Is the popularity of handmade cards on the wane?

If this is in the wrong category admin, please remove but this question has been on my mind for quite a while.
I’ve looked at the top sellers list here on Folksy and I was surprised to find not one card shop in the top 40 :flushed:
I’ve only been with Folksy a couple of months,had 7 sales and realise it’s very early days. I’ve sold quite successfully on other platforms and fingers crossed it will be the same here.
I’m very interested though to hear other opinions as to why handmade cards don’t seem to be as popular as they used to be :wink:

I do buy cards on here but tend to go for different designs that appeal to my taste. I think it’s a very competitive area if I’m honest and you’ve got to be niche to stand out.

I think that like me, a lot of people either send ecards now or wish people a happy Birthday online.
Stamps are so expensive now that I personally have cut right back on sending cards. I think Royal Mail have shot themselves in the foot.
If there are craft fairs, the organisers are inundated with card makers because so many people are making them…mainly due to the crafting channels on tv.
If you like making cards, I would think that aiming to specialist ones and ones that are a bit different, would be the best option. People will pay extra for weddings and special dates, but for ordinary cards they won’t spend the money. Where I live you can get 10 lovely cards in town for £1…you cannot compete with that…which is very sad. I have cards that have been listed many times and don’t sell, which is why I now favour painting.
Can I add…having looked in your shop (your cards are lovely)…I notice that you are sending post free…SOOO…I would add the words POST FREE in your title,…that might attract and appeal to buyers.x

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I think it’s probably more to do with cards being low cost items, therefore with the best sellers list being done on revenue rather than items sold you’d have to sell an awful lot of cards to be in the top 40, as opposed to just a couple of higher cost items.

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Thank you both for commenting. I did specialise in just Wedding Cards and Gay Wedding cards at one point so maybe I should go back to that.
I do mixed Media too so maybe I should concentrate more on that :thinking: Lots of maybes going on here that I think I need to have a complete rethink as to where I go from here :wink:

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As has been pointed out the best sellers list is done on value rather than volume so can be dominated by higher cost item sellers. The folksy charts from 2016 (they didn’t do them for last year) has as the second best selling category as ‘cards’ since this data was also based on value of sales that is a lot of cards being sold to get it wedged between a couple of jewellery categories (you can see all the data here http://blog.folksy.com/2017/01/24/folksy-best-sellers-2016).
Has the popularity of handmade cards waned - I don’t think so. Has the competition in the market place increased - definitely, there are over 14000 cards listed on folksy at the moment and I suspect more people are making their own as well thanks to various craft tv channels. Has the number of cards being sent changed - maybe, I certainly have a tendancy to send e cards to my friends these days where previously I might have sent them a card. I think you need to consider who is still likely to send physical cards and for what occasion (eg I don’t send many birthday cards to friends and family anymore (we’d all like to forget how old we actually are) but everytime someone gets married I send them a card).

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If you don’t mind me reading between the lines a bit with your question can I make a couple of suggestions that might help you sell a bit better on Folksy? First up tags - these only work with the folksy search bot and if someone has put eg ‘birthday card’ into the search box it will rank items tagged with ‘birthday card’ higher than items tagged with ‘birthday’ and ‘card’, given the number of cards available the higher up you are in the search results the better as people probably aren’t going to scroll much beyond page 5 as they are bored by then. You haven’t used all your tags so you might as well add ‘birthday card’ (or what ever the appropriate combination tag would be for the card) to see if it helps.
Secondly descriptions - google’s search bots prioritises the contents of the first 2 paragraphs over everything else so if it doesn’t find the search term that someone has used in those 2 paragraphs it goes elsewhere. Looking at a random selection of your cards in all cases the first 2 paragraphs were the card size and envelope colour - useful information but unlikely to be used as search terms. A quick rejig of your descriptions to put all the key words/ search terms in the first paragraph and then have the size/ envelope colour info might help you get more customers in from outside of the folksy browsing community.

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Thank you very much Sasha there’s some good points there that I can work on :wink:

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