Luna's Baublebilities

It started with growing frustration with the same items and same sellers featured on the front page over and over again.  It escalated with a low but growing level of discomfort with the tone of admin in the forums and more & more underground reports of  previously successful sellers being shut down for arbitrary reasons after publicly complaining about a problem with Etsy.

It got really bad when my sales tanked this April - worse when after weeks of rude Admins insisting that there had been NO CHANGES so we were ALL IMAGINING the drop in our exposure and sales, news of a top-secret change in search function came to light.

Then the Etsy Hacks stopped working.  (Etsy Hacks were these wonderful little tools that allowed for quick re-listing of sold items, searching prior sales, managing inventory and just generally tracking all sorts of crucial business information that was impossible to do without them.)  They were created by a non-Etsy engineer who was later hired by Etsy to make the whole site function better but the only thing that has happened is that Etsy has managed to disable all of his original tools and has completely failed to institute replacements.

Then they changed the page width and lay-out, obscuring seller information in favor of the "Etsy Brand."  They also have failed to implement any changes to protect sellers from scammers, evil games from bitter competitors and non-paying buyers.  They also fail to prevent re-sellers from taking over top search categories and have actually been been featuring them on the front Page more and more recently.
In the midst of this, they spent the  time and energy to produce an embarrassingly adolescent ad for  new coders.  This was a real "help wanted" video.  I kid you not. 

And now they have rolled out a tax tool that will basically make it impossible for sellers in several states to actually OBEY the TAX LAWS!!!

I am so totally done with Etsy.  My shop will be in permanent vacation mode beginning today.
Maybe I'll consider coming back if they fix search, bring back the Etsy hacks, create a tax tool that won't put NYS sellers at risk of audits and tremendous fines, begin to enforce their TOU in a fair and uniform manner and hire some admin who treat honest sellers with some respect.

In the meantime, you can see my supplies and sparklies over at ArtFire - right there in my sidebar.  They SHOW how much they value their sellers in so very many ways.  I'l write about that someday soon but right now, I need to go dye some Alchemy scarves and work on a Gorgeous little Purse/Tarot Card envelope.

Several weeks ago, RoseWorks Jewelry nominated me for a sunshine award and featured my Buttercup earrings.  It was so very sweet of her and I've been meaning to do something reciprocal for her and my other EtsyBloggers teammates, who I have neglected for at least the last 6 months. 

Ruthie created her fun spotlight over on byhand.me so I thought I would go over and see what that site is all about.  It seems to be another social media outlet for artists and crafters - the site is very clean, easy to navigate and quick to join.  It took me maybe an hour to create my profile and put together a spotlight of my own.  The really cool thing is that you don't seem to have to wait and play any lottery games to get a chance to create a spotlight (which is much like an Etsy treasury) AND you can include items from ArtFire, Zibett, Etsy and many other handmade venues in the same spotlight.  Yay!

I'm really struggling with my online shops, particularly Etsy.  They keep tweaking things in ways that might make sense for their admins abut that continually throw wrenches of every size and type into shop profits.  The latest debacle involves searches (again) and their dropdown menu, which recently was adjusted to eliminate "supplies" from the options.  They fixed it after much rabble rousing in the forums, but it just doesn't sit well with me.  They seem to be trying but I continually get the sense that they are out of touch with their true customer base. 

Last year, I paid Etsy  over $670.00 - they represent my third largest vendor expense category and that amount represents approximately 10% of my income from Etsy sales.  I categorize these payments as "advertisement expenses" since the bulk of it is listing fees, but when I pay listing fees, I have no guarantees about how many people will see the items or for how long they will stay near the top of searches.  This is the big problem with jewelry sales online - so many sellers are out there that your items are buried before anyone sees them. 

I really want to move more of my business over to ArtFire and eventually onto my own website.  ArtFire charges me $7.00 a month for an annual total of  $84.00.  If I want to spend more on targeted marketing on or off site, I can do so under contracts that guarantee either a certain number of views or a specific length of time on a specific  webpage.  I would much rather spend a few hundred a year on targeted advertising than keep shelling out hundreds that I have little control over to Etsy. 

BTW - I have removed several items from my Etsy jewelry shop and discounted them by 50% over on ArtFire.  Go take a look!

Anyway,

Here's my pretty sunshine spotlight - composed of items from other EtsyBloggers' shops. I included one of RoseWorks' lovely necklaces - I'm so jealous that she has the time and patience for doing an entire necklace in spiral helix stitch!  You can see the spotlight in person and even clicky on links over here.

Now I have to go get some cleaning done and enamel some dragonflies so I can ship them tomorrow!  I've been fighting off a cold so a morning in front of the computer felt like a good idea today.  (Ug- have to do taxes, soon, too!)



. . . .

Just a quick report on my first attempt at online advertising at ArtFire. 

I purchased a two week ad placed on the Jewelry Supplies Main Category page that ran from January 9th to January 23rd.  The ad cost $10.00 and got 27 clicks, averaging about 37 cents per click.  During that time I sold almost $60.00 worth of goods, all supplies from my ArtFire shop. 

That's nothing compared to my Etsy shop but it is much better than average for my veeerrrry slow ArtFire shop.   If I assume that all of my sales are a result of the ad, my $60.00 worth of sales cost me $13.50 in shop fees and advertising.   (I pay ArtFire $7.00 per month for my shop so I figure that $3.50 is a reasonable shop  cost to set on this two week ad period.)   That's significantly more than my Etsy fees for listing and paying commissions on sold items.  However, it was a very cheap way to get more people to look in my shop.  I need to set up a stats page that will give me some graphs on studio visits per day so that I can track whether or not people clicking on my ad stayed in my shop and looked around at all.

Next up - an ad for jewelry and scarves on ArtFire.  That may take a while as I'm still learning how to make GIMP work for me to create ads.