I am trying to decide whether to open a second shop on Folksy and would love to hear from others who run multiple shops - how easy do you find it keeping on top of them both? Do you ever get in a muddle and miss orders, enquiries etc?
The reason I am thinking of doing it is because I have a new range of sterling silver jewellery I want to sell, and I’m not sure whether it will fit in all that well with the non-precious jewellery in my current shop. On the other hand, I already have the plus account so it’s quite tempting to take advantage of that and just list everything in there! I can’t afford to take out two plus accounts at the moment.
Just wondered if anybody had any thoughts, advice etc gratefully received!
I have been pondering this question for a long time as I have been thinking of having a shop just for my felted goods. Ultimately I would close my existing one as I mainly concentrate on my felted goods now but would run both for a while. Not sure what but something is holding me back!
Btw if you find you are listing more in your new shop I believe you are able to transfer your plus account to your new shop.
I suppose it depends whether you want to re-brand yourself or just evolve your existing brand. You both have quite a few sales in your exiting shops, and presumably a bit of a following, which you’d risk losing with a new shop. Why not create a new look shop in your existing shop, featuring the new products, new banner etc, and gradually replace the older stock in a separate section so it becomes less and less prominent? You could remove it completely once you have your new stock in place and sell it off elsewhere. The other option - to start again - means building awareness from scratch, but you can transfer the remaining time on your Plus account to a new shop, as Roz has said.
I think it’s hard to devote time to two shops - I tried it for a while on here, but found I was neglecting one or the other most of the time, and juggling two lots of promotion was a nightmare!
I have another shop on here, but its empty. I had it stocked with fabric items for a while but never sold anything. Now, as I have a plus account, I don’t want to pay out extra to list in another shop and begrudge shelling out another £45. I have all sorts of things in my shop now, though I still mostly sell the pewter. I think, now that we have the sections, customers can just look at what they’re interested it. Having a variety of different things may also attract a wider variety of customers. That’s only my theory, though, and I’m quite happy to be contradicted by anyone who successfully runs multiple shops!..
I think what it boils down to, is that I am really quite reluctant to start shelling out for listing fees, when I already have a plus account that covers them! I want to carry on making the older style of jewellery as well as the silver, and I imagine there will be a bit of crossover (as in, silver jewellery with glass beads rather than just gemstones) so perhaps if I got rid of some of the older stock that’s been sitting there for the last two years I might be able to give my shop a bit of a makeover. I can imagine, like @ciesse has said that it must be hard to devote the time to promoting two shops and I also imagine it being a bit of a pain checking two lots of emails, logging in and out of two folksy accounts etc.
I didn’t know about being able to transfer the plus account over though, which is interesting…
I run two shops over on the dark side where I have separated my nutty gifts out from my fairy crafts, I haven’t done it on Folksy yet because of the plus account issue and the same debate issues that you are currently facing. If you were to open a second shop, the way I get round logging into two different entities is by using different platforms for each. Although each has a different email address, because I use internet explorer for one and Google Chrome for the other, it means that it automatically logs into each shop without having to always type in different details.
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