see the thousands of beading and jewelry making items at Amazon and to get credit for your purchases. Amazon.com’s selection is great, their pricing often beats the local craft store and you can sometimes get free shipping on jewelry making items.

I’ll donate $10.00 to breast cancer research for every sale of Bead Manager Pro in October 2009!

In addition, I’m going to donate $10 of every sale of one of my favorite bead jewelry business tools: Bead Manager Pro to fighting breast cancer. I’ve written about several different bead jewelry software programs before, but Bead Manager Pro is what I use because it’s relatively affordable, it’s easy to use and it does everything I want it to do. If you’ve been thinking about buying beading and jewelry inventory software and want the chance to have some of that money go towards fighting breast cancer, then October is the month to go for it!

Sure, Amazon’s affiliate program doesn’t pay much, so a $10.00 pair of bead crimping pliers may only pay about 60 cents in commission, but every little bit helps – especially when that 60 cents could help fund educational campaigns about breast cancer or even fund research to find a cure!

I’ll post a grand total for October’s donations at the end of the month. You can also always makes your straight out donations to any number of different local or international breast cancer awareness and empowerment organizations, and I strongly hope you do!

This weekend I was reminded that you can sometimes get the best beads without paying a lot of money. I stopped in a local dollar store and was amazed at how wide a variety of beads and general jewelry and craft supplies they had on sale. They actually had an entire row filled with things I could use to make jewelry with.

In most stores you’d expect to get nothing more than a few kid’s jewelry beads or a little bag of plastic seed beads for a dollar, but I actually found a lot more than just that in the dollar store. For a single buck I could get a bag full of some sort of turquoise looking glass beads, a large bag of some very nice wooden beads or a fairly good sized package of silver colored seed beads.

They also had a small collection of metal pendants with an oriental look to them and there were a bunch of bags of mixed charms and trinkets of various shapes and sizes. The dollar store even had some off brands of jewelry wire, but I refrained from trying it. I did pick up another cheap pair of wire cutters and pliers that I could keep handy for when I wanted to put together some bead jewelry while I’m working a craft show.

You might have better luck finding some deals on cheap jewelry supplies and beads at the national dollar store chains as opposed to the local mom and pop dollar stores. Some of the chains even offer bulk buying, so if you need a case of wooden beads or want 10,000 seed beads for next to nothing you may be able to buy them directly from the store! Buying this many beads at one time for such a low price almost feels as though you’re buying your jewelry beads wholesale!

Dollar stores are great places to get jewelry supplies and beads at a discount but you still have to be careful about overpaying for things, even in a dollar store. I’ve found that you still have to consider the cost-per-bead to really make sure you’re getting a good deal. Sometimes you can still get some better deals on your jewelry supplies using online coupons and I’m always amazed at the cheap beads and jewelry making supplies you can find at Amazon.com.