Hello, I am brand new to Folksy and have just opened my shop two days ago.
I have to admit that I had no idea Folksy existed - the only reason I found out about it was by doing an internet search on where to sell handmade products and I stumbled on someone’s personal blog purely by chance which had Folksy listed in amongst all the usual platforms.
To me this says that Folksy is a very well-hidden secret - I thought I knew all of the online marketplaces but I didn’t know about Folksy.
So my question is, why doesn’t anyone know about Folksy? Where does Folksy advertise itself? We all know the other online marketplaces which do extensive advertising and hence draw in tons of buyers, but I have never seen Folksy advertising itself anywhere and I only found it in one person’s personal blog.
What is Folksy’s plan for advertising itself to draw in buyers?
This is really something to ask Folksy themselves. It is a topic that comes up on the boards every now and then (so might be worth a search to have a look back at those discussions). Folksy Founder James Boardwell has the vision of Folksy being David, rather than Goliath and I think the fees reflect that. (https://blog.folksy.com/about)
I have seen Folksy promoted online by other businesses like blogs, and on the Folksy front page there is a list of magazines that Folksy have been in, but if you’re talking a glossy advertising campaign there are considerable costs involved (full page adverts in national mags like Country Living and Good Housekeeping costs tens of thousands - and with TV ads there is not just the cost of the advert slot itself, but also production costs on top).
I’ve read the article you kindly gave me the link to, which is interesting in and of itself.
There’s nothing wrong with being David, however David still needs to eat and pay his bills and he won’t be able to do that if he doesn’t have any customers, and he won’t have any customers if no-one knows he exists.
So you see, you can be the best thing since sliced bread, but if no-one knows you are there, you are simply toast.
There must be 101 ways that Folksy can advertise itself which doesn’t cost a lot of money. The Folksy founders are creatives, surely they can get creative on inexpensive (or free) ways to get their site out into the big bad world.
I say this because we are not in the advertising or website running business. Our core business is creating and crafting our beautiful products, so it should not be down to us to advertise their site for them. If we spend all of our time running adverts on the internet, we will have no time to create our products.
There have been quite a few discussions about this over the years here on the forums and people have come up with lots of ideas for promotion of Folksy. There have been stickers, tote bags, car stickers and were there even Folksy rulers once (or was that just a strange dream?)
I know where you are coming from - when I first joined 11 years ago, other people kept saying you have to promote your own shop and I thought “why should I, I’m paying a fee for being here - that’s not my job” but as time went on, I realised that I would need to do that and drive all my traffic here in order to be successful. For the fees that we pay, I guess there is just not the budget for massive marketing campaigns but I do know that Folksy pay for google promotion (I think, if I remember correctly) and they have had advertising in places like Mollie Makes etc.
I did think of myself as primarily a craftsperson when I first started up my little business but you do really have to wear many different hats to make a go of things. Some of the bigger online marketplaces that have the huge budgets to advertise themselves in big publications or on TV seem to have sold their souls to be in that position and have lost the handmade/ handcrafted, supporting the independent maker ethos.
Maybe Folksy @Folksyadmin, could come along and give us the advertising stats as I know it;s happening - I just don’t know the details!
I might be completely wrong here but as I understand it…there are just a small handful of people on Folksy admin and I THINK they all have day jobs and this is an extra…I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong. They opted to keep folksy small for the UK handcrafters and if they spread their wings and went the way of the dark side or the auction site, then fees would soar. For those of us who have been here for a long time, we like the “family” feel of it here. Yes, admin “could” pay to advertise but then the fees would rocket and this would become like the other online selling places. We all do our own advertising here and we all help each other and help to promote folksy…I for one, love it here and have over 600 sales…and I don’t have Instagram etc…so it is possible to do well…x
It’s an interesting one isn’t it. I’ve just had a discussion about it with a friend who has her own website (not craft products).
She asked a really valid question and one to really chew on - if we are paying to have a shop on Folksy and are also responsible for promoting their website for them, and for spending hours and hours on the internet posting on social media and paying for adverts to direct people to the Folksy website, then wouldn’t we be better off having our own website and using that same time and money and effort to promote traffic to that?
