Couldn’t agree with you more.
Someone I know runs an ecommerce website in a highly competitive and saturated industry. They don’t do any advertising, and they don’t use social media, but they still show up on the first page of Google ahead of countless other sites selling exactly the same products.
Hi everyone, thank you for your patience. It’d be really helpful to gather some more information from everyone facing this issue:
As I mentioned last night, our overall search performance on Google is up compared to last year so I’m having to gather more information and look into individual queries that have changed since last year to get a better understanding of what may be occurring.
Once I’ve gained a sufficient understanding of what’s happening then I can give a fuller answer, including related topics such as why we might not rank as high as other companies for certain queries.
Hi Aaron
I can show you graphically. Things are of course complicated if you compare year on year as 2020 and 2021 certainly in my case were mega years because of covid and I also have the months when I am on holiday which are usually June and September and maybe a bit of Feb / Mar but those got messed up with Covid and my Bob’s 2019 heart op so nothing compares directly… But this graph shows quite clearly I think if you just look at 2019 and 2022 and ignore the two covid years.
…This ishows number of pieces sold by month 2019 to 2022. 2022 is right down at the bottom…I am quieter in the summer months, schocl holidays and then go away most of September. I open my shop before I get home and Always have orders to post next working day after my return. 2022 …Zilch …first time in 10 years.
Yes I am still selling, I have a lot of lovely repeat customers. I send business cards out with every suncatcher. I drive traffic to my shop via my shop front only website and my SM promotion. But if anyone wants to buy a mother’s day present from me and believe me I have a shop full and all well titled and tagged, if they go to a search engine and search for a Mothers Day present or any similar generic search term they won’t find Folksy and so they won’t find me.
I have no idea when that started happening or rather when searches like that stopped finding Folksy but they used to and now they don’t.
This is not necessarily what has been done to Folksy. More likely what has been done to Google which makes it so unwilling to include Folksy but it is having a pretty shocking effect on my sales and I presume on everyone else’s too.
This invisible Google problem is compounded by the new internal Folksy search. If anyone is lucky enough to get to the Front page their chances of finding something they are looking for via the search are …errrrrrr… low…
If I want to find anything nowadays I usually ask Google but add the word Folksy and tag which is a handy way of selecting the tagged items for my search term.
Sadly it is all those customers out there who have never heard of Folksy who would never think to search like that and will therefore never get to hear about Folksy…
I know that some Google searches at a more specific level are finding things… category level sometimes gives results but if and when it finds a gift guide that is also pretty useless for most of us …as these are curated and generally have multiple items by just a few shops and exclude everything else.
Sorry for abrupt end . Got to go out and just seen the time xx
Hi Aaron
I have just googled ‘hand knitted baby rompers’ . Yes, Folksy appeared on the front Google search page showing only one sellers knitted baby rompers linking it straight to that sellers shop. None of my hand knitted baby rompers showed up yet they are listed and tagged baby rompers, knitted rompers etc. Why did my work not show up on Google; they should have appeared! This is one example you have asked us for.
Like Joy of Glass I send out a business card with every order including my jewellery. My sales dropped once you changed the stats section and the new Folksy.com layout.
I have a lot of my work showing up on twitter as I tweet every time I list a new item and constantly re tweet.
Friends and my loyal customers have said my beautiful work does not show up on Google searches under Folksy. Things are not right. Even if it’s not a Folksy problem the company needs to find out what is going wrong for their sellers. Many sellers are small businesses. We do need to have more visibility with search engines some how as our Folksy shops are a vital source of income. I have spent thousands of pounds on good quality materials and I currently only sell my work through Folksy because it is what it says on the tin ‘British Crafts and Artisans’ unlike the majority of sellers on Etsay.
A lot of the general public are bucking against using social media (including myself). A vast majority of people, expecially the older generation don’t want to get involved with social media. It’s well known the over fifties plus generation have money to spend. They do use Google to search for unique British made products including crafts. It’s this vital clientèle generation we are missing out on because Google is not always showing Folksy.com in their searches.
Sorry this is so long.
