I sometimes get that when there is an internet problem… a signal problem or website a bit overloaded.
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that resolved most of it still get the blurred banner but ive changed it now. thanks 
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I don’t have that problem but I do have a big problem apwuth selling on Folksy.
Firefox gave me a good possible write up but failed to realise that am severely sight impaired and that I make jewellery. Hip owever I think I have found the way to tell my story in a few sentances.
The newest sentence is, “Discovering hands free strong magnification empowered me to cope with the shock or severe precipitous sight loss. I came out with increased self worth and skills greater than ever before.”
I am actually 86. ShoukD I include that?
I have not been having sales even with Tresstle. Is my work not good enough?
Reading is the hardest thing to do but I persevere with that
Wendy
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I can graphically illustrate what has been happening to my 14+ year old shop over the last 2 years…
… You can see Covid (2020 / 2021) and you can see the first couple of years after I started where I began to build up a very steady and increasing business.
Exactly how does one account for what happened starting early summer 2022 ?
I know it was then as in April 2022 I was quite excited to report on here that I was worried I would miss my lovely sales total of 4000 as I was busy.
That 4000 was over 12 years. Since then, over 18 months, they are down to 222…which is 50% according to my rough in the head calculator. And a Very high proportion of that 222 is accounted for by my lovely repeat custoners (last 2 out of 3 orders are repeat ).
So I think I can assume that my sales are down because my non-repeat customer views are down… I would really appreciate it if whatever has happened to cause that could be corrected.
We had a similar set of problems last year and it related to Google invisibility. It took several weeks for anyone to take any notice of our posts about this.
Maybe now would be a good time to check if something similar is happening now and take apppropirate action…
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I think the drop in sales is happening all over by what I can gather, I’ve also got a shop on E*** which has just over 9000 sales and I’ve gone from having 4-8 sales a day to 1-2, it’s normally a busy shop which keeps me going very well. Even going on the E*** forums, you’ll see a lot of successful shops now saying that their sales have dropped off the side of a cliff. There could be many reasons but I think the main one is the economy and the ‘cost of living crisis’ at the moment, but I think there are other factors too, one of them is that E*** keeps playing around with their search facility and basically messed it up as it’s affected soo many shops. I can’t say for Folksy yet as I’ve only been back here a few weeks and only had 1 sale since I’ve been back but also I’m selling different items here, I sell jewellery on the other side and I wanted a completely new shop for my knit and crochet items.
I hope that this tough period will pass and I’m sure it will but when I don’t know. At least here on Folksy the community is very strong and so much more welcoming than on E*** and we will keep each other going with support and hopefully a few sales too.
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My sales elsewhere do not show the same trend. Fortunately.
Altaira Not sure you realise but if you delete your sold listings then you don’t get a pretty photo on your sold listings / reviews .I always think they make for an enticement to anyone looking at your shop to see what others have purchased from you and pretty sure some of my sales have been as a result of someone seeing it there in my shop.
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I am pretty confident that drop in views and sales are down to…3 damaging lockdowns, 2 wars going right now and rising costs for everything…even things that have nothing to do with the areas of war conflict have gone up. Add to that millions of pounds per day spent on other projects/ideas instead of helping local communities and dropping prices for various things in these troubled times.
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They were deleted when I was on here years ago, not recently. I realised after what I had done and certainly won’t be doing it again. I know better now.
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Ah that’s fine. Some people delete them not realising the effect
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My take on that is that I know that the majority of my sales are as gifts. Of my last 3 orders which covered 5 suncatchers 4 of the suncatchers were purchased as gifts. The 5th may well be too but I have no current evidence of that.
I know these things as I have lots of lovely email conversations and occasionally phone conversations with my customers. Now I don’t know about anyone else but however little spare money I have I always still buy birthday and christmas presents for my nearest relatives and a few close friends. If money is short I still buy them presents but maybe slightly cheaper ones.
My graph is units sold not value
I also note that my target customer base covers an age range which generally has more disposable income so is likely to be least affected by the current financial situations.
PS We’ve been here before :
That topic details action taken by support when they discovered we were correct and we had gone Google blind and action was taken and things improved but it took several months as broken SEO takes a long time to rebuilt. Maybe we are going Google short sighted again ? My own Folksy Stats reveal astonishingly low Google source figures. As the Folksy search is pretty errrrrrr…not very good…maybe not surprising my views are down and thank goodness I have built a lovely customer base and have good webiste and SM links to direct people here.
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I had a sharp rise in shop visits/searches in September - and my best sales month, including Christmas months last year (my shop has only been open for 2 years) - but then plummeted to almost no visits/searches in October and this month so far. Sales too have gone quiet. Admittedly I was closed for the first week of October due to hols, and that probably had a knock on effect.
I hate the new stats though.
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Can’t really call them stats . Not the Statistics I studied at uni anyway .
Statics would be a better terminology 
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Yup - I did stats at Uni too 
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It is often difficult to tell why one shop succeeds and another one doesn’t Wendy @JewelsinHarmony.
One of the main problems is that you need to be seen on social media. Your Folksy shop on it’s own is probably not enough - your shop is like a store front window displaying your work but you need to tell people to look in your shop by having some photos on Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram (or all 3) along with a link to your Folksy shop so they can find you easily.
I’m sure your work is good enough to sell and I think it’s great that you persevere with reading and creating even when it is very hard for you to do.
It might be a good thing to get someone to check your written comments before you publish them as an ‘extra check’ for typographical errors.
In my shop I don’t mention how old I am as I don’t think it’s really relevant - I let the quality of my work speak for itself.
Hope this helps and good luck.
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I think sales are down across the board for most of us.
I still get some sales from other sources like Etsy and international sales from the USA also come in occasionally but sadly much of Europe after Brexit is a no go area for me now.
Part of the problem is the economic down turn but I also wonder if Social Media is less effective than it was. What I do find is that suddenly I get a batch of sales all at once and then nothing for weeks - it is very odd.
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My sales have picked up a bit and noticed that the visits to my shop have doubled. Do think near pay day things pick up then go quiet again.
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Thanks for all the replies everyone, I wasn’t talking about sales though, I do appreciate that we are in very troubled times both economically and socially and am very well aware of the conflicts and the cost of living crisis and that sales are not great, I was merely wondering if anyone else had seen a big drop in shop/item visits in the last week, just curious as to if something had changed that I wasn’t aware of is all.
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Yes. Drop in views. Very obvious from the statics I save some but not everyday.
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I just did a mini test on several of the things in my shop via an incognito search on Google Chrome and they came up high on the results on ‘All’, ‘Images’ and ‘Shopping’, which they certainly didn’t when we were having that problem before.
What’s even more interesting is that they were coming up for Folksy first and not Etsy, where I have the same things with the same keywords (yes, I need to work on that!).
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If I search for any specific item in my shop then yes Google will of course find it.
eg a search for ‘Entwined Heart Suncatcher’ which is the first part of the title of 3 of mine will bring up lots of them
But the point is a customer would unlikely to use those actual words.
‘Heart suncatcher’ doesn’t get me anywhere on their front page.
We only get new customers if they find us either via google searches, and I’m pretty sure google is still the first choice for searches,
or… if they somehow find themselves on Folksy and search on there (and the search is pretty useless in most caess)
or… if directed to our shops via our own social media
or… in my caes by a page on my website which has a clickable page with All my shop listings shown.
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