Hey Etsy....

Do you know you have serious morale problems with your sellers who happen to be YOUR customers? If you don't, and your reading comprehension is better than your customer service skill are, you just might realize it if you finish reading this. Hope your attention span is that long.

You Yankees up there in Brooklyn need to wake the hell up. Not only are you putting your sellers at risk, like the treasury fiasco that  had the real names of people on them instead of their shop names. I know it may not be a big deal to you, but to the sellers on their who have been terrified by stalkers-take time to read the threads-it is a huge deal for them. What do you do?  You take the yellow brick road and close the shop of a vocal, yet very sales productive, seller. Guess you did not want to hear the truth that she-and many others spoke.  I won't name her here, but those who read this should be able to get the hint. Here's the link to the first thread in the forums calling admin.'s short attention span to it. Next time, it might be credit card numbers-what does etsy care?

Closing shops and muting sellers in the forums seems to be standard for you guys. Time out adult style.  That's business like-NOT!

You lure people in with the bait about how easy it is to sell online-and free, too. Free to set up a shop-that's about it. There's the 3.5% FVF (final value fee) to you, the .20 per item to list for 4 months which seems reasonable until people realize that in order to be seen on that messed up search of yours, they have to keep renewing items on a nearly daily basis.

People ask for selling tools, you give them idiotic, cutesy plush phone booths. Probably paid for with the money you got from all those dimes you got when people relisted.

You roll out unasked for changes-a new shiney-to calm things down. Instead, it stirs things up because you aren't bloody bright enough to test the changes before rolling them out. (Again, think treasury fiasco for one-there are many more.)

You messed with feedback. Here's the link for that. You botched up the sales tax roll out-go to the 7th post down if you click this link.

I could go on, but I will stop for now. I would never, ever recommend this site for anybody to sell on. You aren't out for the sellers in any way at all. -you are out for etsy. You will always be able to drag more novice sellers in and get them to eat a few cupcakes and have a few glasses of Kool-Aid, so you will continue to make money when they give you their relisting dimes. The best thing that could happen to etsy is that when etsy goes public-if it does after all these fubars, Fred Ward and the Board, will take a huge broom to the place and get some people in there who know what customer service is, who know how to run a business and decide to run etsy like one. Not have some yuppie goof who scammed NYU to get in, like Kalin, did running the show. I would be a little concerned if I had a multi million dollar company to have somebody like that at the helm. Doesn't exactly inspire a feeling of confidence in the place, ya know.

Things I forgot to mention about ArtFire

I had been sitting on the previous blog post until I was about to burst, so I published it in a hurry.  I am an ArtFire Maven and had advance knowledge of this announcement. The ArtFire Mavens are a group of sellers who get to play with all the new toys first. Before anything is rolled out to the site, we get to put it through its paces and find any bugs or kinks. We also brainstorm ideas with Admin. on what something should look like or how it should be worded. They are great at listening to and implenting our feedback.

Anyhow, I wanted to mention some more things about why I prefer ArtFire over Etsy.
1. The flat fee. There is no final value fee when something sells, except for whatever percentage the payment processor takes. I like the multiple payment options, too.
2. Admin. there is responsive to problems and bugs. They respond in the forums and one of them, Tony, has even started a thread called Photography Q&A that has grown to many pages. All to help the sellers.
3. Admin, is good about letting you know when and why if the site has to go down for some reason. I think there has been once in the last year that it went down unexpectedly and that was due to severe weather impacting the servers.
4. I like the seller categories. Besides the usual Handmade, Supplies and Vintage, there is a Design category. An example of what goes there is, say, I designed purses, but had 3 of my neighbors making them for me. Still handmade, but not by me, so they go in design.
5. The Collections are similar to etsy treasuries, but a lot different. They will be rotated on the FP of ArtFire, and, if somebody is in a Collection that has made the FP today, if they are in another Collection, it won't be eligble to be on the front page for X (as yet to be determined) number of days. It won't be the same people with the same stuff  showing up time after time, day after day.
6. You can promote yourself in the Collections. It's ok. Some people have made Collections with just their work and that's allowed. Collections are a promotion tool. Google likes them. It is nice to create them with other studios' items. I've found some wonderful shops that way.
7. Pro studios have a gallery where you can show off custom work or work that has sold.
8. ArtFire gives Pro studios a blog that is indexed by google.
9. The flagging system at ArtFire actually works. If somebody is selling something and calling it vintage and it's not, four different studios can flag the item and the item will be removed until admin. checks it out. The sellers is not removed-only the item. If a seller feels items are flagged in error, they can appeal and explain to admin..
10. Last, in this post, but not least, by a long shot. I like the way the site looks. It's getting better every day. I'm not a chrome and glass, owl and cowl kind of person. I'm more English countryside and shabby chic. Barefeet or mocassins over stillettos any day.

If you haven't seen ArtFire yet, click the link at the top of the page. It's worth looking at and who knows, you might decide that for $5.95 a month, its a great deal.

If you sell online you might be interested in...

a HUGE announcement from Artfire. If 20,000 sellers sign up, the fee to have a Pro Studio will be 5.95 a month-locked in. That breaks down to .20 a day-as much as it costs to list one item  on Etsy where you have to constanly renew and relist to be seen. It's one of the many ways ArtFire plans to celebrate coming out of beta. If 20,00 sellers DO NOT get in on this, THIS DEAL IS NOT HAPPENING.

I'm going to tell you 10 things about Artfire that make me prefer AF over etsy-or would make me prefer it if my etsy shop was not on permanent vacation.

1. Items are automatically pushed to google shopping with its' 25-30 million monthly shoppers and to TheFind.com with its' 20-25 million monthly shoppers. So while people may say that etsy has more traffic, Artfire has more potential shoppers.
2.Artfire has rapidcart which is a remote widget (similar to etsy mini), so people can shop from it right off your blog or your FB kiosk.
3. Artfire has no account check out. People don't have to set up an account to purchase from you. They can just go through the checkout steps in whichever payment option you accept. ArtFire is set up to take google checkoout, amazon payments, and REM as well as paypal.
4.Artfire search is not done by what was just listed or renewed. It's based on the search query-like google or yahoo.
5. Pro Studios can customize their studios with categories, custom colors, widgets and more.
6. Help guides for all the things you need to know to sell on Artfire-including extensive guides to SEO.
7. A contact phone number for Pro sellers if you need to contact admin.. Real people in a real office setting answer your questions.
8. Artfire has coupons, batch editing and over 30 other seller tools to help you sell.
9.It doesn't matter to Artfire is you sell elsewhere and include links to the other places. They want you to be successful.
10.Artfire lets you have 10 pictures in your listings.

So what are you waiting for?? Hurry on over to Artfire and check out the details on this super group deal.

New destash studio on Artfire

I have opened a destash studio on Artfire -DWDdestash-to sell off the excess Lake Superior Agates I have. I may add other stones or beads to it. I haven't decided yet.

I designed my banner and avatar for the studio-my second version. The first version was too light once I got the studio set up. It was fun doing that and I learned a lot from it.

Stop by the new studio and say hi.