Interested to know if anyone has noticed a correlation between number of items and sales in a shop and is there is minimum number anyone would recommend.
I think you need at least one page of items, to give people things to browse through. If you go onto the second page it’s time to start using collections for easier browsing.
I’ve about 550 items at the moment - I would have more, but I have so many commissions on at the moment I haven’t had chance to make much stock LOL!
Quite a few of those listings are variations of commission items, which is why it’s so great to have the Plus Account.
Oh, and 1100 sales so far 
Interesting. I have around 20-30 in each shop and sales are rare. I really should try adding more.
I have about 160 items so far.
But I sell about 6-10 items a month.
I’m still quite new though.
Well, I’m just setting up here at the moment. I would expect there to be a small correlation between the number of items and sales, if only because more items = more tags = more opportunities to be found. I also agree with the poster who said a full page is a good thing, as it makes your shop look better - I would be unlikely to go into a shop which had three-quarters of its shop window empty!
I’ve currently got 300 odd listings but that will hopefully go down over the next month as I have a whole bunch of summer shows lined up and they were very good last year. I’ll then look into doing all of my tags, rewriting some of my listings and redoing some of my photos. Personally I think you would want to have a page or 2 of listings, any more than that and you need to have well organised collections as people loose interest (this is based on looking at the flow of traffic through my shop in google analytics). (But before you go filling up your shop with hundreds of items you need to consider do you have enough capital to tie up in stock that may take a while to sell and do you have the space to store it all).
I’m not sure there is a correlation between number of listings and number of sales. In some sections you could have 20 listings which would give you a reasonable market share (eg furniture as there are only ~800 listings) whilst in other sections 20 listings would make you a very small fish (eg jewellery or cards). But within eg the jewellery section if your 20 listings are for higher priced items you stand a better chance of being randomly found as there are far fewer listings (my higher priced items get more views and sell better than my lower priced items is part of my reasoning behind that). More interesting correlations would be between amount of time spent promoting and sales or quality of listings (attractiveness of photos, number of tags and key phrases in the description) and sales.
Hope that’s helpful.
Sasha
Up until about 18 months ago I had great folksy sales, at least 3 per month then all of a sudden everything stopped, I tried everything, promoting, face book, pinterest, and nothing worked. I then decided to change my product, at the moment I have 29 items in my shop and yet no matter how much promoting I do Folksy is just not doing it for me. I do however have the same stock in my US based selling platform shop and sales are nice and steady, I also get lots of views and interaction form other members and non members. I think a lot all depends on your target market, it seems my market is mainly in the US and Canada, so for me folksy is purely just another shop window advertising platform, I am actually thinking of closing it as I just don’t get the sales, views or interactions, why waste precious time trying to flog a dead horse.
hi Grimm Exhibition, I have just looked at your shop, I don’t think it’s about quantity, it’s all about photography, tags and titles. I just took a look at your shop and you don’t seem to use all your tags and maybe you need to stage your products in better lighting. With tags you need to use maybe butterfly cushion, and not just a one word tag, also your tags need to reflect your title, butterfly cushion cover, large cushion cover, vintage lepidoptery cushion. if you try to adjust the tags to match the title then it might help your sales. Good luck.
I have 231 items in my shop and I move things around depending on the time of year so my mother’s day and Easter cards and Christmas themed items are in the back of my shop. My winter woolies are mid way through. I will start bringing the Christmas and winter wear closer to the first page around September time depending on the weather.
I’m just over halfway through tagging all my items. I have orders to do before I go into holiday mode for a long weekend so might not have more to add to my shop for a wee while.
I have so much stock available for creating I don’t really need to buy much expect for the odd ball or yarn or the odd reel of sewing cotton.
@bagsofelegance Thanks for the feedback, Im not sure if I can improve photos, but il try in future.
I thought id used all my tags but il go back and check/redo them.
I have a tag question, are the words in tags noticed more by customers in searches than the words in the listings and title? It seems odd to add the same words in title/listing and tags so I wondered which was most beneficial to searches.
@GrimmExhibition I believe that the tags are used by the internal folksy search algorithm which gives them a higher priority than titles and descriptions so if someone searches for red earrings then an item tagged with red earrings would come higher than something titled red earrings in an internal search. However google etc don’t use the tags they use the title and description when searching hence the need for repeating things in both the title/ listing and the tags.
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i can’t believe that good sales are to do with how much you have in your shop - surely it’s how good your stuff is and whether people like it. i can see maybe for SEO having lots of listings improves amount of visitors to your shop, but surely it is how good your items are not whether there are hundreds of items?
I think people will buy it if they like it. Don’t think it’s to do with how much you have.
The more listing though the more people will view your shop.
In alhonesty I think luck has a lot to do with it.
I agree that what you stock has to be wanted and good quality, but I wouldn’t have 1106 salesin just over 3 years if I only had 50 items in my shop 
I agree quality is important etc but I observed something recently.
This may sound odd but I have sold at a vintage market, I started to buy some vintage clothes and took them along. The organiser has hundreds of vintage items to look at, rails for people to rummage through, I have about 10 items hung up. I have 100% noticed that people stop and have a good look at her items, but they walk past mine, like the rail was invisible. I think its clear that people like variety and they like to have lots to chose from.
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Buttonsy, folksy’s best seller, doesn’t have pages of items - they have one page of designs but several of each design.
This is what i was thinking of i suppose - that perhaps you don’t necessarily need lots of different products, just a core group of quality products.
They have lots of sales, but maybe they focus on each item and then sell multiples of them.
Yes, if people do quantities of the same item they don’t need to list so much, but many sellers on here do unique items.
Using @GrimmExhibition’s example - perhaps if they had a rail full of multiples of the the 10 items of clothing, maybe in a variety of sizes (not possible, I know, with vintage) - then people would have stopped to browse more.
I really don’t see what the issue is with sellers who have lots of listings? That’s the wonderful thing about Folksy - the diversity and variety of the sellers. Who says we all have to follow the same format?
But it IS logical that if you list 10 items, all hand made and unique, and therefore not listed as multiples, then at any one time your maximum sales opportunity is 10. And if you can only list one or two items a week, you won’t get huge sales figures. This doesn’t matter if you’re crafting for fun,but don;t forget a lot of us in here are doing this for our living, therefore we want to maximise our sales opportunities. With me, I spend tome creating paintings and drawings, and if I then used the images to print cards etc as well as selling the original, it makes perfectly good business sense, and I don;t see why anyone should criticise my decision to do that when it’s my sole income.
I have 24 at the moment.
I don’t have a problem with people having hundreds of items listed (I can’t understand why anyone would!) but when advice is always “list more items” as it is on the other site, it gets a bit tiring. Some things take a while to make, like yarn from scratch, and if you are not doing this full time then it is probably not always possible to simply magic up a few more things to put in your shop.
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