I guess it depends on perspective. If you are asking sellers or buyers?
The general public haven’t a clue what folksy is about. I would pick brand awareness from a sellers perspective, hands down!
However as a consumer I loathe the search function. I have given up and gone to etsy a number of times because of just how terrible it is to find anything.
It would be great if the postage times could be in business days and not include weekends please on the order confirmation the customer gets and on our dashboards. Mine is set up as will post within 3 days, however, if I sold something tonight, and it’s too short notice for me to post tomorrow (Friday) I would then have to post it on Saturday or Sunday, to keep within the 3 days. I can’t always post on Saturdays and don’t want to change the postage times on all my items to 5 days, just in case I can’t post on a Saturday one day, and obviously there’s no post collection a Sunday.
xx
More promotion and media exposure. I’m wondering whether to ask buyers where they heard of Folksy just to glean some info on this. A company that’s been going this long should have a much higher profile by now.
Just email your buyer.
Indeed . I always email a thank you for the order and tell the customer when and how I am posting .which is usually that day or the next. It only takes me a couple of minutes as I have the basic text set up as a signature in my email system.
That way they know when to expect it and it also means they have my direct contact details so they Very often write to tell me it has arrived. Have some lovely conversations. Almost but not quite as good as talking to them face to face and I also often get mention of good communication in my reivews so customers do seem to like it.
It would have to be the quantity of traffic that Folksy drives to my Folksy shop. I think that Folksy could do a lot more with going after more traffic through advertising etc and really do more to promote the portal. In the two years that i have been on here I’ve had around 5 or 6 sales whereas with our cousins across the water I’ve had over 350. I don’t do social media promo but I shouldn’t have to really and on Etsy I don’t do it either however I get loads of visits and with a good sales conversion rate too.
Its the search for me too. No amount of promotion on tv etc is worth a jot if when folks get to the site they cannot search effectively for what they are looking for. I will be honest as a buyer at Christmas I was searching for specific gifts and the search threw up so many items not related to my search that I gave up after looking at the first 4 or 5 of pages and went to the other site that should not be named and I wonder how many prospective buyers did the same.
Honest answer: rebranding. Anything ‘-sy’ will just be seen as a rip-off of another site.
I have to admit I’ve never liked the idea of having pictures of makers on the home-page (nothing against the makers themselves!!) as the selection isn’t exactly diverse and the photos themselves aren’t necessarily the most polished. I find it better to stick to good product photography.
in fact, curation of shops would be a plus.
the search facility please
Promotion, promotion, promotion…please x
@OhhhWhatAYarn I have been known to pop across and use the search on the other site then come back to see if the seller has a shop here… but no ‘normal’ buyer is going to do that!
Gosh, it’s a toss up between rogue shops and promotion. I understand how much advertising costs, so it’s hard to know how to push that without a massive increase in our fees (which I think are very reasonable!) So I think I wish there was a better way to vet rogue shops as they make us all look bad.
Agree with all the posters saying they wish the Folksy name was more well known, but I am a newbie here (since last October) and I don’t know how that can be fixed apart from me and other sellers working hard to spread the word on my social media
For me its the search function, and re-designing the button to make it obvious that one is for items and the other is for shops. That confused me for years!! ( tho not too hard to do that )
As a Folksy buyer it would be the search facility as I wanted to buy Christmas gifts from Folksy this year but the search results seemed to throw up far too many random things and I gave up.
As a seller it would be promotion though I appreciate you have been making efforts with this with setting up Folksy Local on social media.
Sorry that’s two things but from different perspectives!
My biggest problem with Folksy over the years has always been lack of sales compared to other sites. I don’t know what needs to be done to fix that. Is it real paid for advertising rather than just social media and word of mouth? Or is it fixing the search facility so customers can find what they are looking for when they get here? Whatever it is, THAT is what needs to be fixed. Everything else is just tinkering around the edges.
The search / filtering functions for me - both for items & shops. No point in promoting to bring customers here when they can’t find what they’re looking for!
The shop search function only really works if you know the exact shop name or sellers name.
I know there is an ongoing issue with the search function which has been dragging on for a while now. The workaround is to use the filters - but these only let you drill down so far, & once you get to the bottom level of the categories (i.e. Jewellery>pendants) you will only see the most popular categories. So if your item is in one of the smaller categories then it’s as if the item isn’t there.
We add tags for colour & materials so would be great if those were filterable options, & if the filters were available at shop level too. Also if we’re pushing Folksy Local then it would make sense to be able to filter by region!
Looks like it’s pretty much neck and neck with promotion and search facility at the moment! But as some have pointed out, you can’t really function well with one without the other it seems…
I do that too if I can 