Hi Susan. I think Support are getting back to you, but yes you’re right that you can currently only contact sellers if you are logged into Folksy. The main reason for this is because we need to have someone’s name and email address in order to pass on the message to the seller, so when you press the button to contact a seller you are prompted to log in or set up an account. It’s the same on Etsy, I think.
Another reason is spam. We recently audited the messaging system and found that about half the messages being sent were spam. This is despite the fact the spammers have to open an account to send the message, but at least we can block their account as soon as they are reported. If we removed the need to log-in, the amount of spam messages would probably increase hugely. The current system is there to try to protect sellers.
The final reason is to try to keep as many sales through Folksy as possible. We found that some sellers are using Folksy more as an advertising page, and when potential buyers message them through Folksy, they are then completing that sale off site. This makes it really hard for us, as we rely on the revenue we get from the relatively small commission to make Folksy a success and continue to support our sellers.
We’re definitely open to suggestions though. So if you can think of a solution that fits your needs but also protects sellers from spammers and helps keep sales within Folksy, that would be brilliant. We had talked about introducing a ‘Make me something like this’ button but again you would need to be logged in to use it. The other possibility is that if we can introduce some sort of variations, buyers could specify what they needed through that. Although that would only really help at the point of sale and not pre-sale questions.
