It is so difficult to make right decisions every time especially when you are trying to please so many people. Of course it is very time consuming to feature makers in a detailed and meaningful way - however featuring 12 people a year does seem rather ‘exclusive’. Perhaps featuring a craft rather than a maker would be best - for example you could have a ‘spotlight on jewellery’ one month examining a few aspects of the craft such as beaded jewellery, semi precious stones, precious metals, enamels, etc. and incorporating 4 or 5 makers mentioned by name with a brief bio and link. Next month it could be ‘Scented items’, ‘Greetings cards’ or ‘Knitting and Weaving’. It would be a bit more work but it would give coverage to more sellers and introduce a bit of diversity. Of course it may not be practical but it might be worth considering as an alternative to featured seller. Hope you find a solution that pleases everyone.
The problem with featuring a craft and incorporating four or five sellers is that it still means everyone else in that craft is excluded. When you spotlight any seller, you obscure the rest. That’s not equitable. With the number of sellers here, there’s a very good chance of a scenario where sellers join the site, become disillusioned with the lack of visibility, and then leave, all without ever making a sale.
It seems most of us sharing our views here are in agreement that having one featured seller each month is a non-starter. Folksy are adamant that they cannot cope with featuring more than one seller each month, so the best thing to do is scrap it completely, not try another variation that still won’t work.
Using one of your month-long spotlight examples of greeting cards - even though I make greeting cards I would not want to have that on the front page for a month. Variety is the spice of life…
Newest items listed, latest items sold, and theme of the day - all dynamic banners, and all that’s really needed to provide enough interest and variety to engage our customers.
Exactly - and especially your last point.
I love our seller home page feature of “featured listings” as it allows me to present my visitors with a shop front which is interesting, dynamic. Not the ‘same old’ if they make return visits.
I ‘feature’ tag all my rainbow pieces and I have lots so whenever I or anyone else visits my page they see a different, random selection of 3 pieces. It works.
Static displays are boring and bored customers leave without buying.
Must admit I was surprised when I realised the Best Seller feature was a set 4 listings, not a random, changing display drawn from all items in the shop as the Folksy favourites and theme of the day are.
Wouldn’t it be great to hear some more shopkeepers’ voices in this thread @kimfolksy ? Might Folksy HQ be able to post on Instagram asking for others to have a look at this thread and contribute their thoughts and ideas?
It feels like there are only limited voices on this so far and whilst I realise that taking part in forum discussions is totally optional, perhaps other sellers would want to know about and take part in a discussion like this that impacts a big regular feature on Folksy. Just not sure how often people pop in here - I know I very rarely did until just recently.
I saw the craft feature to mean that every single seller of that particular type of craft, would get a chance to showcase…much like we have a theme of the day. Not just for five or six makers to get featured.
Is it feasible? Not sure. But it’s sounds like something new and fresh to try. And it would mean that those haven’t had many sales or are new will get a fair crack of the whip. With a just sold section, which I think is OK, but there are many on here who don’t sell every day/week/month who would lose out on the exposure.
Also, there is a possibility that a ‘just sold’ feature may be top heavy with less costly, smaller items that sell more frequently and as you say, not everyone sells regularly especially if their items are more of a higher priced, considered purchase. Just a thought.
but it would be just a snapshot, a moment in time of last n items sold, random. Doesn’t matter what is there as long as it a variety of things, is interesting.
I have read quite a few comments but not all of them due to lack of time but I also think a month is too long for a featured seller. I was lucky enough to be featured a couple of years ago for 2 weeks and it was definately long enough. I wanted to make sure I had enough stock for the 2 week period which took a lot of work and personally I think a month would have been too long for me.
I do understand there’s a lot of work and time on Folksy admin to sort out featured maker interviews, images, social media postings etc but personally I would rather see more makers featured not less.
The only problem with features by craft is if done by tags, well we all know how that works. NOT!
The latest sold items would not be permanent as Joy said but would be shown as sold in that minute then gradually disappear. So unless no sales apart from one person would move on quite quickly.
I used to love it when they showed most recent items sold. I saw items that I wouldn’t have seen before and went to see what other items they sell.
It may also gives us an indication as to how many sales there are a day on here.
The suggestion was to only feature four or five makers:
I’m another who thinks one featured seller a month doesn’t work.
It makes the front page/ site look neglected.
When I was featured seller we had a small window of changing pictures from our shop at the top of the page (if I remember rightly), there was no interview or any social media coverage. So very little behind the scenes work. It still brought in extra exposure and sales, so was worth while. Maybe we could go back to that.
I actually think there is way too much going on on the front page. I wonder which bits convert best into sales.
Personally I loved it when we had the seller compiled treasuries as the main feature, they were always interesting and attractive, but possibly didn’t convert well.
This is really useful to read. Thank you all for your comments so far. It sounds like the biggest frustration is with the homepage and giving that amount of space to one maker for so long. Is that right?