She then pointed out that with your own website you are not restricted as to what you can do, you are not spending time and money posting up adverts on social media and potentially bringing in buyers who then buy from a competitor instead of you, and it is a lot cheaper.
Then she asked - what makes Folksy a better alternative to having your own website considering all the factors of time, money and effort?
I’ve reached for a glass of wine to digest her questions!
How do people know about Folksy ?
If you read some of the many forum topics on the subject you will find that the older shops on here (yes i’ve been here 10+ years) have realised that the best way to be found is to advertise yourself and that is exactly what I do.
I’ve had my own website since 2009 but not for selling, just my personal shop window to here. I have recently rebuilt it and am very happy to say that I know it is working as I’ve had 2 enquiries in the past fortnight since I published it, which have resulted in sales, via my website contact page.
Having said that it costs money to have a website but my rebuild is half the cost of the previous and the most important thing it does it keeps my trademark name for me and me alone.
The other place I advertise is on social media. I use
Twitter (less than the others as it confuses me easy ) ,
Pinterest…an awful lot of the things listed in my Folksy shop are pinned as I list them and as a result I get a lot of trafffic that way (as there are a lot of things in my shop as I am an addicted glass maker )
Instagram…using this more and more and pretty sure sales are coming from there now too
Facebook… had a business page for yonks and I post every new Folksy listing on there (carefully worded to Never use commercial terms and the link to the listing goes in the comment not the post itself). Get lots of traffic from Facebook.
Now Folksy could double their fees and use the extra income to advertise which would undoubtedly bring in more people. but… I have to ask myself… just what percentage of that extra traffic would come my way ? How do Folksy ensure they keep every body happy with their targeted ads. ? Woolly Hats, Baby Blankets, carved eggs, jewellery in all shapes and sizes, garden furniture, knitting yarn bowls, glass suncatchers, greeting cards, painted mugs…
You see my point… some people are going to be missed and they are going to be unhappy if their fees have gone up.
Look what happened on Etsy a few months ago when they shot their prices up… shops moving to here and Num in droves.
And of course the reason those unhappy people are not happy is probably nothing to do with the lack of targeted advertising in their specific wares but might be because they have out of focus photos or bad listing titles or no tags.or even trying to sell something nobody wants to buy (that does of course happen)…
So for me, I prefer the status quo. Reasonable fees from Folksy to cover hosting my shop and I do the advertising which brings people in to it and also hopefully to other shops too.
I spend about 15 minutes a day on my business FB page and my other social media doing my little bit of promotion. That is all it takes.
Why Folksy to sell and not your own website.
In the last 2 weeks I’ve had 2 enquiries / sales via my website. I’ve had 10 Folksy orders in the same period.
Can I just add a little word of caution. I looked at your IG page and see you have asked people to comment with their email address if they want to buy. Nothing would induce me to put my email address into an IG comment where it can be seen by the whole world. You need instead to ask them to visit your Folksy shop or private IG message you.
I do see where you are coming from, and there’s nothing any of us would love more than for Folksy to be THE place to go for quality handmade goods. Folksy do promote themselves in cost effective ways. Very recently the fabulous Leanne @LEAPUP gave up her time to put together a series of animations using items from various makers, that we could all share and get the names out there. There is #folksyfriday to join in, there have been flyers and logos for us to download and print off and hand out at craft fairs, and Moo run a discount on business cards for Folksy shop owners (amongst other things mentioned further upthread).
As a small business, and having worked for other small businesses too, you do need to be a jack of all trades, and that includes advertising your shop to let people know where they can buy from you. And it is tough, and can be daunting if you’re not familiar with how to do it (we chat about the best way we can do it on these boards, supporting each other - it’s one of the best things about being on Folksy!). But like any skill, you would need to pay for the advertising to be done for you if you want to just concentrate on crafting only.
Don’t know if you get the monthly update that Folksy send out @PoppyKayDesigns?
