Hi!
I’ve just opened my shop here on Folksy, it isn’t my first shop. I’m really excited to start selling here, and I like that it’s UK based, however I do feel a little disheartened about the section that my items fall into.
My items are aimed at pets and their owners; bow ties, bandanas, catnip and so on. They fall under ‘homeware’ then ‘garden and pets’, but then ‘everything else’. It just seems such a broad section, and I’m concerned that no one will find my items by just browsing.
I’m feeling hopeful about sales, but I was just wondering whether anyone has problems with the sections, not just selling pet items, but anything really 
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Thanks for reading 
Katie
I don’t think I would know if I’d had a problem with the sections or not in terms of being a seller, as I’ll never know how many people have looked under a particular section and not found me- if that makes sense!
When people buy from my Folksy shop I don’t know whether they’ve clicked on a particular section & stumbled across my shop or if they knew what they were looking for.
Promoting will work through pretty much all the social networks you can think of. A lot of my customers are directed traffic from places like Facebook, Instagram & Twitter.
Had a look at your shop- the bow ties are lovely. I have a house bunny (and they can’t wear collars unfortunately!) but my friend was looking for a bow tie for her cat just a week or so ago, and she saw a few that clipped on, but wanted one where the bow tie itself is connected directly to a matching (or contrasting) collar, so there would be no risk of the bow tie coming off (which she’d experienced before.) maybe an area to expand in to?
Don’t know if you use Instagram, but there’s a lot of rather famous cats on there that are frequently wearing little bow tie collars and little collars with mini ties attached so there’s definitely a market.
Whenever I’ve gone looking for something to buy I’ve always used the search function rather than gone browsing through the categories so I would say that it is more important to make sure you have the right tags and a good title rather than worry about which category you are in. When i searched for dog bow tie there you were right at the top of the page!
My top tip for newbies (and someone had to point this out to me) is that folksy crops images to square on shop fronts and in search results so when I ran the search your bow ties were there but the edges of the images had been cropped off. You might want to consider recropping your pictures so that the first/ main one is square and people will see all the item when scanning through search results.
Good luck
Sasha
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I don’t think the sections work as well as they might. I find it very difficult to find items I want as the sections are too broad. Hopefully it does not still apply now that we have returned to tagging, only know if i am not on the forums much I get virtually no views.
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Hi Susannah!
Thanks for the feedback! I started out with elastics on my bow ties, but they were so fliddly to sew and use, so I was excited to switch to clips. They’ve had good feedback in my other shop. I had thought about attaching them directly to collars (I’m working on collars as we speak!) but I really didn’t think people would want that, I just thought they’d prefer the option of removing, but that’s really good to know
I use Instagram every day @myperson_lovesme Still building it up, but I was lucky enough to have a dog with 28k followers promote my bow ties recently!
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Hi Sasha!
I know what you mean about the photos. I couldn’t find any ways to crop/re-size/re-position them on Folksy, is there not a function on here? That’s why my jars have got two different photos too, which I’m not pleased with, but they just didn’t fit in the frame well unfortunately. I am planning on having some re-photo shoots soon, so hopefully I can fix it!
Alas no there is no way of re jigging photos once they have been uploaded. I crop all of mine using Picasa before they get uploaded - they have a cd cover option so I don’t have to guestimate a square - also means I can tweek the brightness if needed.
Sasha
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