Hi everyone, I have been on Folksy for 6 months now but have not made a sale. My other site with the E**y robber company, has continued to do well with at least a sale a week. I have set up my shop in much the same way and have used the same photo’s from my library so what else can I do? I signed up with Folksy beacause I was getting fed up with the overbearing attitude of the other company and also the charges that just keep on going up. Can anyone see what I am doing wrong on Folksy?
Steve
Your shop looks great. I think that over the last few months people have been watching their spending, so it is nothing to do with your work. Also because you are at the “higher” end of the price bracket, people are counting their pennies…DO you join in on the forums?..some of us are on there every day, so that people get to know us…also do you show your work on the facebook Folksy shop group?..You have to push yourself forward. Join in on the games on the forums…show your work on instagram and twitter if you can.
On Folksy you need to do advertising yourself…no good listing and waiting for the customers…they need to know that you are there x
Folksy has a much smaller browsing audience compared to Etsy so ideally you need to bring in your own traffic/ buyers via social media (facebook/ instagram/ twitter). If you don’t want to do social media then you need to make sure your listings are top notch so that you get found by the browsing customers. The folksy algorithm looks for the search phrase in the title/ description/ tags so you need to make sure you put those key phrases in your title/ description/ tags. Some of your listings don’t have any tags. Many of your descriptions are very short and lack key info like dimensions (compare the description of the DnD screen vs the snake cane). I was once advised to write descriptions as if describing the item to a blind person - search algorithms can’t see the images so this is a good way of making sure you remember to include all the details. (the folksy search is very different to the etsy one)
Here’s a link to the folksy blog which has articles on how to use tags and write descriptions that get found.
Using exactly the same photos on both sites isn’t always the best, because Etsy crop thumbnails to rectangles but Folksy crop thumbnails to square, so if you’ve made your photos to look at their best on Etsy, then your thumbnails may have parts of the item cropped off on here. You don’t need all of your photos square, but it’s normally good to make the first photo of the listing square so the image seen in search looks its best.
Also as Sasha says, some of your descriptions on here are very basic and lacking tags, which means they’re less likely to come up in searches. I didn’t see any measurements on any of the items I looked at either (other than mentioning the original size of the wood it was made from). I wouldn’t buy anything online without knowing how big it is, because although there may be photos, these can sometimes be misleading and it’s never easy to know exactly how big something is just from photos.
Having a look at some of the advice in the link Sasha posted (particularly this page for tags - How to use tags on Folksy) will help give an understanding of how to write listings specifically for Folksy (as all websites can work a little differently) and then if you follow this advice to update your listings a little, it’ll hopefully help get you more views and sales.
I’m not running my shop at the moment due to my circumstances but personally I think a lot of the problem is Folksy not doing the advertising that the likes of E… does.
I know that we need to do our own advertising, social media etc but hardly anyone knows about Folksy, most people I know knows about E… but have never heard about here.