Etsy.com was once small! They have worked on building their website to become a household name. I have not said Folksy should be spending on T.V advertising. Somehow they made their name before doing t.v advertising; via search engine visibility. What I am saying is Folksy.com have been around for years yet the vast majority of the British general public still don’t know it exists. I am not a search engine expert but Folksy.com are financially stable enough to improve search engine visibility. As someone has already pointed out it’s not expensive to have good search engine visibility. I don’t know enough on the subject but it’s down to using the correct algerisyms for searches from what I understand. Folksy.com is a first-class site and it deserves to be better known for what it truly believes in for it’s sellers. They have increased our fees saying they will invest more money on becoming more visible. We are grown up adults and open discussion on a problem should be respected. By working together we could find the problem. Someone knowing a lot more than you and I could have the solution for our delema; lack of search engine visibility.
Hi Aaron
I have notice a reduction in sales since the new search function in Folksy was introduced, with longer periods without sales.
I have just done a Folksy search for one of my items (pendant) and came up on the 4th page, despite having 4 key words in the title. Other items with none of the key words appear before mine (earrings, suncatchers).
The same search on google, my item came up on page 4. Interestingly the item in the same search using images was much further down the list (at least 200) and one of my old sold items appeared before the current one.
I hope you will be able to give us more guidance soon.
Something must have changed, I googled ‘Hand Painted Cards’ and Folksy came up on the first page, which is fantastic! 
Although I was very sad to see that none of my work was included in the link to Folksy when I clicked on it, it showed just 43 cards, now I know for a fact that there are far more than just 43 hand painted cards on Folksy, so that is a bit depressing.
As for the new stats and sales figures, I haven’t noticed any difference really.
That Is interesting. When I Google that I get a collection of Gweddus Art which has that titile but with Original as a prefix. Maybe we need to very carefully label our collections to get found that way :
It’s just too crazy for me to be honest, I really struggle with all of this and have come to the conclusion that with the price increase it’s really becoming a case of it’s not worth the walk for me personally……
I completely agree with @PaintedHorseArt, I find tagging an absolute minefield. I’ve just checked the stats for my shop and I’ve had zero clicks from Google since I joined. I’ve used a variety of different tags for my photos and I honestly don’t know where I’m going wrong or if the tags need to be left for a certain number of days or weeks before they gain traction. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
I can’t add much to what has been previously mentioned other than to say that I get more sales on Etsy (which is to be expected as I am not great at social media and driving my own sales).
What is interesting is that any activity I do on Folksy seems to result in increasing Etsy sales - the November Folksy event was a case in point, I got a marked spike in sales on Etsy but only a slight rise in Folksy sales - but I was only ‘pushing’ Folksy.
Folksy does appear to suffer from less visibility in searches (more so than can be explained by an individual shop just having ineffective tags/SEO or the fact that Folksy has less clout than the big boys!). When people search for anything it seems Etsy etc. is the default position and Folksy relegated to the dark corners. I have similar items on Folksy and Etsy with similar tags but only the Etsy ones show prominently.
I must stress that I still prefer Folksy over Etsy because of the genuine ‘handmade in the UK’ small artisan ethos and I feel invested in the Folksy community. I hope Folksy HQ can find out what’s going on and improve traction in the marketplace - I know we’d all love to see Folksy fulfill it’s true potential .
I mentioned earlier that Google does find some gift guides.
EG https://folksy.com/themes/bee-gifts comes up fast if I search the exact title “gifts for bee lovers”
But that is Not the same as a generic search for bees as that only brings up the Folksy curated bee list. I have two bee listings but as they are not in the gift guide that search will not find any of them.
I’m not complaining my bees are not there just noting that the gift guides do ometimes get picked up but that is not at all helpful for 99.9% of us.
Gifts for crafters also comes up But note Gifts for Gardeners does not .
There is a reason for this… how the gift guide is named. Gifts for gardeners actually only shows as Gardener in the URL so will obviously be so far down any search it will never be found,~
So a Good suggestion @aaronfolksy to at least get the gift guides shown is be more careful how you actually label them-- have a ‘gifts for’ prefix and not just the actual theme word.
Now I am sitting here doing an Analysts work to see what is being picked up and what not. MAybe someone from Folksy could be doing a similar exercise while i get on with my glass making and promotion. 
