What’s been happening at Folksy – September 2024
Hi, hope you’re having a good October. Here is an overview of last month with some insight into a key user segment: overseas visitors. As ever, we’re keen to get your feedback in the comments.
We’ve been focused this quarter on Improving the user experience of Folksy so people can find relevant gifts and buy easily at Christmas.
Insights
There is a fairly consistent pattern to behaviour on Folksy. August is a surprisingly busy period for artists and makers on Folksy (perhaps helped by the Summer Exhibition?) and we typically see a rise in new work listed. September brings visitors with more buying intent and so it has proved this year. This greater intent is interesting – we believe it’s tied to a few things such as people actively thinking about seasonal events like back-to-school, Halloween and Christmas.
Compared to last month, Aug 2024:
- Aggregate order value (GMV) for Sept was up by 17%
- Organic Search is still the most significant driver of buyer visits, however last month sales from users from Facebook grew 118%
- There were 10% more active Folksy sellers in Sept
- There were the more or less the same number of non-seller visitors to Folksy in Sept
- 25% of (non-seller) visitors had buying intent, 1% up*
- Average order value was up by 8% (so we had more of our visitors converting to buy and they had a higher basket value) up 10% year-on-year
*we define intentful as “viewing 2+ items in a single session” – these are people we believe have a reasonable intent to purchase
- 8,827 items were listed on Folksy (new, not re-listed) – up 17%
- 214 new shops (started in Aug with at least one listing)
What did we do in Sept?
Last month we shared the work we’d doing to support users to:
- More easily explore Folksy – browse-based behaviour
- Create ‘styles’ for their profile to have items recommended to them
This work has been progressing on the backend and we hope to test an early version later this month. The slower-than-hoped-for progress on this feature is due to a couple of things:
- A significant upgrade to our technical stack
- A phishing scam, which started in late Aug and has involved significant work both in our immediate response and building in additional security measures
Issue in focus: Item availability and overseas visitors 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇫🇷 🇪🇸 🇩🇪 🇦🇺 🇮🇳
In order to support our objective to “Improve the user experience of Folksy so people can find relevant gifts and buy easily at Christmas” we’ve been analysing visitors landing on items they can’t buy, either because the item is unavailable or because the item doesn’t ship to the country the user is from (or wants the item shipping to). We want to make the experience of Folksy better for these users, and to maximise the sales for sellers too.
Although our focus in UK craft and the UK market, a significant proportion of visitors to Folksy come from overseas and 40% of those overseas visitors are from the US. In the last 30 days, more than 12k visitors with buying intent came from the US, and overseas visitors in general account for around 10% of all orders. The cost of shipping and Folksy not being available in other languages may limit conversion. However, we believe there is a more significant reason: over 50% of Folksy sellers do not ship outside of the UK and 55% of people visiting from overseas are landing on an item page that does not ship abroad.
This is a shame! Because while handling customs, EU regulations and postage for overseas buyers can be challenging, overseas buyers spend 100% more per order than UK buyers (and US buyers 200% more!).
But there is also another issue: a greater percentage of visitors from overseas land on items that are no longer available at all – 25% of overseas visitors land on an item that is unavailable to buy at all, compared to 15% of UK visitors. Many sellers don’t realise that a lot of items they no longer sell still (sometimes because that particular listing has sold or expired) have significant search value and attract people interested in buying. The reason more overseas visitors land on items unavailable to buy than UK buyers is that more come from Pinterest, and Pinterest has a significant inventory of older, “evergreen” (pinned) items.
This means that less than 1 in 3 overseas visitors land on an item that they can buy. If they are lucky enough to land on an item page that is available and ships to their country they are five times more likely to buy *something* within 7 days of visiting Folksy than a user landing on an item that is unavailable to buy.
To this end, we’re going to run a trial to see if we can help more sellers ship overseas and improve the experience for overseas shoppers. We’ll post more details on this experiment later in the month.
Other work we completed
- We released our new community policy and updated the information on our Terms of Use accordingly
- We updated the Folksy Seller App (IOS, Android) in light of recent Google API updates
- We shored up the security on the Folksy messaging system
Upcoming
- General Product Safety Regulations (GPSR) compliance and OECD Model Rules and DAC7 reporting requirements
- Release experiment to improve non-UK buying experience (and increase sales to non-UK visitors)
- Testing new browsing experience and profile creation
