I cant believe that your shop still cant be found Roz. Being directed to an empty shop is even worse. I really feel for you and hope you at least get compensated. If i worked for Folksy i would at least make sure you were being heavily featured while the problem was being sorted. Id put you on the search front page.
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Dear Folksy
I am your customer. Me. I pay monthly fees to hire the shop space, i pay selling fees and advertise your business and my fellow sellers whenever i can.
The people who buy from my shop are MY customers, not yours.
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An update to say there is basically no update and no efforts to fix this mess, is disturbing to say the least, which absolutely matches the situation in the last two weeks.
No significant drop in sales, still a drop though. Break that down to individual shops, because this is what we are, and the drop becomes overwhelmingly significant. Chances of shops and items being found have been chopped down dramatically as we can all see from the “perfect match” search results. Buried in the deep is what we are, if we take into consideration that folksy listings barely appear in the internet search results of whatever search engine.
To also consider all these issues that have been pointed out from the first second of the “feedback” request not a priority and knowingly leave your customers, US, in a such distressing situation for two weeks, while you are expecting the buyers, OUR customers, to trust this platform with their hard earned money, shows no professional ethos.
Most sellers, who are Folksy’s customers, have been promoting the Folksy name as much as they have been promoting their own. Folksy Friday, stickers, QR codes, word of mouth, and in every possible way. Yet Folksy, decided to literally chop off our names, from the 1st point of contact with a potential customer. The search results. My name is Mina and I run “The Sloth’s Cavern”. I am not an anonymous worker in the Folksy factory who makes sure that Folksy will not run out of items to sell. It takes me hours to make a card, not including the photography, editing, listing, and the promotion. Will not even try to calculate time for pyrography or crochet items. So, as a result of this massive effort, if and when one of my items pops up on a search result, and if it draws the attention of a potential customer, I want them to SEE MY NAME. Simply because by items are not FOLKSY branded, they are handmade one after one by ME.
Not even going to mention the vanished shops, that is disgraceful.
I am personally very lucky because I pay the plus subscription monthly, so easy to know what to do at the end of this month. I am also very lucky that my customers can drop me a text and tell me what they need if worse comes to worst. Exactly like they did before I asked them to use Folksy. Unlucky as the search has brought me 0 sales all this time, but at least it will help your statistics. That would be 100% match from one system to the other, wouldn’t it!
I am actually really sorry that you have to come here and face all the music Kim @kimfolksy , when all this might not even be your responsibility. And please don’t take this as an attack to you, as I respect that you are doing your job. It is against the decisions that were taken, the way they were all put into action, and the failure to see that folksy at the moment is failing people who saw it as an extension of their “family” circle and kept it going all these years, despite the lack of promotion.
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This is why i switched to pay-monthly plus. I don’t want to pay a year upfront any more, despite it giving me a nice discount.
I have so little control over what happens on folksy, beyond deciding whether i keep my shop open or not, and a monthly payment gives me that control.
Im not going to pretend im ok with this fannying around with the site. Its dreadful. Im disappointed and feel truly let down.
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Thanks Kim. I can totally understand that from Folksy’s point of view, search:sales might still be converting as expected because I’m sure as a customer I’d usually be finding something I liked from the results that come up from a search. This isn’t very reassuring as a seller though, because the important issue, is understanding HOW to get listings into the products that are returned in a search. So, for example as @KBCreations mentioned, searching ‘gift for cat lover’ brings up lots of lovely cat items - but also an awful lot of bird items, dog, items even elephants and butterflies. I have a number of items with cat in the title and listing text and the words ‘gift for cat lover’ in the tags amongst other cat related tags and yet they DON’T appear in the search. I find this is confusing, frustrating and very disheartening and the most important piece of the search change puzzle that is currently missing.
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Is this a surprise to anyone? Folksy run this place as cheaply as they can. They won’t invest in mainstream advertising. Nor do they keep up to date with the latest apps/website tools that are known to increase sales and bring in buyers. They depend heavily on the sellers not only doing all the legwork with regards to visibility and promotion of Folksy but also as being the main buyers. They say not, but where is the proof of this. Where is the proof that buyers come here outside of the sellers efforts to bring them in? Over and over again we’ve got people saying repeatedly that nobody seems to know that Folksy exists. This has been going on for 17 years.
Is there anyone on here who sells exclusively on Folksy and makes a full time living out of it? There are on other sites, so why not here?
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The shop names need to go back asap.
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I do find your shop in the Search for shops. But I can see how frustrating it is when your shop and lots of others come up as well that have similar items. In my view, only one shop should come up…
But maybe it’s done this way in case a buyer doesn’t remember the exact name of your shop? So they will find you with similar words…
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I’ve just looked at Roz’s shop under shop search and although it’s there when you click through it links to her old shop which is shut. Very frustrating
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This just makes me exponentially sad…
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Thank you for the update, Kim.
