Changing it can be a hassle, but if you know it’s something you’re not going to be happy with and will want to change eventually, the longer you put it off, the more of a hassle it can be as you’ll have used those details even more.
Just make sure the new name is something you’re happy with and will want to keep, or you’ll have to go through all of the hassle again. Often that might be thinking if you changed style or added a different kind of craft to your shop, would the name still fit? For you it might be if you stopped using the bike in the future, would you still be happy with the name?
The suggestion to get a list of what you’re going to need to change beforehand is a good one, it can be easy to miss something if you change and then suddenly realise everything needs updating (we have seen people with their old shop address in their Instagram profile months after changing their name).
On Folksy there are a couple of ways to change your name.
The first is changing your shop name (which you can do yourself through the ‘shop appearance’ page). This is the name that shows on your listings and in search, and if you just change that, no links need updating.
The second is changing your username, which changes the name you log in with and your shop URL. This is something we have to do for you so you just need to email support when you want this doing.
This is the one you need to think carefully about because it will change your shop link, and the old link will no longer work. That means remembering every site you’ve shared your shop link (often the profile of any social media sites you use), and particularly if you have your name/link (or QR code) printed on business cards, labels or packaging, it could mean a lot to change.
However it won’t mean links to individual listings will need updating - shop names aren’t included in listing links.
We do sometimes see shops with completely different usernames to shop names, even with well established and successful shops (but it does take a little more thought to remember their address as you often think of the shop name first).
As you mentioned, you may also want to change your email address to match, but that can mean a lot more to update (and sometimes remembering multiple places on the same site, for example if you change your email address on your Folksy account, it won’t automatically change the PayPal email on your account or the email address signed up to the newsletters). It can be good for branding, but we see a lot of accounts where shop names and email addresses don’t match, so it’s not always necessary to do.
As we’re here, also a reminder that if you do change your name on Folksy, you need to specifically log out of the forum and log back in for the details on here to automatically update to match.
