Thinking of coming back.......a few questions

Shop Talk
1

Hi, as the title says I’m thinking of coming back to Folksy and giving it a real shot.
I did try selling on here before, but I had just started up and didn’t really give it much of a go, had no idea about SEO and didn’t have much in the way of listings, so of course I failed miserably.
I currently have 3 shops on the other selling place which i haven’t really done an awful lot with, but I would like to start putting a lot of effort into one place or the other as I’m not convinced that running the same shops on both platforms is workable.

A few questions…

  1. Can i run multiple shops on Folksy without having 3 different emails? thats what I currently have an it’s a little infuriating.

  2. I have 3 shops because I do 3 different types of crafts. 1 is a wooly things shop with my crochet, knitting and felting, another is full of my sewn items, including CE tested dolls and stuffies, quilts and art dolls. The 3rd that I have recently opened is for items that are more adult in nature, specifically cross stitch and embroidery hoops with swearing and subversive quotes. Can anyone give me an idea of how these various things sell on folksy?

  3. Is it recommended to only run shops on 1 platform?

  4. Is folksy still seller driven sales or have they started doing any sort of advertising and getting the name out there? I would imagine that alot of people would love to buy British if they knew about it! I understand that I need to do some driving of sales to my shops, but I also don’t want to have to spend all day at the pc in order to do it.

  5. And of course, hows are sales in general? Is it worth me coming back at this point?

Thankyou for any answers you can give xx

2

Okay…

  1. you still need 3 different emails (I think) but you can set up most desktop email thingys to sync to them so it picks up all your emails to all the various accounts so that you don’t have to check each one individually. (My phone picks up emails to both my gmail accounts)
  2. not my field can’t comment
  3. so long as you rewrite your descriptions you can have your items on multiple platforms (I do, the rewrite bit is to do with web bots as if it is the same thing written they see it as spam). You do need to make sure that you can check for sales regularly and remove one offs from the other shops so that you don’t accidentally sell something twice.
  4. folksy have been trialling some sort of google ads I believe - still analysing the results I think so it is still very much seller driven sales but I think that the revisions to the search engine and the addition of tags makes it easier to pick up browsers.
  5. My sales are on the up (and not because of any promotion on my part) but I am operating in a different category so it might be different in the textiles arena.
    Hope that helps
    Sasha
3

Just a thought, but do you really need 3 separate shops? I’d agree you’d maybe need 2 as the more adult-type items may need to be separate but as for your knitted, felted and sewn items, these would all sit quite well together in a single shop. There are quite a few shops on here that include all these types of items under one umbrella. It may be something to consider to make things a little easier. Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide.

4

I always thought you needed one email address for each shop but I have 2 shops (only one active at the moment) and seem to have the same email address and paypal address associated with both so it must be possible! I know if you want a plus account you have to have a different one for each shop - you can’t run 2 shops on the same plus account.

I agree with Helen @PocketfulCreations - maybe you don’t need 3 shops - to be honest it is a pain running more than one as you have to keep logging in and out of them to change from one to the other, which is partly why my second shop is inactive. Can you not separate your items using the collections feature. You can also change the order of items appearing in your shop so you could always move your more adult items further down the shop if you are worried they may offend the casual visitor.

I run shops both on here and on the other side but I don’t list much in my other shop and don’t really promote it - I prefer to try and drive all my traffic to my shop here - and as a consequence not a lot happens over there so I may just let it run down. Certainly unless you work to send traffic to your Folksy shop via social media etc it probably won’t work for you although I believe some advertising ideas are in the pipeline.

My overall feeling regarding Folksy is you get out of it what you put in. If you just open a shop and let it sit there its unlikely you will get sales but if you are prepared to put the effort in its chances are greatly improved.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

5

thanks for the replies everyone, you’ve been very helpful :slight_smile:
I actually did initially have all my items in one shop, but i thought it looks very jumbled and confusing which is why i switched it to 2 shops, then of course due to the nature of my 3rd I just opened a seperate one for it straight away.

6

Apologies I do have 2 different email addresses.

7

Hi Roz
I did the same as you and came back but I still find that my shop on Etsy does better despite, not much promotion from myself. I think if you are running 3 shops, you are making things more difficult than they need to be…