FOLKSY - is it a good selling platform for handmade products?
A Handcrafted Business Marketplace Walk Through & Review of Folksy
Folksy describe themselves as 'the home of British craft.' They are basically a U.K Etsy, they probably hate this description but it sums them up quite well.
Handmade Marketplace Reviews by Tracey Phillips.
Tracey is Owner and Jewellery Designer at Bright Shiny Objects.
"I am regularly trialing out about the various selling platforms available for us handcrafters, makers, designers and artists, so it makes sense to share my experiences with you.
I already sell on Etsy which is probably the most recognised platform, but it's time to try a few others.."
Tracy
One of the things I love about Folksy is that only handmade products are allowed apart from craft supplies, but unlike Etsy no vintage items are allowed.
Signing Up And First Decisions
First I need to decide between the two Folksy accounts - the Folksy basic account has no monthly fee and charges 15p +VAT to list each item and 6% + VAT sales commission. The Folksy plus account costs £5 (inc VAT) a month for unlimited listings but you still pay 6% + VAT sales commission. As I've got a lot of products to list I think I'll go for the plus account. (Details correct June 2019)
Now that's decided I need to set up my account, first I need to join Folksy, I can use Google or Facebook so Facebook* it is, one click and I'm in, now back to the selling page and I click to sign up for the Folksy plus account.
*one point to note about signing in with Facebook is that it automatically assigns you a username, which is not very useful when it's completely different from your business name - now I have to email Folksy to get it changed as your username forms part of your shop URL
OK next, through to a form, you need to fill in:
Paypal email address (to collect payments) You will need to have a Premier or Business Paypal account to open your shop.
Shop name, tagline and description, home address (you can only sell on Folksy if you are in the U.K)
Google analytics identifier (will worry about that at a later date!)
Social Media links
A tick to accept terms and conditions and onto the next page.....or not....my shop name has already been taken.
I've tried a few different variations - still no go.
It's very frustrating. I took a break to think of a variation of my business name that would still work and help customers know it is still me.
So next step is to set up my shop
I won’t bore you with the basic bits of the shop setup such as profile pics etc, it’s all easy to do and there’s an Folksy Shopfront checklist of things to do which makes it easy.
You can add the ability for customers to pay by card if they don’t want to use Paypal, this is done via Stripe and you just need to fill out a form with your business and bank account details.
I wasn’t sure whether to do this as I think PayPal is pretty much accepted as a payment method by customers now, but as I’m testing things I will do it and see, it will be interesting to see which method customers use.
So now to start uploading some products. I already sell on Etsy and I’m always keen to find an easy way to do things, and Googling ‘importing products from Etsy to Folksy’ I found a blog post from Folksy offering a trial of an upload service. (If you don’t already sell on Etsy then you will have to list your products here instead.)
I emailed them asking if this was still available and they replied with this –
"You will need to export your Etsy listings as a CSV file and send it to us.
To download your listing data:
Sign in to Etsy.com.
Click Shop Manager.
Click Settings.
Click Options.
Click Download Data.
Click Download CSV to save the file to your computer.
Send the file over to us here at support@folksy.co.uk
Please also provide us with a single Folksy subcategory (e.g. Jewellery > Necklaces and Pendants > Silver) that we can add all of your items to, and a default UK postage cost for your items.
You can edit these once we’ve imported your data, but we are unable to pull them in automatically from Etsy.
Once we have your data file we will get to work copying it all over to your drafts. Please note this usually takes around a week, but can take longer in busy periods"
Excellent! That is my product listings sorted then.
I’ve sent over the CSV file so will see how long it takes. If you don’t use this service adding listings is still pretty easy it’s just very time consuming ….kettle is on!
I’ll be back as soon as the products are ready to go.
That was fast!
Three days later (very quick!) and I have an email telling me that my products have been imported. They have also attached a spreadsheet to tell me any problems with the listings such as unsupported characters or maximum quantities exceeded.
This appears to be mainly the titles which are a lot longer on Etsy!
So what I need to do now is go into my drafts and check through each product to see if anything has been changed and also change the categories that things have been listed in.
The choice of categories is very similar to Etsy, so at first glance it looks as though most things are covered.
When you apply for your products to be imported you give them one category for everything to be listed in, it’s then up to you to go in and move them to the correct category before pressing publish. So guess what I’ll be doing soon!
As well as sorting categories, each of my products need the titles shortening, and the materials they are made out of adding.
It’s still a lot easier than listing them all from scratch! Though if that is where you are at right now, it isn’t that bad. I just couldn’t face doing all mine when I have already listed them on Etsy.
I’ve got 150 products to do so I may be a while!
I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with an update for you – will I have any sales by then?
Fingers crossed!
It's important to note...
I’m just going to leave the shop and listings do the work. I won't be doing any marketing at all. I won’t be promoting my Folksy shop anywhere.
The purpose of this experiment is to see how well the platform works organically.
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It's been a couple of months now since I set up...
Sorry for the delay on this. the Folksy shop is so quiet I actually forgot about it!
When I say quiet...well, dead really.
Please remember this is an organic sales test, so I am sure that if I had been actively marketing this would be different.
I've had no sales.
Looking at the shop stats I've had 503 views to my shop and items, and a massive 4 (yes a whole four!) have favourited my items in the last 30 days.
Unlike Etsy and Amazon there are no options to do promoted listings or advertising, so if you want your shop to be a success you will need to go all out on social media to draw customers to your listings.
Personally if I'm going to spend time on that I would be trying to attract more customers to my existing Etsy/Amazon stores, but if Folksy is your only marketplace then it's got to be worth a try!
I've had a sale!
Well it's finally happened - my first sale! It's taken another month.
Easy to process, the money goes directly into your Paypal account, then Folksy send you a bill monthly to collect their charges.
That's All Folks
I had an email this morning telling me that my products listings were all about to expire - so that's three months up on Folksy!
In that time I have had one sale, and to renew all my products would cost in the region of £40 so I've decided to cut my losses and close my shop.
I've done no promotion of my shop at all.
It’s funny, I found this article on an unrelated search.
Let me say a few things about it. Firstly what this lady says is completely true! I make handmade homeware I’ve gone all out using Instagram & Facebook. I too have a sale once in a blue moon on there. That’s putting in serious work. When I look at my stats, the impressions are huge but the views are practically nill.
I take my own photos and have a professional setup. So it’s not the pictures that are causing the lack of sales.
I don’t think the fees are worth it, all I’m paying for is a place to put my products that’s it nothing else. It’s not like I don’t have a nice website to do that for less per month!
Regarding stripe, Folksy say sign up to stripe but what is the point when everyone knows and uses PayPal all my payments are taken by PayPal
In my opinion don’t bother with folksy!
Thank you for this. I’ve been considering moving my Etsy shop to Folksy, but from what you say it probably isn’t worth it. I may stick with Etsy. Better the devil you know and all that… Good luck with your shop!
Thank you for doing that review. Was thinking about joining Folksy but seeing so many shops now closed on there and the shops that were on doing virtually no business, I think I will look into Amazon handmade. Thank you for sparing me the cost and frustration of such a venture!
I am just about to launch a new hand made product, question is do these comments reflect Etsy,s latest rules, (90 day payment Etc) and is Folksey now in a better position