Tuesday 14 February 2012

Folksy & Etsy Comparison Part 5: Sharing & Promoting

Well, I'm slowly getting through all these posts! This one is about how Folksy and Etsy each make it easier (or harder) for you or others to share your shop and items for sale with the rest of the internet, and encourage them to buy when they visit you.
Note I have updated this post 18th September 2012.


Adding links to other web presences

Folksy – you can put the URLs of your Facebook pages and Twitter etc in your profile, but these will not be clickable links, customers will have to copy and paste into their browser.
EtsyYou can add links to your Twitter and Facebook business Page to your shop front page, making it easy for customers to find you (add the links in Your Shop > Info and Appearance).


Note that neither site allows you to give links to other websites where your items are for sale and if you do this you run the risk of suspension from the site. 


Promoting your items

Folksy - Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest buttons on item listings so they can be shared easily.
Etsy - Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest buttons, plus Treasuries, the possibility of pay-per-click search ads and your items potentially being on Google.com shopping.

Treasuries are an Etsy tool. These are great advertising for your items, and a good way to join in the Etsy community and help out your fellow sellers. You can make your own Treasuries and you may find yourself being featured in others', too. Folksy doesn’t have a Treasury feature but you can use Pinterest to curate collections of items. Currently Folksy staff choose the front page so you might find one of your items on there one day too.

Having your items on Google shopping is great, although the advantages can be overstated. I rarely get more than 5 clicks a day. There is no rhyme or reason to when your Etsy shop becomes "syndicated" as they call it – it is completely random. My shop took about a year. But others have been waiting longer and for some it happens much more quickly. There is no point asking Etsy when your shop will be syndicated. To check if you've been syndicated, click the "Your Shop" link, and look down at the links on the left. There's a section called Promote, and if you've been syndicated there'll be a link called "Syndication" there. There'll be a future post about Google shopping. 


Coupon codes

Folksy – No.
Etsy – Yes.

Etsy wins here, as you can give out coupon codes for either a fixed amount off or a percentage off. You have to manually make the codes inactive after they've been used, but that's not a big deal.  

If you want to offer a discount on Folksy you need to either manually adjust the prices on listings or offer a Paypal refund. A Paypal refund takes up to 7 days for the money to be back in your buyers account, and you don’t get refunded the difference in Folksy seller fees. You do get your paypal fee back for the refund though. Folksy have said they are working on the ability to implement discounts, however they have said this will be in the form of a shop sale, rather than individual discount codes. I suspect they are trying to do something different to Etsy, but actually I think the discount code feature is what most people want. We'll see.


SEO of images

SEO (search engine optimisation) kind of fits here because part of the reason we share and promote our items is to increase our SEO. There used to be an important difference between how Folksy and Etsy named the images you uploaded to your listings; however they now do the same thing:

Folksy & Etsy rename your photos to a random string of numbers when uploading.

Folksy used to win here; if you named your image "sterling silver drop earrings jewellery UK" then it would be called that on Folksy too. This meant that a Google image search for sterling silver drop earrings UK would pick up your photo. Unfortunately now the image is renamed to random gobbledygook, like on Etsy.  As the listing title is applied as associated text to your photo, it can in theory be picked up by Google image search, but it will be far below any photos that include the text as the photo name.


The next - and possibly last! - post will be on the buying experience from the customer's point of view. There may possibly be one more just to add all the little things that didn't really fit anywhere else!

All parts of this series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Listing 

Part 3: Personalising your shop 
Part 4: How items appear on the sites
Part 5: Sharing your shop and items

Part 6: The buying experience 
Part 7: Everything else!!

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