Could I politely request of Folksy support that they also vet the shop links on their Social media posts.The latest IG post showcases 7 sellers with links to their IG profile.
3 of those profiles only have links to E*** shops and no link to Folksy. Perfectly acceptable for the shops to do this but really not for them to be Folksy showcased like that as it is hardly going to help sales on Folksy.
Latest FB post has only one of the 8 shops tagged. The others are named but not tagged so a customer would have to be really really determined to bother finding them to buy from them .
Sorry to moan but when we sellers do Folksy Friday SM type posts they are almost always fully and carefully tagged to the individual sellers even though it takes our free time to do this.
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Once at a craft fair, when I was selling soap, one woman looked at the ingredients list and asked what sodium hydroxide was and all the other sodiums. When I told her she said, āOh, no! Iām not touching that! Iād never use soap with salt and lye in itā I couldnāt be bothered explaining the saponification process necessary for all soap or INCI terms for oils and butters 
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Iām not a soap maker but i know they all need that 
I also think hat featuring one shop on the home page of Folksy for a whole month is way too long.
Many of us put in a lot of work on a daily basis to get our work shown on the front page for a few seconds!
Whoever gets that spot in September/October/November will have a very unfair advantage from a potential sales perspective.
If it is costing you too much to run it weekly, then scrap it and give the space to Theme of the Day - at least then all of your paying customers have some chance to be visible.
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Absolutely 100% with you there. I can see no justification whatsoever for one single seller to be singled out for promotion for a month while all the other sellers get none.
It is also not a good look at all for the potential customers, visitors to this site. If they visit weekly what are they supposed to think.?. that Folksy are unable to find more sellers worthy of being featured and if that featured seller is not to their tasteā¦ well they wonāt come back again will they !
We are all struggling badly enough here with the Google invisibility of Folksy. Spend the time being used for the featured seller to do frequent, daily+ social media posts with lots of interaction which will benefit the whole site.
Why not replace the featured seller with an automatic display of last 8 pieces sold, it would be ever changing (and therefore interesting to potential customers), spread potentially across all shops and would show the sort of things which out customers actually like enough to buy instead of only curated selections which are not necessarily to our customers tastes at all. After all there is only a very small percentage of things shown in Folksy favourites which are marked as sold out which would indicate that maybe they are not the customers favourites?
Apologies for being negative but when I look at my zero 2023 Folksy Motherās Day sales and compare them to the thriving shop I have had in previous years (and the lovely sales I am getting elsewhere) I can only wonder what on earth is happenig here and attention needs to be focused on getting sales to all the Folksy sellers and not on trying to turn this sales site into a crafters exhibition / workshop.
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Brilliant idea scrap the featured seller, which is one person out of how many selling on Folksy.
Like Joyās idea of having last item sold, across the top of the page that would look good for a buyers point of view.
As said we struggle enough on here without one person benefitting with a months free promotion.
Again the curated items are a waste of time as they are purely down to what a few people like. What is the age range of the selectors? Unfair if not a broad spectrum of ages, if all under 30/40 says it all. Tastes differ and know a lot of my customers are older.
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I have to agree. If itās too much work, scrap the feature entirely.
Id rather the site worked better overall, to be honest so if working on the featured seller means less time on improving the functionality of the site, im on the side of dumping it completely.
I realise im a former featured seller (when it was a week), so i benefitted in the past, but a month is really unbalanced to everyone else who pays to have their shop here.
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But Loisā¦ when I was featured for a week, and probably you to, we were not also the main features of social mediaā¦ It was just the front page here for a week and the background article.
This āfeatureā now seems to be taking over as the be all and end all of site promotion and I cannot believe that is in a good way for the future of this as a selling site.
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Agreed.
Naybe making it a simple featured artist interview and a discount offer if the artist wants, and nowt else would mean more artists can be featured again?
I want to sell my blooming makes. Thats what i pay my fees gor. Folksy isnt an online craft magazine. If thats their intended direction, im probably out.
Can folksy clarify what the future plans are? Id really like to know. Weve had rotten search internally for months, little representation via google, an onslaught of fake and scam sellers (seems to be under control now so big thanks all round) and now theres to be intense focus on a max of 12 artists per year.
Im finding it harder to explain why my Ā£75 is worth spending here.
Ps ive got covid so feel ill and am grumpy, some of this may well be unfair, so apologies in advance.
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I think you have just echoed what a lot of us feel Lois, good luck with getting attention from Folksy. I feel more and more that they do what they want and to hell with the rest of us that do not agree. Getting worse and must admit would even consider enrolling with Stripe to go somewhere else that is more seller aware.
