50% Off Sale At Affinity

  

Another Affinity Products Sale

Through August 15 

Visit Site Here: Affinity

Etsy Cyber 2023 Sale 25% Off

Etsy

is hosting their

Cyber 2023 Sale

Oct 23 - Nov 29

25% Off

Visit Printaphoria At Etsy 

Printable Graphics To Beautify, Organize & Simplify Your Life!

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Lettuce Craft Featured Project

~ One of my projects, Nature-Inspired Scrabble Tile Necklaces, is featured at Lettuce Craft, a wonderful, busy craft forum. I'm going to write a post about the site soon. I'm still new and learning my way around. ~

Payhip Upgrades Their Memberships Selling Feature

Payhip upgraded their membership selling feature and have this to say:

It’s been entirely rebuilt from scratch to help you sell any type of membership to your customers. With memberships you can now add “Posts” which let you share content with your members in a flexible & interactive way. Of course you’ll also be able to upload any files you’d like with each membership post. You can also allow your members to comment on posts, building up a community around your membership...

 This link leads to their announcement about their upgraded system for selling memberships.

Payhip is a great place to sell your memberships, courses, music, digitals, physical products, subscriptions, etc. You can join for free and open a free shop or use their selling links feature to sell your products from your website or blog. When are you going to take advantage of this remarkable selling venue?

Payhip was started by 2 brothers, Abs and Kahin Farah, who live in England. Payhip is a profitable company that is doing very well. I'm happy to say that I don't expect them to fold like so many selling venues have done over the past several years. Check out this site, which if full of features for sellers and totally free to join and open a shop or use their selling links.

Why Are Etsy Sellers On Strike Yet Again?

 Etsy sellers launch a week-long strike over increased fees was written by Jaclyn Diaz and reported today at NPR.org. Many sellers have launched a week-long protest by closing their shops and other actions. This is in response to the recent in a long line of fee increases announced by CEO Josh Silverman. Seems like 59,000+ shop owners have signed the petition. A quick web search will show results for strikes during each of the past few years.

I don't feel that Etsy morale will improve for disenchanted handmades sellers. Somewhere along the way, during the past 12-15 years, Etsy management felt that to stay afloat they had to expand away from pure handmade support. They added a complicated fee system and have raised prices so often and by such a high percentage that it has crushed not only the bottom lines but the spirits of many handmade sellers. I closed my shops at Etsy a couple of years ago but not because of changes at the site. Sometimes I miss being there. It's at times like this that I'm glad I left though, which makes me feel sad. It was exciting to be a part of Etsy, back then.

Dwanda, Artfire and others folded and it seems like Etsy is having to take drastic steps every year to remain viable. These decisions have invited in questionable resellers and consistently driven away Etsy creatives. I was at Zibbet when years ago there was a mass exodus of Etsy sellers to that selling venue in response to insufferable changes. Most of them returned to Etsy when Zibbet did not deliver what they were expecting. Sellers need to seriously ask themselves if any selling website will fulfill their expectations. If not, what is the best course of action for their brands?

While the popularity of Etsy seems bleak for many, others are realizing what I had begun to feel some time ago. The best business practice for the future of creating and making is to learn how to market and sell from your own web spaces. There are still a few venues left where the income of the creative is not gouged. One of them is Payhip. Another is Meylah. Find Meylah store setup info here.

Learning to self-promote and sell from our own blogs and online shops will provide peace of mind to start, which will go a long way in generating income. It is difficult to focus on creating good products and effectively marketing them when there is misery about the selling platform and constant fear of what will come next. It can be bad for the creative psyche to be in an atmosphere that has become increasingly riddled with controversy.

Will this strike matter to Etsy management and ownership? Will it bring about the desired changes? According to many sellers' comments at the forum, no it will not. Many of them say it's the low-sales-volume sellers who have organized and are signing on to the strike. My heart goes out to the makers and designers who feel a need to boycott Etsy. If the majority are low-volume sellers, then my suggestion to learn to market and sell from their own shops is even more crucial. If being at Etsy is not paying off, shouldn't those sellers be expending their efforts and funds elsewhere? That would build invaluable marketing experience and generate more lasting assets for the sellers.     