Handmade jewellery UK is featuring Folksy on the first page for me, also lampwork glass jewellery UK is on the first page with my folksy shop but I am one of the very few lampwork glass artists on here.
I didn’t get many sales before the change and the same after so no different for me.
As an experiment, I searched for the same terms in an incognito window and got the same results - Folksy items coming up on page 1 of results.
Out of curiosity, I checked the 2nd search term under the Images tab and also got a result high up on the results page there. But, on the Shopping tab - zero - no Folksy mention that I could find at all. Very interestingly, there were lots of results high up for ‘The British Craft House’, who are a small independent group - much smaller than Folksy. They’re obviously getting something right that we’re not.
I’m still convinced that the answer lies in Folksy’s sitemap and only Folksy can take a look at that…
I mentioned in the spam shops thread that I did a Google search using a tag I found on a Folksy item.
A Folksy seller has put the name of a website on their item as a tag (excluding the web prefix and suffix), so I searched for the tag exactly as the seller has it on their item (also excluding the web prefix and suffix).
Google only returned two pages of results. The website appeared right at the top of the first page, but the Folksy item didn’t appear at all.
@aaronfolksy @JOYSofGLASS @PoppyKayDesigns @Fififoxi
I’ll try to condense this and keep it as short and sweet as possible. I will not be talking about Google ads, as that’s a different topic altogether and I am sure the Folksy team knows what’s they are doing.
I am fairly new to Folksy (I love it here), however, I have had e-commerce experience for 6-7 years and I can safely say there must be some serious backend problems in regards to Folksy with either Google merchant not accepting Folksy, or a similar issue of Google merchant not having a good connection with products / webpages on Folksy. Unless Google isn’t pushing multi seller platforms like Folksy on the free shopping tab - unless they pay for ads, that would explain why the free shopping tab in Google is filled with Ebay, Etsy, Amazon, etc. or very small business websites with good SEO etc etc. But there’s no reason why folksy listing shouldn’t be showing up on Google shopping tab.
For the number of products and sellers Folksy have, 2-5% of them at least should come up on the first page of a Google search (in the shopping tab). Smaller sites (smaller businesses) who don’t pay for ads come up before Folksy.
Folksy listings should be showing up in Google product / Google shopping searches organically even without ads or using the keyword “Folksy”, the Google shopping tab is available to any website through Google merchant, so not showing up there is a huge issue.
I tried searching both ‘soy wax candle’ and ‘handmade gifts for mum’ and no Folksy listings came up for either. Some even with the word Folksy attached to the search.
Try this experiment-
Try Googling ‘gifts for mum’ (or any other generic term) and add any website tag (Etsy, eBay , Amazon, etc) the first 10 or so products will be from the website you specify (pic attached). But when you do that with Folksy, you won’t get the same result. It works for all websites except Folksy.
On the Google seller tab (the tab at the side of Google shopping searches which allows you to view products by seller) Folksy never comes up as a seller either (see photo attached).
This is another big problem - as for the number of products and sellers Folksy have, Folksy should be there. Small sites like the British craft house comes up, so Folksy should also definitely be coming up.
In conclusion- there’s an issue, I am not sure which bit is the issue, but the team definitely need to look into it.
I tried looking for quilled rabbit cards as I have a few. Nothing came up at all on All or Shopping but when searching Images (which of course prospective buyers will not be doing) a few of my cards came up with the Folksy name showing In Stock. Quite concerned that searching for “handmade gift for mum” does not come up with any mention of Folksy items - only lots of other websites - many I’d never heard of.
Thank you Ed for all your hard work in flagging up the issues – it will be interesting to find out what is causing this.
Best Wishes – Anna
Just to add, Google Merchant is a paid for service, so you’d only show up under the Shopping tab if you’re paying Google for it.
My husband tells me that you don’t have to pay for your whole site to be found there, Folksy could choose say the top 100 selling items (that are in stock!) and promote them there. At least having something on the shopping tab would be a gateway to shoppers into the rest of the site.
Again, who knows if Folksy ever do this or have plans to do it…
And p.s. I never personally use the Shopping tab myself and aren’t sure how many people do - my own approach to online shopping is “if they’re paying to promote something, it’s probably crap” 
I accept that I may well be mistaken…
When I’m shopping online a always use the images tab over shopping.
