San Francisco – A City I Love

I made an Etsy treasury tonight based on San Francisco.  A city I feel fortunate to have lived in, and called home, I felt inspired to build a treasury with SF as the theme.  While building out this treasury, I came across a piece that I absolutely had to feature, and am compelled to purchase if nobody else does over the next few days.  I thought I’d spotlight it on my blog as well, as I truly love it.  Who knows, maybe it will be hanging in my office one day soon! 

Isn’t that just simple and beautiful and everything that San Francisco is!?  Yes, I’m seriously in love.

You can check out my treasury here.

New Series – Art Fire Set-up

Hi everyone in blog land.  I’ve decided to have a weekly (may be more frequent) series about my experience at Art Fire.  I already have an Etsy store, but feel there are many things missing there.  Art Fire already has or is planning to implement many of the features I’m looking for in a third party storefront.  This doens’t mean I’m closing down on Etsy, but it does mean that I’m broadening my reach for now.  We’ll see what happens in the long term.

So far, I’ve subscribed and gotten my storefront started.  I was able to pick up one of the accounts that will be $7/month for life.  I’m part of the beta, so provide feedback and share ideas I have for the site.  The first thing I’ve noticed is that I have real interaction with staff members.  Interaction that is not patronizing and gives me hope that Art Fire will be professional (let’s hope it stays this way) and will do what it can to treat it’s sellers with respect.

One long time member of Etsy, and now new member of Art Fire has started a blog that is dedicated to Art Fire news and artisans.  Please check it out as I think this is a great spot to get daily information.

If you are looking for a storefront that is in the beginning stages, is trying to learn from mistakes others have made, who sees stats, search, tagging, and a smart feedback (called ‘karma’) system as critical to a business owner… I recommend you check out Art Fire.  They offer a free option so you can test them out.  If you decide you like it, you can get it for $7/month, right now (limited offer to next 5K users).

Top 5 things I like about Art Fire right now:

1. Stats… I can see how my ad campaigns are doing, I can see how people found my store, I can see individual stats per product.
2. Staff… The staff is extremely involved and are clearly taking in our recommendations.  They make changes immediately when they can, and tell us where things are at in development and when they expect to launch them.
3. One page listing… no more going through four pages just to list or edit an item.
4. Real Marketing Plan… they are utilizing the front page to get high rankings in the SEO space, they have plans to increase marketing spend, and they are already doing marketing across many online venues using search marketing.  They also have ~50 different sites that you can easily share your products with at the click of a button.
5. Modern Feedback… they don’t want feedback tied to each product sale, they want it per order.  They are also working on multiple paths to leave feedback so when users want to leave negative feedback, they must truly have a good reason.  They come from eBay and have seen what a bad feedback system can do.

Top 5 things that can be better (and most likely will be because they are in beta and address issues):

1. Front Page Clutter… yep, they have a lot of text, mainly for SEO optimization.  They are the first to admit it’s not pretty, but effective for where they are now.  They have plans to change the front page in coming months.
2. Search… search is not perfect, but they have many items in development and recognize that search is very important for everyone.  I’m hopeful, as they actually recognize this as a high priority and want to do it right.
3. Re-ordering store items… right now store products (besides featured products) are listed chronologically.  Plans to change this and give order control to sellers are there.
4. Flagging Items… this is a topic that is already very popular in the forums, and is something they will need to address.  They have many barriers to entry when it comes to negative flagging, but yes, they do plan to automate it for the most part.  Nobody has a perfect solution, but the list of ideas I’ve seen come from their staff is probably more thoughtful than most I’ve seen.
5. Loading pictures in listings… while easy, and you can do multiple pictures simutaneously, once uploaded into a position, you can’t easily resposition it.  You must re-upload.  While it’s workable now, this will be annoying quickly.  I asked about this, and they said that a change is in development or launch in early ’09.

I hope that you find this information useful.  Leave me a comment if there is a specific question you have about the service or a topic you’d like to see discussed here each week.

Just created my first treasury on Etsy!

So, go check it out… can’t believe I got my treasury listed!  So fun!

You can see it here.

Set Up Google Base – LetsEts

Using LetsEts I’ve sucessfuly set up my Google Base.  This allows me to add my feed of products to the Google search engine very easily.  The process was not too bad and I thought I’d share what I did:

1. Go to LetsEts
2. Enter your Etsy User Name
3. See your product images and information appear as a list
4. Download your xml (or whichever file format you choose)
5. Click on the Google Base link provided at LetsEts
6. Sign up for Google Base account if you don’t have one (Google will take you through the steps automatically if you need an account)
7. In the settings of your Google Base account make sure you type in your URL, otherwise the next step will not work correctly
8. Upload your xml (or whichever format you saved) file
9. Voila!  If it has worked, you will see the number of files uploaded and the expiration date

I look forward to see if this proves to help my sales on Etsy.  Will definitely report back.  It’s hard to tell as Etsy doesn’t have a real stats program, but I’ll see if anything increases in the next week or two now that I’ve uploaded my product information.

Would love to hear how Google Base has worked for you.

New Purses, Etsy, and Hello!

I have started my Etsy shop and will have more items available each week.  I’m very excited to be bringing the items I like to create to this online store.  I’m also going to be soliciting local boutiques and stores, but Etsy is a great online area for my goods.  I like the community and so far people have been very nice and helpful.

I’m specializing in totes but will also offer up clutches, pouches and actual purses.  I love to create and bags are something I’ve always loved.  I like all sorts of bags for all sorts of occasions and now have a place to justify my desire to make new totes all of the time.

I will be using this blog to talk more about the projects I’m working on and things I hope to learn (or can share to help others learn!).

Would love to hear some of your stories as they relate to creating bags, selling online (Etsy or otherwise) and sewing in general.