Thank you for reading and considering all the points sellers are making on the forum.
Can I just emphasise a point I think I may have made before? That is, please, please, Folksy, think in terms of shops and not of items?
Stats can be so misleading - e.g Stats may show 1000 Sales , but that could be 2 shops each selling 500 fairly mass produced items, or 100 shops each selling 10 carefully and very time consumingly hand made items. So bombarding the searcher with 7 pages of items ( without shop names, and with many shops who stock appropiate items not included) may still bring a sale “for Folksy”, but it wont get people browsing shops. Long term it will result in Folksy losing its distinctiveness over other sites, and small shops getting lost as they have done on other sites, and larger already successful shops losing out if they arent lucky enough to sneak into the 7 pages .
Think differently and encourage searchers to look at shops! That will in turn result in sales.
Thanks for reading.
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Well at least we all know now that we the sellers take second place to the Buyers .
I expected more to be honest, I thought and have always said that Folksy listen to their sellers, that admin are easy to contact and will do everything to rectify problems, that they are there for us, well they have proved me wrong this time.
This is not acceptable, this is more than disappointing, my trust and faith in this site has diminished.
There is no excuse for the simpler tasks not to have been put right i.e, the capping at 7 pages and reinstating our shop names on searches which could have been rectified straight away.
I for one want my name back on my products, these are my designs and my creations they do NOT belong to Folksy, I pay Folksy to advertise my brand, that’s all so this needs doing as an urgency not in another week when folksy decide to do it.
I agree, @kimfolksy we all know you are just the messenger and this is not your doing, but as those who made the decisions to wipe our shops out will not come forward to listen to us it is unfortunate that we have to air our grievances to you.
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Yes Minerva @BelaFarCrafts - it appears in the search but if you click on the link it doesnt go to the right shop!!
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That’s awful. Whatever else is going on with the ill fated new search, they should at least have put this right. Not having a clickable link to your shop is something they should have corrected straight away. It’s appalling customer care that possibly puts Folksy in breach of contract. If the shop you are paying for can’t be found and they won’t put it right… that’s really bad!
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Well, we don’t pay Folksy to advertise our brand because Folksy doesn’t advertise anything at all. We’re actually paying Folksy for the privilege of doing our own advertising of our brand AND doing Folksy’s advertising for THEM.
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Yes sorry, wrong choice of words there 
what I mean doesn’t always come out right… we pay Folksy for the shop space and yes we adverise our own shops and the Folksy site.
@OrchardFelts this is actually appaling and should have been dealt with as a matter of urgency. Folksy need to address the urgent matters first instead of shuffling numbers from buyers search results.
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I asked my very digitally accomplished and digital media trained step granddaughter to look at the search. She is also an online Publisher so knows all about proper presentation.
First of all I pointed out the little Feedback button…which she had of course not noticed. And as expected she had never seen any request for assistance in website design presented to a customer like that before, she was welll amused. She had no idea it meant feedback for the search until she pressed the button…so goodness knows who all these ‘buyers’ are who are providing feedback so it can be analysed before anything is done to fix this almighty mess.
She loved the fact that a search for Stained Glass showed her a lot of the content of my shop and very little of anyone else’s And laughed out loud at the restriction of 7 pages…said she had never seen the like of that before.
I then burst out laughing as a rare Follksy sale ping was heard on my phone …good gracious I exclaimed . Someone must have been in Suncatcher search and could hardly fail to miss mine 
Just the ramblings of a once popular Folksy shop seller who is now astonished when a Folksy order appears.~
PS: Silly silly me. the order is from one of my lovely customers who orders off me frequently. No need to search. She goes straight to my shop 
PPS Forgot to add --Lizzie’s eyes rolled so far when she came to the gift guide her pupils completely vanished in her eye sockets
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Has anyone else also noticed that when you click the Search button, the search page that appears shows the EXACT same listings EVERY time (before you start entering your search query)…
It’s a STATIC page…
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Yes sick to death of seeing that wooden thing top left
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…a ping..what is that sound, i havn’t heard that in a while and as my social media promoting has taken a nose dive because i couldn’t be ar..d I fear I won’t hear another.
Perhaps if we all sent urgent requests to repair the damage they might get looked at, but where is the urgent request button ?
When our bills come in on the 1st of the month we could hold payment back for 3 weeks until we get around to sorting it as it’s not really a priority to us paying fees.
Ha ha of course the order was from a regular Joy, surely you didn’t expect anything else.
@PoppyKayDesigns it is one of the things that is really getting my back up, same items every time and although they are lovely it would be much fairer if someone else had a turn.
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