Artfire Gone And Etsy Raising Fees

Found out today that ArtFire shut down in December. They explain why here. I'm shocked, like I was when Dwanda shut down, but then again, I'm not. Things on the handmades and maker venues front began to collapse over a decade ago. I used to keep track as one listing site after another folded. I've now lost count. Even Cargoh is offline, showing an announcement page with a vague promise. 

Aftcra is just a facade, a ghost for a long, long time. No one answering, no one responding. The homepage still loads as if they are flourishing, except it displays the same 2017 and before product pics, just like at their Facebook page. Walk around at the majority of the blank sellers pages and hear crickets...

Etsy really is the lone handmades venue of some size and they've opened up to so many micro manufacturers that competition is grossly unfair. They also recently announced that they are increasing fees, again, from 3.5 to 5% starting on July 16. Sellers are again in an uproar. For some time they have regularly been in an uproar. 

Can handmades ecommerce continue to sustain these frequent fees increases? It would be devastating if Etsy shut down. I hope they don't have to. I closed my shop there months ago in favor of a Payhip shop with my own domain. I sometimes miss Etsy but with the upcoming fee increase, I admit that I'm glad I'm gone. So many categories of fees and frequent changes was exhausting, really. I like visiting and looking at certain types of products and I sometimes buy graphics and digitals.

I think Etsy would expand even further to include mid-manufacturers before they would fold. Unfortunately, that might cause the marketplace to look more like an American Aliexpress than it already does. It seems like the majority of craft supplies sellers are reselling rather than de-stashing, which was the original meaning of selling craft supplies. It's a fine but ugly line that Etsy has overlooked and will overlook more to remain online.   

New Resources Section At PCL

A new section has been added to RESOURCES: Forums/Groups/Social. The first entry added is the crafting website GetCrafty. What they say about themselves:

Welcome to the Arts & Crafts Forum at GetCrafty.com. Our site is a friendly community dedicated to all things Arts & Crafts related, just some of the subjects we cover here are: Crafts, Paper Craft, Crafting, Kids Crafts, Craft Ideas, Christmas Crafts, Crafts for Kids, Craft Supplies, Craft Shows, Halloween Craft, Easy Crafts and more.

This website is active. I counted 23 posts made today and at least 7 yesterday. As with most social sites today, spam proliferates. Bypass the posts on egg donation, cryptocurrency and sports betting and pick out the creative threads that inspire you.

Instagram On Desktop Now

Did you know you can now use Instagram from your desktop/laptop?

 

Even to create posts? I had left a few yrs ago and went back with a new acct this week and found out. So, we're no longer restricted to our smartphones.

 

Here's my link. If you're on Insta, consider following me if you like my shop, Printaphoria, and I'll return the favor. https://www.instagram.com/artsycrafterystudio/

New Page At Printaphoria & Creative Living

You can now find links to Amazon-published paperbacks and upcoming ebooks at the new page Amazon Books. The publications are good for gift-giving as well as personal use. Thanks for visiting!

News: Baroqoo

 

 

 

Went to visit Baroqoo today and found out they shut down last year. I found this post by an Etsy seller dated 6/20:

 

I have just been in contact with the team at Baroqoo today after noticing that my monthly payment was not removed by PayPal. I was told that while Baroqoo is closing at the end of June, they did not feel comfortable taking payments for June. They said they did not have the success they had hoped for and that having public venues to get the Baroqoo name know came to a halt with Covid-19.

No new handmades selling sites seem to be able to make it anymore. While money can be a major issue and COVID threw a monkey wrench into the mix, I wonder if it's something else? I remember more failures before the virus hit. Many massively-successful enterprises in other industries made it through the most astounding odds. There just seems to have been a slump in handmades selling support during the past 10 yrs from which the cottage industry never recovered.

What do you think is the most significant cause(s) for the failure of new handmades selling venues?