Hi All,
Definitely a difficult one! I wonder whether it might be possible to set a time limit on when items can be relisted - maybe only relist when there is 1 month left before an item expires? This would prevent people from relisting their entire shop everyday but should still mean those like Brenda (@teabreaks) and Joy (@JOYSofGLASS) can continue relisting a larger number of items regularly to prevent them expiring?
Cheers Lou
Im sorry i must admit Joy @JOYSofGLASS and Brenda @teabreaks as Im fairly new (opened my shop in October) this scenario didnt occur to me that some shops would have over 500 items and therefore the relisting is a regular necessity for you both, but as youve both explained you wouldnt dream of relisting everything in your shop on the same day, but have a schedule that suits you both.
I have another oddity to add to the equation. I have a ‘habit’ of closing my shop for 4 weeks at a time and going off on holiday and before I do that I make sure I have relisted everything which will expire during that time and a couple of days leeway afterwards. So restricting to a month before would totally snooker me.
Some people relist to get their listings to the top. I relist to stop them falling out of my shop because if they do expire unexpectedly they are quite tricky to spot later…I know been there got the t-shirt.
Fair enough! Just a thought & the limit could be more maybe 2 months, which is 1/2 through the listing time & allows for plenty of leaway! 
I completely agree with you here and had noticed it myself, would love Folksy to get that changed
I like the idea that Brenda @teabreaks put forward of shuffling the listings so not all from one seller appesr in a block. I would like to browse the newly listed items but to be honest see it as a waste of my time when there are pages and pages from one seller. I have the plus account but havn’t ever relisted everything at once, if i remember i go on once a week and maybe relist half a dozen, i can’t see the point in doing them all but I know the option is there and it is fine to do it and also a perk if paying extra for the plus account.
I think items being “shuffled” automatically as Brenda @teabreaks said, is the best idea if it can be done. Not only for the relisted items, but for the gift guides, search results and everywhere. Putting limits on the amount someone can relist means the benefits of the plus account get limited as well. The same with time limits. Sellers have so many things to do, and most of us have probably found a routine of working around folksy, lists, relists, social media, creating and everything else in between. Customers need to be able to see (and potentially) find the product they want regardless of the shop being a plus account or not. Getting lost in tens of pages with the same product in different colours or the same style of one maker surely doesn’t help. The ability of seeing everything from one shop is there anyway, so shuffling wouldn’t make shops “disappear”, it would just help more shops to “appear” and at the same time gives the variety if that makes sense.
Would part of the solution be having an automatic relist option for items?
This would mean that the onus is not on sellers to constantly have to manually relist items and would mean they get spread out a bit more.
that sounds like a good idea Jessica @thewhimsicalmarbler …they have a box to tick on the dark side, so it would just be a case of ticking a box when listing and it would then be automatic and the choice of the shop owner.
This has all intrigued me. I have never thought of relisting things before they expire! I get an email from Folksy when something is about to expire and that is my call to action. No wonder I can never find my stuff in gift guides or themes of the day - that, together with my shop name beginning with W is probably a big disadvantage!
Surely all those searches, gift guides, themes etc should present a completely random selection of relevant items to make it fair to all sellers? Or is that me being simple?
Gift Guides, as far as I am aware, feature items chosen by the Folksy team ie the guides are a curated selection. When an item from your shop is going to be used in a Gift Guide, you will see a notification if you click on Activity in your dashboard, in the same way as if it has been favourited by someone. Theme of the Day depends upon makers tagging a suitable item with the tag that Folksy tells us to use for that theme. If you don’t tag your item with the theme of the day tag appropriately, then the system does not pick it up and it won’t be featured. I don’t think anything is listed in alphabetical order in any guide or theme, so your shop beginning with W is no disadvantage. @WonkyTowersCrafts
They need to be sorted by something, if it were completely random then it’d get very frustrating for buyers when they go back to a search/gift guide or whatever and can no longer find what they had just seen and might have been interested in because the random results have now shown in a different order, with what they first saw at the top now being near the bottom.
You expect results will change over time, but if they were random that would happen every time you refreshed the screen/click back because you suddenly noticed something as you’d clicked away and have now lost.
It also wouldn’t be good to have search results random because that would mean the most relevant items are no longer at the top. You might make a search and think there’s nothing that’s a good match available on Folksy because the results are in a random order and the one item that’s a great match is somewhere near the bottom, beneath things that are only a part match. But search isn’t sorted in chronological order so that isn’t affected by mass relisting anyway.
I agree that as a buyer it can get really boring when you get to a page full of one seller, but it’s difficult to find a solution that’s fair, doesn’t cause issues for genuine listing behaviour and isn’t going to irritate buyers in a different way.
Hopefully most people intent on buying will also be using search rather than just browsing a general category.
I never thought of that, a random shuffle wouldn’t really work then at all, just wish there was a way of not having pages and pages from the same seller together.
I agree that continuous shuffling wouldn’t work but the order should be random - not items from one seller all clumped together. I’ve just gone through today’s Pastel theme. I spotted 24 listings in a row from one seller. That’s all very good for that person but the sellers on page 18 will, presumably stay on page 18 all day. Who is going to be bothered to search that many pages.? At least the theme of the day presents a random, continually changing collection on the home page, which helps.
At Christmas I took part in the Just a Card online fair. When the listings were produced I was on page 20 something and I stayed there for the whole time, as the shop order didn’t appear to shuffle. I got maybe 2 clicks through to Folksy for my £35 and it seemed an unfair way of doing it.
We are Folksy Plus and restricting the number of daily listings wouldn’t bother us at all - it irritates us too when we see a whole list of items from one seller and I now stop looking very quickly if that happens. We don’t have a massive stock - only 122 listings at the moment but I try to manage our listings and with that small number aim to list around half a dozen a week never mind a day - but I do understand some people with smaller stock items can hold much bigger stock numbers. I’m not brilliant with technology but would it be possible for the ‘system’ to randomly rotate listings under a searched heading. It’s the same issue with ‘theme of the day’.
Seen the downside comments re randomly rotating the listings so accept that’s not a good idea. 
. But it is an issue - I’ve just checked today’s theme of the day and as an example there are 15 items blocked together on page one from one seller - not a judgement on the seller. I viewed the page three times and the order doesn’t appear to change so if you are on the last page (page 18) then you are not likely to get seen unless by a very patient searcher.
The thing about the Theme of the Day is that the 8 pieces on the front page Are randomly selected and if you hit reload a few times you will get a different selection every time. It is only if you click for more that you find they are grouped together in the way they often are. I suspect that most non Folksy seller visitors to Folksy will not be clicking that more button but just enjoying the 8 currently on display which are generally all different shops (except where the theme is so badly tagged that there are only 20 items included 
).
It is the Folksy sellers who are more likely to click I would imagine.
Couldn’t sellers just list a couple of items for the theme of the day? Like with my favourite piece which is only one item. Much easier to see the items and the shop. I think that would be better than unlimited as I just looked for my items got to page 18 and gave up.
But what if the theme word is one which people tag with anyway. I have a shop full of listings tagged flower flowers so no sorry that won’t work.