Any changes imho should be put to Folksy sellers to see how we feel. After all we are paying the fees, creating , commission, PayPal fees, not to mention paying for changes that are not always for the better. I expect that will be too much like hard work and easier to lose us along the way,
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If you do the maths, just having 12 shops a year as a featured shop just doesnāt seem fair.
E.g. I have done a tally of the shops in the East Midlands, my area, there are approximately 220 shops in this area, divide this by 12 and thereās not much chance of being featured ever. Multiply this by each area, it looks less impressive or fair. Featured shops should be abandoned if there is only going to be 12 per year.
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Everything seems to be a scattered approach, flitting from idea to idea without the fundamentals of a structured business plan. Nothing seems to be thought through with the rigour or governance required to run a successful business. We donāt know what their experience or education is when it comes to business management, but what they say and do gives the very strong perception that they are struggling to understand how to operate a business.
Their business model (if they ever developed one) was an ecommerce marketplace for UK artisans to sell their finished handcrafted products, no doubt born from the exciting idea of competing with E. With all the ill-thought-out departures from that model, it seems they donāt know what they want to be anymore. The time they are giving to those departures is failing the site, as demonstrated by the constant lurching from issue to issue, and the lack of advertising and visibility that this site desperately needs.
On top of that are the technical basics of running the site which they canāt seem to get right. Outside of the Google indexing issues and the site search chaos, there is a significant amount of basic functionality missing for sellers, simple things like being able to search your own listings in your shop settings, a copy function on a product page, placing new listings at the front of shops rather than the back; and then of course thereās the serious issue with spam shopsā¦
Thereās still a banner on our Dashboard regarding fees for Folksy Plus shops during January. Itās now the middle of March - why is that still there? Basic thingsā¦
The featured seller is just another really bad idea that hasnāt been thought through. Their decision to have only one featured seller per month is inwards-focused - centred on the amount of their effort required. They have not given any thought to what is best for all of their customers (all of us). If they wonāt invest the time on featured sellers then it has to be scrapped altogether. Are they really going to have one featured seller for October, November, December? What do they think will happen if they do that? Iām fairly confident it will not be toleratedā¦
Every decision they make for this site needs to be customer-focused without prejudice or exclusionary criteria - ie what will benefit ALL sellers (their customers) which by extension will benefit them and the site as a whole. A cynic might suggest that their decisions are focused only on them and how they can reduce their commitment (while increasing fees by a staggering 50%).
All of these things are basic yet they donāt seem to grasp any of it. Itās clear to me that they need a business coach or mentor, because they are seriously struggling with every aspect of this business.
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Absolutely agree with that too - the newest items listed are an automated banner so it would be really easy to duplicate that to have the latest items sold. An excellent idea and one that should be raised as a requested feature and voted on - get rid of featured sellers completely and replace it with the latest items sold.
The curated items and gift guides are a waste of time and effort. As you say, they are purely down to what a few people like - they are completely subjective and not a representation of our customersā tastes. If they want to persist with gift guides then there should be an option on the item listing to include it in a gift guide, that way sellers can add their items to the appropriate guide themselves when they are listing them. That would also free up some valuable Folksy time and effort, wouldnāt itā¦
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Everyone has made very valid points. Folksy used to show the last sold items at one time.
Maybe instead of a featured maker we could have a featured craft? Card making, illustration, glass work, weaving, woodworking etc. if that was a month long then hopefully there would be enough time to feature loads of makers who are working in that craft
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This is my major gripe with Folksy.
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Keep the front page simple get rid of favourite finds, featured seller and replace with latest sold. That should be automatic and allow the money saved from staff making decisions to perhaps take an advertising stall or advert in something like The Country Living fair to promote to their readers what Folksy is all about.
Doubtful that most buyers wade through the front page, they would rather search and find. If the search is not good enough they walk away.
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Thatās a good idea. A featured craft. It would encompass a maximum of sellers within that feature instead of just one.
I
Sorry but donāt like the idea of any month long feature whether seller or craft. And a Craft would take far far more time and effort than a single seller.
We are Not a Crafting magazine, we are an online store and we need to be selling and we need our customers to be buying and not just browsing for ideas.
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Spot on Joy @JOYSofGLASS. Think Folksy have got to get away from a craft magazine to a professional handmade site.
I know some of my local customers hate Folksy as too much on the front page and have mentioned they would like to be able to search in a shop, not the whole site. The other side has this facility and more important than giving one business a showcase for a month foc.
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I really like that idea - much better than giving a month of exposure to one lucky seller. Folksy is after all supposed to be about āUK handmadeā - not just commerce. You could also feature craft supply shops too. I do feel featuring a craft would be far more inclusive and give lots more Folksy sellers a chance of the limelight and if people were happy to make little reels etc. of their making process, this would fit in nicely too.
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