Here’s an update about how things are looking at Folksy. As our first one covered the 4-month period of January to April 2023, this one is going to follow on directly from that and look at what’s been happening between May and August 2023 (again four months).
Headlines:
262k - the average number of (unique) visitors a month between May and August - that’s an over a quarter of a million visitors a month
3.12% - increase in the number of orders (May-Aug, year-on-year)
17% - increase in order revenue, year-on-year
orders up 35% in August 2023 vs August 2022
Taken all together, the last four months have been really encouraging and we’re feeling cautiously optimistic about the Christmas sales season. Overall the number of orders between May and August 2023 was up 3%, year on year. Interestingly, the revenue from sales was significantly higher - up 17% over the four months (up 16% in June; 19% in July and 49% in August). This continues the trend we have been observing: that people are still being careful about how often they are buying, but when they do, they are spending more.
May was the exception. Although May is typically one of the slowest months in terms of sales, as there are no big shopping occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or Easter, this year we saw a big dip in the number of orders - down 25% compared with May 2022. However, last year May was our best month for sales (excluding the Christmas period) due to the success of our online Spring Market, which we held on 14-15 May 2022. This demonstrates just how effective these shopping events can be in driving sales, and suggests we should be planning in more events like this, particularly in the quieter months when there is no other shopping occasion in the calendar to lift sales.
This was part of our reasoning behind holding the Summer Exhibition in August: to combat the traditional lull in online sales during the summer months, when people go away (and many sellers switch on holiday mode). We were really proud of how the show turned out, and really happy with the response to both this and the Folksy Fringe. We felt both did an incredible job of showcasing the tremendous talent on Folksy, and also allowed us to trial alternative ways to display work, which we can incorporate elsewhere on the site. We’re now planning to run these events annually and possibly also introduce a judging panel and prizes for the Summer Exhibition - which should be a great opportunity to get some good PR. Thank you to everyone who took part, shared and talked about both events. The increase in visitors and sales we saw during August is testament to the buzz you all helped us create.
This wasn’t the only big thing that happened in August. This story about Etsy broke on BBC News on 31st July, and the social media coverage plus the other news stories that followed led to an enormous increase in visitors to Folksy (a 57% increase in August yoy) and an exciting influx of new sellers too. Welcome everyone and thank you for taking that leap of faith and trusting us. We’re working really hard to make sure we live up to people’s expectations and also keep Folksy dedicated to handmade.
Speaking of which, we introduced several new features:
- Royal Mail Click & Drop
- New Shopkeeping experience
- The ability to search your listings
- The ability to upload multiple photos at one time on desktop
We’re also working on a more seamless Paypal integration for buyers, and updating the seller dashboard. We’ll keep you updated on those.
We’re also continuing to grow our online presence and we’re starting to see really good results from the new social media strategy for Instagram, which we started trialling earlier this year. We’re finding that our posts there are now much more effective in reaching new followers, which was our aim. (We’re now going to see if we can replicate the same success on Facebook by creating a strategy specifically to fit that channel and audience. We will report back!) In July on Instagram alone our posts reached almost 47k accounts organically, including over 22k people who don’t already follow us. In August we also ran three social media adverts, one advertising the summer exhibition and two aimed at making the most of our exposure following the Etsy story and encouraging more sellers to switch to Folksy. These helped us reach over 53k people, including 36k non-followers. We have found, however, that it has harder to reach people through Facebook adverts than it used to be, so we need to experiment again here. As usual, we will be running more social media adverts over the Christmas season, testing what works best, alongside the Google Shopping Adverts we already run for all Folksy shops free of charge.
Sticking with reach, we also appointed a PR agency to help continue to grow our brand awareness. They have lots of exciting plans. We are already the biggest UK-based marketplace for craft, with far more visitors a month than any of our competitors (excluding Etsy and NOTHS who don’t focus on handmade and/or aren’t based in the UK) BUT there are still so many people out there who haven’t heard about Folksy and it’s our mission to reach them! In the meantime you can see a selection of the press coverage Folksy has received here - https://folksypress.tumblr.com/ - there are some great features on there, so please do have a look and we will try to update it as often as we can.
We’ve also been really enjoying the workshops we’ve been running for Folksy Plus members - hopefully they’ve been useful for you too. We have some fantastic ones lined up for the rest of this year and next year too, including sessions on reaching more Christmas shoppers, writing newsletters, Pinterest, getting in Valentine and Mothers’ Day gift guides, reels and self-belief. We’d love to hear how you’ve been finding them and what else would be useful to you.
Thanks again for all your support. It means the world to us and in return we promise to keep working as hard for you as we possibly can.
xx