What’s happening at Folksy – January 2011

A selection of items from the 5 most visited shops in December 2010.

Hello and Happy New Year! We’re back with another round-up of Folksy news and stats. We hope that everyone is fully recovered from the big rush and you all had a really successful Christmas on Folksy.

December Statistics

• Folksy had visits from 276,307 different people in December, this is an increase of 142% on December 2009.
• December orders were up 8% from November 2010, that’s a 49% increase on December 2009.
• 55% of December’s visitors were returning and 45% were new visitors to Folksy.
• Congratulations to Quernus Crafts, Pants and Paper, Bits n Bob’s, Chain of daisies and Silk Purse, Sow’s Ear who were our most visited shops in December.

Christmas at Folksy

We saw one of the busiest Christmas periods yet on Folksy, starting in early November we saw a huge 46% increase in orders from October.  The increase in visitors to Folksy has been brilliant but did lead to a few issues such as slow periods on the site.  We made a few tweaks to make sure that we kept running as smoothly as possible and that the buying experience wasn’t disrupted, we’ll be making some behind the scenes adjustments this year to make sure that we don’t face a similar situation in 2011.

Looking back to 2010 and forward to 2011

2010 was a fantastic year for Folksy seeing some of our biggest changes to the site:

• We came out of Beta
• Shop Sections were introduced
• The Facebook shop application was launched
• The new Official Folksy facebook page was created (we now have over 3700 fans!)
• The Folksy team saw a lot of changes: Toni joined the support team, Hilary took over to manage the blog and forums, Doug our new developer was hired and Sarah joined as new Folksy manager when we said farewell to Anne.
• A new dedicated help and support system was introduced
• The blog was reinvented with regular posts full of information for sellers
• The new regular Folksy email newsletter was sent out
• Lots of new categories were added
• 20,000 Folksy Festive Samplers were printed and distributed by over 60 Folksy volunteer paper girls and boys

We are now looking forward to another exciting year at Folksy and are already making plans for new changes and additions to the site which we will keep you updated on.  Thank you for supporting Folksy over the past year and we wish all of you a happy and successful 2011.

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 – James, Rob, Sarah, Doug, Andrew, Toni and Hilary.