This is a copy of it on the Folksy Clubhouse Facebook page that may be of interest:
We haven’t done a monthly update for a while, so we thought we’d do a summer round-up instead. From September we’ll aim to make it monthly again, but in the meantime here’s what’s happened in June, July and August at Folksy HQ.
Summer 2019 in numbers on Folksy:
The number of sales was up 7.26% year on year
789 new shops opened their doors
190 people made their very first sale on Folksy - YAY!
36.5% of all visitors came to Folksy from organic search (Google being the most popular search engine, followed by Bing and Yahoo)
84.7% of visitors to Folksy were new to our site
59% of visitors came from the UK, 19% from the US, 2.4% from Australia and 2% from Canada
Just over 30% of visitors came from social media
Facebook was the biggest driver of traffic from social media, generating 17.8% of all sales.
14.9 MILLION people saw pins from Folksy and our blog on Pinterest
Sales from Instagram were up 113% on the same time last year, which shows it’s becoming increasingly important as a sales driver. However it currently still only accounts for 6.45% of sales.
Our Google Shopping adverts brought in 10.99% more revenue than the same period in 2018 (these are adverts we place for free for all Folksy sellers as part of our service)
The busiest day in terms of transactions was Saturday 27th July and the quietest was Saturday 24th August (the super hot bank holiday weekend)
We responded to 24% of all support queries within one hour and 52% within 4 hours, which is great considering the number of queries was up by 26%
We made some significant changes to the Folksy sitemaps that should improve SEO (ie help Folksy appear in more searches online)
We added reviews to shop pages and product pages
We made plans for Creatival in Manchester in September, as well as more plans with Just A Card and some of our other partners, to be revealed soon
The Instagram post which led to the most visits to Folksy was our ‘Dora and Hitch’ Folksy Friday animation by Leanne Warren, which had over 5,200 views. All the films were really popular and we’re so grateful to Leanne for making them
We published three free craft tutorials on our blog, as well as articles on how to survive running your first craft workshop and how to style & photograph more traditional products
We ran a full-page advert in Actual Size magazine
And here are just a few recent milestones: Mark from BreukArt made his 1000th sale, Kim Onyskiw made her 25th sale, Maxine Pring made her 600th sale, Angela Finch made her 100th sale, Mel from Bluebell Woodturning made his 500th sale, Suzzie from ThistledownandHOPE made her 100th sale, Abi from Rock Rose Jewellery made her 300th sale and Martine from MaisyMuffin made her 2000th sale. There were loads more milestones too, so if you achieved something you’re extra proud of, we’d love you to tell us in a comment below.
We also squished bugs and did other things too but we’re running out of room here to share them all!
I do have my own website (https://www.bigbirdlittlebird.co.uk) but promoting that as my only shop front would be extremely hard for me as I work full time, and I just don’t have the availability. Plus all the legal T&Cs, the reviews, and other functionality that Folksy offer would cost me more too.
IF I had my own website…which I don’t, I would have to set up a shopping cart, deal with paypal etc etc…Folksy does it all for me for just a few pence…
Also you have to get people to your website…believe it or not…people find Folksy and other folksy shop owners spend with each other too…a lot of my sales have been other Folksy peeps…if I had a website…those people would probably never have found me unless they were looking for art. With Folksy, people might be looking for jewellery, come to the home page and see one of my paintings…sorted x
Meant to say that the main reason, apart from wanting to reserve my Joysofglass name, for having a website was that I wanted the challenge of building a website as I used to be IT. I don’t sell from it because of all the things you have said ! I let Folksy handle all of that
Re my Instagram page, I set that up quite a while ago when I didn’t have a shop (I only joined Folksy two days ago) and I didn’t really know what I was doing - someone told me to try to get sales by asking people to comment with their email address so that I could contact them back. Thank you for reminding me about that, I’m going to delete all the pictures and start again.
I have also just joined Twitter and have put a post up but obviously I need to get followers. I would love for anyone who would be willing to send me their Twitter account and I will follow if they would be willing to follow back? I will tweet other people’s posts if they tweet mine.
