What’s happening at Folksy :: October 2010

A selection of items from the most viewed shops of September 2010. Congratulations to Whimsical Wren Jewellery, Babylonglegs, JAustenJewelleryDesign, Pants and Paper and Teasemade.

Hello! We’re back with another round-up of Folksy news and stats. The highlight of the past month was the release of our new Facebook application. Over 500 Facebook shops were installed in a little over 24 hours after the release, with sellers telling us how pleased they were with the easy installation. There’s a sticky in the Chittah Chattah forum if you need any advice on installing your shop front on Facebook.

We’ve also made a few design changes to Folksy, reducing the header size and streamlining the search box area to make the site easier to use for customers, as well as improving the performance of the site by re-introducing caching.

September 2010

• Folksy had visits from 204,665 different people – a 10% increase on August 2010 (and 165% on September 2009 and that’s not including figures from the forums or the blog)
• 15% increase in New Visitors to the site compared to August, with September 13th being the busiest day for new people at over 8000 new visits.  Much of this increase came from search traffic which also increased by nearly 7%.
• Our Facebook fan page is growing rapidly, with over 800 new fans since our last update!

Shop Sections Coming Soon

Shop sections are on target to be deployed in early November. We know how important this is to our buyers and sellers and it’s our number one priority to get this rolled out as soon as possible.  Andrew our design lead has been designing the styling and creating the core functions required to create and manage the sections and Doug (our developer) is going to produce the magic to make the pages work.

What else?

We’re aiming to complete the Folksy Festive sampler for publication by mid November. Anne has been working hard on finding items and getting the content together for the last few weeks.   We’ll be looking for your help with distribution to local independent shops and craft venues, so a Folksy paper round is in the offing.

Email newsletters will kick off later this month.  For a while now we’ve been bedeviled by the strain these newsletters put on the service, however this has been resolved and we can now re-introduce emails.  Going forward we’re also planning to create separate seller specific emails to keep makers in the loop about seller specific updates (as we realise the blog and the forums are not read by everyone, *sob*).

Tags

We’re still promoting your Halloween items through the Halloween badge on the site, and will move onto Christmas themed items from November 1st, with the whole of the first week of November devoted to decorations, so be sure to appropriately tag any festive items you have in your shops.

We’ll also be producing a number of gift guides on the blog and via email this year.  We’ll let you know in advance what the themes and keywords are so you can tag your products accordingly.

A selection of items available at www.folksy.com tagged with the keyword ‘Scarf’ an essential accessory now it’s getting so chilly.

The Forums

You may have noticed Hilary (aka Haptree, our blog editor) in the forums a lot more recently, she’s going to be taking on the additional role of helping to ensure the smooth running of the forums, answering queries and reporting back to the support and technical teams.  We think that integrating the management of the blog, forums, social networking and support areas will make it easier for sellers to find helpful resources and for the Folksy community areas to grow.  We’ll be taking cues from forum topics on what you would like to hear about in this community blog and the areas that need to be developed in our searchable support area, which is already a mine of information for buyers and sellers.

How are we doing?

We’d like to know if this sort of update is useful, so do give us your feedback on how we could improve. See you next month!

:) The Folksy Team – Anne, Hilary, Toni, Doug, Andrew, Rob and James.