I’m Katharine and I have recently opened a shop in Folksy (KRoseCreations). I am completely new to selling items online. Like many of you, I have made unique gifts for my friends and family and haven’t just gone down the high street to buy something generic. People have always said that they like my work, but I don’t know if they are just being kind So, after loads of encouragement I set up a shop on Etsy and have been on there for two months. I have made some initial sales and had good reviews, but I am struggling to get myself out there, as I am also new to social media. If any of you have any tips to help out, I would really appreciate it, and if any of you would like to follow me on Instagram so that I can get a bigger following, I would also really appreciate it.
Hi welcome to the Folksy family. Unfortunately, it’s even harder to get sales with Folksy as it’s not anywhere near as well known despite going for nearly as long!
Folksy forbids any mention of other selling platforms names on their forum, so be very careful! Sellers here refer to the other major selling platform as ‘the dark side’. Many of us do social media and it’s still not getting known to the general public!!! The other platform you sell with does extensive t.v advertising etc; Folksy don’t as they believe it’s up to sellers to get their name out there to make sales. It’s a hard constant slog. Just have the patience of a saint and keep plugging with Social media and join the other things the sellers forum have. We all try to help each other as best we can and it’s a wonderful helpful family for any advice when needed. On the plus side Folksy have a wonderful 24 hour helpful admin staff and the system is easy to navigate. Good luck
Welcome to Folksy Katharine @krosecreations . Your shop looks lovely! I’ve added you on Instagram, though I hardly ever use it, actually recently deleted it and reinstated it a couple of times… anyway! I’m in the middle of changing my shop name, so I’m @highlandpedlar there (soon to be here too).
Good luck with the new shop - I hope you get your first sale very soon!
Welcome from me too. I find Folksy very easy to use, and people are very helpful and friendly. Folksy staff are great at answering queries too. I love that it is all UK sellers, and generally all handmade stuff. When it comes to sales, though, I have had very few. However, I do still have a shop on the dark side, though with less and less items, and I get no sales there either! I get a LOT more views on Folksy, I can go days and days on the other one with no one even looking at an item. So I lose hope and don’t add more items or renew items when they come up, which makes it a downward spiral! However, as I add them on Folksy instead, I haven’t noticed a corresponding upward spiral in sales ……..but I live in hope!
I have recently returned to Folksy after many years away. I have a shop over on the other site where my sales have dwindled.
On any platform it is all about driving sales to your shop via social media. I am terrible at promoting myself, I find it does not come to me naturally.
I am on instagram, Facebook and YouTube (mostly sewing and sewing machine maintenance on Youtube) with the same name as my shop, Frutejuce. Any folksy followers I will follow back
Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I really appreciate it.
Keep going, and never give up! If you like what you do and it makes you happy - that’s what matters! That’s what I’ve learnt recently.
You’ve made some really lovely items
Hello @frutejuce. I am very similar to you - I am learning that you have to drive sales on social media these days also not my strong point as I have steered well clear.
Doing lots of research to learn See you on Instagram!
Welcome and best of luck with your new Folksy shop, it looks lovely by the way! Hope you have more success here, though it may take time, the support from other sellers and Folksy Admin are leagues above any other selling platform I have come across. x
@krosecreations Don’t worry, you’re allowed to make a passing mention to say you sell elsewhere, but we don’t allow promotion of alternative selling sites, so just don’t word it like “I sell on this great other platform where I get loads of sales…”. It doesn’t matter whether you call it Etsy or the dark side, we all know what you’re talking about either way, it’s more about whether it sounds like you’re recommending people to use a competitor (directly named or not).
We wish we could afford to do the sort of advertising Etsy do, but unfortunately we don’t have the budget for it - we’re a tiny company compared to sites like Etsy, so like sellers we also rely a lot more on things like social media. We know it can be difficult to get the hang of (especially when they change how they work so often), so we do try to provide information to help sellers promote themselves.
And as you’re a Plus seller, you’ll also find a few workshops and webinars about Instagram that you can watch on our events page - Folksy - Sign in on Folksy
Particularly on the older blogs there may be a few specifics that are no longer relevant (for example hashtags no longer have the same importance on Instagram as they used to, and square is no longer the best shape image for Instagram), but there should still be some helpful tips if you’re just getting started, particularly with things like content ideas.