Sorry, me again, but might be worth grabbing a cuppa, and popping onto the Folksy Blog. Lots of info, tips and tricks on there including social media. http://blog.folksy.com
I was going to mention that too, have you seen any of the animations, @PoppyKayDesigns?
Either the FolksyFriday ones done a few months ago (can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE5SLwXCbNizCRl5cqF3xhw/videos) or the Mr Mouse video which was released before Christmas last year (https://vimeo.com/303905880). Wonderful little videos which advertise Folksy in a creative way, show off items that are for sale here and made on a budget thanks to generous people who want to help spread the Folksy word just for their love of the site. Folksy shared them on the site/social media/blogs… but obviously that’s only going to get to the people who already know about Folksy, so they require a little help from us sellers to share them and spread the word further. There’s a lot of work put in to creating those animations, so I don’t really see it as Folksy doing nothing and we’re doing all the work just to click share.
The reason I prefer to sell here rather than have my own site is that although we do have to do some promotion to get people in to our shops, I would have to do a hell of a lot more to get people to visit a standalone site. Yes I bring in some of my own customers, but Folksy does have buyers itself that will browse the site and just happen to see my items, and other sellers who also need to buy items occasionally and prefer to support this site before looking elsewhere… I wouldn’t have any of that if I were running my own site. There’s a community feeling here that means while promoting themselves, sellers will also occasionally promote other Folksy shops (such as when doing a FolksyFriday collage on instagram, or making a Folksy board on pinterest), or even with the instagram challenge Folksy ran last Christmas. One person shouting about their own site is less likely to be seen/taken notice of than 100 people posting about Folksy. Even if they are focusing on their individual shop, after someone has seen a few people sharing a Folksy shop, people will start to take notice and realise “oh that must be a place for handmade items, maybe next time I’m looking for something I’ll check that site”.
Plus I also think there’s a lot more trust than you’d get with a standalone site. Although you might not have heard of Folksy until recently, it is a known site. If anyone is feeling a bit wary of buying here because they haven’t heard of it, they can look it up and see positive reviews, people buying and selling here without being ripped off, mentions on places like blogs for years about it being a place to buy and sell handmade. Although we’re all individual sellers, being on a selling platform makes people see us as part of a larger thing, so if the site as a whole has positive reviews, the chances are we aren’t likely to rip them off or you’d hope we’d have been kicked off a respected site. There’s not going to be that with a standalone site, you just have to completely put your trust in one person and site.
The link to the blog @BigBirdLittleBird mentioned is the one I also mentioned in your other thread about being new to selling. So, get your feet up and have a read.
It all depends on how you view Folksy and how you think you should use it. If I was renting a bricks and mortar shop, I wouldn’t necessarily expect the lessor to advertise my shop.
I agree with many of the previous points. I tend to treat Folksy as if it were my own website, but it is easier to manage, cheaper, all the payments are taken care of and for a very reasonable fee.
Although I promote to social media, many sales do come direct through the Folksy site itself. I consider that to be an additional revenue flow that would not exist on a stand alone website.
Of course, a bit more advertising by Folksy would be nice but I also recognise that comes at a price.
This is a great discussion and you are winning me over with regard to the benefits of selling on here that you are pointing out, for example the trust in the community vs a standalone website, and one person shouting about their website vs 100 people shouting about Folksy.
I think the fact that I had never heard of Folksy until Sunday (when I joined) is making me feel a bit wobbly about making any sales. I am of course very keen to make this a success, so I’m going to throw everything at it and see what happens. I guess I just need guidance from you pros with all the know-how tips to get customers in!
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I’ve just joined Twitter so if there is anyone willing to follow me I will follow back and hopefully start to get some sales from there.
I tried to look at the Pinterest site but I can’t look at anything unless I open an account.
You might need to look at your pricing. There are literally thousands of cards on sale here on Folksy and yours do stand out as being much more pricey than most.
I presume you don’t want to sell overseas. You can prevent overseas buyers buying by simply leaving all overseas postal rates blank ( not 0).
