Weeknote #278

Hello!

It’s my turn to write the weeknotes, which feels a bit odd because I’ve been in bed all week with bronchitis (is that too much sharing?). It started off so well, as we gathered round the board to talk big plans for 2014, using this book for inspiration. We’ve been looking at what we want Folksy to do and be, drawing up wishlists of pie-in-the-sky size proportions and breaking those down into actual real achievable things. We’ve booked in Folksy’s very own fairy godmother and longterm crush James 2 (recently promoted from James 3) to start making our dreams come true.

Sian made me this. She first picked up a crochet hook in December, and in the space of five weeks has evolved into a master-crocheter

A big part of my job is searching Folksy for beautiful things to feature, which ties in with one of our top priorities this year: improving how search works. (I’m secretly hoping that once we have an all-singing, all dancing search engine, it will leave me with oodles of spare time to take crochet lessons from Sian.) Today there were 169,414 items available to buy on Folksy (I counted them all myself*), so it would be a very marvellous thing if we could develop a sparklingly efficient and clever search that guided buyers through all those hundreds of thousands of wonders and straight to the thing they were looking for.

My search wishlist includes: the ability to sort results and refine searches, search favourite shops, search a shop’s listings, and get recommendations based on favourite items and previous purchases. I’m not sure how many of these will be possible, but if you have any other ideas I’ll add them to my list. (Doug will be pleased.)

Prancing Hare by Louise Jenkins, a favourite find this week and a bit of a star on Facebook

Also on our Board of Big Thoughts are finding new ways of showing and sharing on Folksy. We started working on this at the end of last year by introducing My Folksy, a gift guide carousel, an extra Pinterest board on the homepage, and Favourite Finds. These seem to be working really well. Having the Gift Guides as a carousel on the homepage has made them much more effective, and in the past few weeks the gift guides have generated 17% of the total revenue. Favourite Finds is also massively popular with buyers – its conversation rate is around five times higher than we normally see (which means that if someone clicks on something in Favourite Finds they are five times more likely to buy it than if they click on it elsewhere across the site).

We’d like to add even more new and brilliant ways of discovering and sharing on Folksy, so every shop gets seen. Just in the last 17 days, 276 new shops opened on Folksy (see some of them here), which, when you add those to the bazillion shops already on Folksy, means one bazillion and 276 people are part of the good ship Folksy. That’s one big shop ship that needs keeping ship shape.

Red Fish Topper by Manthy Proctor – one of the 276 new shops opened in the last 17 days

While I’m talking about stats, Heidi asked me if I could share some more. I love a good stat as much as the next girl, so here we go Heidi, these are especially for you:

Top 3 search terms on Folksy currently:
1. Sale
2. Jewellery
3. Valentine

Most popular Gift Guides currently:
1. Sale
2. Winter Home
3. Gifts for Crafters
4. Adorn
5. Valentine Gifts for Him

Busiest time of the day on Folksy (by visits):
From 5pm, peaking at 9pm, then dropping off.

New visitors vs returning visitors (so far this year):
New visitors = 56%
Returning visitors = 44%

Revenue from new visitors vs returning visitors (so far this year):
New visitors = 37%
Returning visitors = 63%
(I think Folksy sellers who buy on Folksy account for something like 7% of all revenue, but I need to double-check.)

That doesn’t cover everything, but if I hold some back it gives me an excuse to do another pure stats blog another day…

See you then x

 *not really. There’s a button for that.