That’s great! Thank you Kim. The support from Folksy and other shop owners has been fab so far.
I was fully aware of your standing on advertising before I joined, so please don’t worry about that - or other people sending slightly negative messages about that. At the end of the day, if you want your business to work, you have to put the effort in yourself and not expect others to get sales for you
Thanks for the blogs, I will have a look at those. It will take me a while to get up to speed with all these avenues, but I’ll get there.
Thanks for clarifying about mentioning other sites, that is helpful as no one wants to break the rules.
One of the beauties of Folksy is that it is small, homely and personable. I, for one, and I guess there are many others of the same mind, would not want it to become large, impersonal, badly regulated, hard to negotiate, plastered in gimmicks, favouring large successful shops and “best selling” ( and therefore repeatable, not one off, items), etc etc etc. Those are some of the multitude of reasons many leave Etsy and prefer Folksy. And, yes, the downside (that’s probably too strong a word) is that a small concern cannot afford advertising on a scale to match larger sites.
But, is it worth Folksy considering any small scale local advertising? Perhaps as basic as providing posters people can print off and put in their window, coupled with Folksy sending matching posters to local libraries, town halls etc. Maybe targeting a different area of the country each month to spread the cost? If the cost wasn’t prohibitive, maybe coordinating with a small matching internal advert in the local bus just for a month (Google tells me about £100) .
……. Or suppose every Folksy shop owner delivered 50 flyers in a road in their locality. I don’t know how many Folksy shops there are, but say there are 1000, that would mean that Folksy’s name would be spread to 50,000 households!
Edited: just looked and it says there are about 13,000 ! That’s 650,000 households reached if each one does a mere 50.
I love @samazama‘s idea of the leaflets, I used to do a market where all stall holders took home a bundle of leaflets to distribute ready for the following month. It would be amazing if everyone took part. But from my observations the majority of the shop owners don’t even bother to get behind Folksy’s social media posts with a like or a share, I can’t imagine they would be up for walking up and down their street with a few leaflets.
I think you are right, it probably wasn’t very practical!
But I was just trying to introduce the idea that even if Folksy can’t finance large scale advertising, which is quite understandable, it doesn’t mean that small, even very very small, scale advertising isn’t worth it.
With the general policy of people doing their own advertising ie promoting their own shops it means that yes, that is what will happen - individual shops are promoted and hopefully draw people in to look and maybe buy - but do those people go on to look at Folksy as a whole? Would they go to Folksy for something completely different, or just return to that one shop if they again wanted something similar?
We all love it when one of our items appears on Folksy’s front page for some reason - in a gift guide, popular right now, or whatever, but I often wonder how many people actually land on that front page? Other than those very familiar with Folksy already. On other words how many people come across “Folksy.com" ( not a specific shop or a link to an item) and think “ I’ll have a look at that”. Likewise, I guess people only like or share Folksy’s social media posts if they already know about Folksy.
So it is this initial getting Folksy’s name out there that is missing, to tempt those that have never heard of it, and aren’t specifically looking for a particular item, to have a browse.
And if that can’t be done on a huge Etsylike scale (which we know is too expensive and I wouldn’t want anyway) then maybe there are other small, or very small, avenues that could be explored. Just because a million people cant be told about Folksy it must still be better to tell 100 people than none. And because Folksy is such a good site, the word should spread.
So, after loads of encouragement I set up a shop on Etsy and have been on there for two months. I have made some initial sales and had good reviews, but I am struggling to get myself out there, as I am also new to social media. If any of you have any tips to help out, I would really appreciate it, and if any of you would like to follow me on Instagram so that I can get a bigger following, I would also really appreciate it.
Rapped knuckles already!!
. Your shop looks lovely! I’ve added you on Instagram, though I hardly ever use it, actually recently deleted it and reinstated it a couple of times… anyway! I’m in the middle of changing my shop name, so I’m 
also not my strong point as I have steered well clear.