Folksy HQ Update – July 2024

What’s been happening on Folksy in July 2024

This is the second in our monthly updates. You can see the one for June here.

Key insights and stats

While UK wide retail sales are struggling (ONS June 2024), Folksy saw growth in July.

Compared to June 2023:

• Order value for July was up 16% 
• There were 6% more active Folksy sellers in July
• There were also 6% more (non-seller) visitors to Folksy in July (151,000)
• There were 20% more ‘intentful’ (non-seller) visitors to Folksy (110,000)*

*we define intentful as “viewing 2+ items in a single session” – these are people we believe have a reasonable intent to purchase

In July there were:

• 10,560 items listed (new, not re-listed)
• 253 new shops (started in July with at least one listing)

What we’ve been working on at Folksy this month

Our focus for the last quarter has been on attracting new customers. The main body of work on the platform has been improvements to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to ensure that Folksy is set up to perform effectively for search engines as they crawl and index the site for content.

Folksy seemed to be performing well anyway, so this work is to enhance our already good position with regard to ranking for given keyword searches. We don’t expect the results of this work to be immediate but they should start to bear fruit soon and compound over time. As Google accounts for the vast majority of our visitor traffic and (non-seller) buyers, this work is of continuing importance. 

Other things we’ve completed:

• Research with buyers to better understand motivations and user experiences. The insight from this work has directly informed our next major project which we’ll share next month in our August update.

• A review and re-drafting of some of our terms of use – this work has been informed by an audit of similar platforms and of the UK legislation. We’ll be rolling out and sharing these new terms later in the year.

• Paying down some ‘technical debt’. Folksy has three main codebases, and the older codebase is harder for us to work on. Sometimes we have to just fix things in the older codebase so they can continue to meet modern standards and be supported by our hosts, but wherever possible we look to refactor the code into more modern technologies. 

• We moved to a new analytics platform in April. In making the move we’ve (almost) completed the creation of a comprehensive set of events/data that we want to track. The remaining work is to track registered and unregistered users, and merge revenue and user data (as currently it’s measured by two distinct properties). Having accurate granular data on what user behaviour is vital for us to make informed product and business decisions and this work is already helping us identify areas of opportunity and value. 

• The Summer Exhibition took quite a bit of effort to organise in July. We did this event in 2023 and it proved popular as a way to create interest in Folksy from a wider arts and craft audience and we’ll be using this as a way to promote Folksy and craft in general for months to come. 

• Finally, we started work on a new feature aimed at engaging buyers and retaining them by surfacing things they’re interested in and showing new things related to those interests over time. This work has started and we’ll update you on when we’ll have a first release ready. 


That’s it! We hope you manage to enjoy some summer sun (though it seems in short supply) and we’ll update you again in a month.