We do have plans to review the homepage and we may also change how the featured maker section appears before any larger revisions happen. One idea we had was to change it to a “Featured Makers” section, and show a changing selection of products from all previous featured makers, with a link the interviews landing page on the blog where the current featured seller would obviously be top, and retain the button which links to this page showing all featured sellers.
Do you think that would be a better experience for users, as they would then see a wider selection of products in this section?
In terms of how the Featured Maker slot might develop, we want to test how it works as a monthly feature first, but during this time we will review the feature and how it performs. We don’t want to make a rash decision, but to carefully consider the benefits it brings along with the concerns you’ve all raised, and whether it’s best to continue with some changes, find an alternative or remove it altogether.
I do really like the idea of having a featured craft (or genre) of the month, as that would allow us to explore that in more detail, while highlighting more makers in that field. This is an extension of how we were planning to work in the coming months (as we explained here) so it may be that, for a while, we continue with featured makers already scheduled, so we can honour our commitment to them but move towards a featured craft, rather than a featured maker. For example, in May our featured maker will be Matilda Belle, so our featured craft for May would be Handmade Supplies, and her interview would form part of that. Moving to only having a featured craft would take some more work, as we would need to research the best way to display/showcase that in order to involve as many sellers as possible.
Let us know what you think.
Oh dear I do seem to have put the cat among the pigeons! I imagine that from a practical point of view it would be impossible for Folksy to feature lots of makers in any meaningful way.
I think what Folksy were trying to do was give potential customers an insight into what goes into making an arts or craft item so were focusing on one maker ‘representative’ of lots of makers.
From a marketing point of view giving customers interesting insights about makers and crafts builds trust and interest in an certain field, it also means that customers understand why something costs what it does - an important point in retailing handmade items that can be expensive. By changing the feature window on a monthly basis it gives customers a reason to visit just to see if there’s anything new that interests them and gives a seasonal feel to Folksy.
Folksy has positioned itself as a friendly, trustworthy UK company very different from Amazon, Etsy and E Bay - as such it has to promote the ‘small business’ artisan aspect
of the company and what better way to do it than by showcasing some of it’s makers. Getting marketing right is difficult and time consuming, in Folksy’s case you have to please both sellers and customers - and we all know ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’!
It is practically impossible to showcase every shop - when I proposed mentioning 5 shops per month it was only a suggestion, a way to give a few more shops a chance to shine. It can be very frustrating to not get featured as much as some shops seem to but I don’t see a practical solution. If you use the best selling criteria do you measure it by volume of sales or value of sales? either way it will favor certain shops and the same goes for latest sales - the shops that are popular will always feature prominently. By focusing on different crafts at least some less successful shops will get exposure and variety will be maintained.
I must say I’m relieved that I’m not the one making the decisions and hope someone comes up with a magic bullet until then I hope we can compromise and find an acceptable solution.
It really is a difficult choice Camilla (as you can see we sort of cross posted at the same time). I don’t think people realise the amount of time and work that goes into ‘marketing’ and promo work. Good luck!
Featured seller is a problem in any format, you mention previous sellers why when they have been featured before do they get to be featured again, plus boring seeing the same old dished out. The last thing we want is the same sellers repeated let alone one seller for a month, this feature should be scrapped, maybe have a prominent link to the blog for more in depth interviews, further down the front page and certainly not one or former people featured. This gives the same message that the rest of us are not worth even looking at.
The fairest way is the suggestion of last sold items that way everyone who is lucky enough to have sales gets a look in. They are only on there for a fleeting moment but is fairer than picking out the select few. The same for the favourite finds, why? The front page is messy and too much on it, needs to be streamlined to reflect us all.
I’m not sure that showing only people who are ‘lucky enough to get sales’ is fair? Surely it’s fairer to give those shops who aren’t getting seen or sales exposure as well? Hence the showcasing a craft - that way everyone gets a chance to be seen, not just successful sellers.
Having any kind of “featured seller” or “featured craft” discriminates against the majority of sellers by the very fact that it’s impossible to include every shop. You need to get rid of it completely.
Let’s imagine that Folksy signs up to a marketplace catalogue where thousands of marketplaces pay a fee to be listed. Let’s further imagine that the owners of that catalogue decide to “feature one marketplace” on the front page for a week/fortnight/month/however long they want to exclusively promote that one marketplace for. You are paying a fee to be listed but you are being actively excluded from being seen. Would you seriously accept that?
I’m struggling to understand how you can justify featuring a seller under any format or context, above every other seller. It needs to be scrapped.
From an end-customer point of view, please do some research on UX and why visitors leave websites within seconds of landing. The top reasons for a bad UX are poor website design, static home/landing pages, complicated navigation, poor search, and a long checkout process. Having a featured maker or featured craft falls firmly into the static no-no.
Any suggestion is going to not suit everyone. In that case moving on just make it a basic front page perhaps split into the departments sections and no images, sold items, featured sellers, regions etc.
If the front page is flooded with no sales shops that does not look good either as customers may wonder why, perhaps the site is dodgy.
So many variables and hate to say but getting bored with Folksy now as nothing we say is acted on but changes to images on a thread as cheaper! We have just had an increase of 50% to fees, really!