A reader asked recently about the results of my opening a
web page at Big Cartel and being featured in the Poppytalk Marketplace. Here are the results so far and my thoughts and opinions on the subject.
Big Cartel:
Opened the website June 18th.
The weekly visitor stats:
6 weeks ago – 155
5 weeks ago – 151
4 weeks ago – 135
2 weeks ago – 129
Last week – 172
No sales through the site.
I find that having a stand-alone website like this one is a
pretty lonely existence especially when you can’t really interact with
potential buyers. If it were a site where you could treat it like a blog and
write about your latest projects, triumphs and tragedies I think it would be
more engaging. That being said, you still have to put the effort into the site and
update it constantly to keep people engaged.
Another stumbling block for me, whether it’s a blog or a
website, is that I’m not sure where to go to advertise and get people to come
and look at the site. I’m a guest author on a silk ribbon supplier’s blog so I
had them link my avatar to the website. There’s facebook (I do) and twitter (I
don’t) but how much time is one supposed to dedicate to the social media stuff
and when is there time to actually create? I know part of my problem is that
I’m not the chatty ‘guess what I’m up to now’ kind of gal so I guess that makes me a bad candidate as a salesperson.
According to my Google Analytics numbers for June 18th
to Sept 26th, most of my visitors (150) were from the silk ribbon
blog. Second was tied between direct traffic and Poppytalk Handmade both at
135. Next was the Poppytalk blog at 96, goggle.com/referral at 77 and my own
blog at 60.
The Poppytalk Marketplace:
Inclusion is still ongoing. It runs from June until
November. I haven’t had an Etsy buyer mention specifically that they saw my items on
Poppytalk.
Again, if I check my GA for my Etsy shop for the June to
present time, Poppytalk Handmade ranks 26th for traffic with 52
visits.
Etsy shop:
Sales Stats:
Apr – 19
May – 6
June – 2
July and Aug – 6
Sept - 4
As you can see, my sales on Etsy have not been the greatest
since May so that’s really frustrating especially since a month and a half later
I started the Poppytalk marketplace and Big Cartel website and haven’t really
seen any significant changes. When I read the discussions in the Etsy forums I
see lots of sellers in the same boat with low sales. I have been on the Front
Page at least once each month and one of my necklaces was in an Etsy Finds
daily feature and yet sales continue to be practically non-existent.
Is it the economy, the tweaks to the way the search is run
on the site, summer? Who knows?!!
I do like the social aspect of Etsy where you can join
different teams, read their blog for updates and insights and glean info and
opinions good and bad in the forums. It’s a ready made social network,
unfortunately, it’s mostly other sellers that you’re interacting with and
granted some of them do turn into buyers but not that many.
I would like Etsy to advertise to buyers in magazines that
don’t cater specifically to crafters to try and get their name out there. It
seems right now that most of their efforts go towards recruiting more new
sellers. They make their money both ways from sellers listing and selling but
if sellers aren’t selling a lot of them are just going to give up or move to
another site and Etsy will lose out on listing fees.
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