Before the current £5 per month plus account was introduced in 2018 there was a pay for the year in one go type of plus account - that’s the legacy annual account.
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Ah, thanks.
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I received a email yesterday telling me my legacy account will now be going up to £75 to keep in line with everyone else.
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Admin had to make the difficult decision to increase the plus account fees for anyone on the old legacy accounts - you should have received an email yesterday, mine went into a sub folder in my email rather than the main one so if you haven’t seen the email its worth checking in any subfolders your email has (promotions/ spam/ etc). The email had to be sent by a specific date because people have to be given a certain amount of notification of changes to direct debits. Because of that they haven’t had enough time to update the blog post or write a new one. I will make sure that they do that ASAP and clarify what will happen with legacy annual accounts (mine only renewed last month so no idea if I’m good until Nov 2023 or if I’ll be refunded for that and have to take out a new annual account)
FYI there is a piece of code which means that the newly listed items on the front page will only show one item per shop and they have to be genuinely new items or being relisted within a certain time of their first listing. Relisting your whole shop will only affect how things look on category pages not the front page.
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All sounds good to me.
Not sure I fully understand the ‘genuinely’ new listings thing tho @SashaGarrett. Might scupper me a bit, takes a long time for me to get new designs out (plenty waiting in the wings) because I keep having to reprint existing designs which is a slow process & I just about keep up currently (each is like a little edition print). Every time I think I’ve caught up, I discover I’m almost out of another design. Or I have a wedding commission deadline to meet which slows the cards down… (Can’t list those as new for months until after the significant date).
Nature of my work doesn’t fit with a constant stream of new items. Each new edition is a slight upgrade/tweak on the one before, so it’s kinda new…
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If you’re on a legacy annual account or you’re on the £5 monthly account, you should have received an email yesterday to let you know that the price will be increasing from 9th January 2023 to bring the cost in line with new Folksy Plus members.
We understand price increases can be worrying, particularly at the moment (it’s been a hard year for so many people) but this is the first price increase for legacy account holders in a decade and the first increase for monthly users in four years, and it’s essential for us in order to continue to provide the best service we can.
We also understand that the timing of this message isn’t ideal, just before Christmas, but for the changes to come into effect in January we need to let you all know now.
We’ve written a blog post explaining more but if you have any questions, please do let us know.
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My account is due for renewal in October 2023 as I pay yearly, does that mean my fee doesn’t increase until then? Thanks
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Yes, that’s right Joanne.
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Sorry Elly @EllyRowbothamPrintmaker I wasn’t very clear. This has nothing to do with the plus account or the changes to the pricing. It relates to what gets shown in the 8 boxes under the heading ‘newest items on folksy’ (pretty much at the bottom of the Folksy home page, so far down the page that I doubt any one actually sees them).
For a listing to count as genuinely new (to the bit of code that rotates the items in those boxes) it needs to have a listing number that has recently been generated (if you look at the url of a listing you will see a 7 digit number in there - that’s the listing number) rather than an older listing that has been relisted (even if it has been updated in some way). So if I was to take one of my bits of fordite and repolish it so it looked completely different but only amended the photos in the listing that wouldn’t count as ‘new’ to the computer code because the listing would have an old number even though the piece itself is new. For the computer code to see it as new I would need to copy the original listing (or use the add new listing) so that the listing has a new number.
Yes anyone who’s work is labour intensive so they don’t list much or anyone who has a core range of products so doesn’t need to create a new listing very often, won’t get featured in those 8 boxes much, however they are sooooo far down the page that I really don’t think it matters.
I should probably give up trying to explain myself and just stuff myself silly on festive baking, I’m probably beyond clarity of any kind.
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sasha @SashaGarrett does that mean that if someone deletes a listing and then relists it…( it has a different number) and then will appear on the new listings page?..which won’t cost anything if people are on the Plus account?
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Hi Sasha, yes I did get that it has nothing to do with the account price changes. Tho, in a way it does. Part of the advantage of a plus account is the freedom to re-list daily. Which presumably should give you more visibility for those of us who do it? Thought that was the idea of it? Also if you update the tags to coincide with the monthly tags. Think the front page should rotate its hierarchy (or some of them).
yummm, festive bakes…
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@teabreaks If someone deletes their listing and then makes a new listing of that same item, that would be counted as a new item and would show in the recently listed section on the homepage.
Yes someone with a Plus account could do that for free… but it wouldn’t be a very good idea because it’d lose any favourites, and any existing links such as if they’d shared it on Pinterest or social media would no longer work. It would be a lot of work for what is likely a few seconds or minutes showing on the home page (near the bottom where no one might scroll to during that time).
@EllyRowbothamPrintmaker It’s only those 8 listings on the homepage for the recently listed section where older renewed items aren’t included (so people don’t get confused seeing the same things over and over again with them being clearly labelled as new). If you click on the “see more” button, or go to a category page or tag page (which theme of the day is) then the brand new listings and recently renewed listed will all show at the front, so renewing does make a difference in all of those other places.
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Yes.
But.
The old listing will have certain advantages over the new listing - the old listing will have been indexed by external search engines (google etc) so will (potentially) appear in google search results. The new listing would have to wait until it has been indexed by google etc before appearing in google results (that can take a month or so). The old listing would have links to social media (potentially more than just what you have done yourself) and might have been saved by potential buyers on pinterest. The new listing wouldn’t have that. The old listing might have been saved as a favourite by potential buyers.
I’d rather have an older listing with its associated SEO benefits than a new listing which might have a chance at appearing in a box at the bottom of the home page. (there is no guarantee that a new listing would appear in those boxes depending on how many other new listings are being generated by other people at that time)
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thank you Kim @konyskiw …I wasn’t going to do it…I just wondered…lol…thank you for explaining x
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Just set up my annual direct debit for £75. All for saving money.
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Thanks @SashaGarrett & @konyskiw 
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Does the annual account get debited automatically?
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I hope with this increase and with the new year ahead, Folksy are going to ramp up the advertising.
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I thought that the increase would only happen when your account was ready for renewal…eg…mine is the end of March.
It depends whether you are on an annual account or a pay monthly account (and if you want to switch from a pay monthly to an annual one). You are almost certainly on the old £45 a year annual version and that will renew at the higher rate when it becomes due - which for you is in March.
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