Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Milestone Marker - 150 listed on Etsy!

Wooohoo, I just passed 150 listing of items on my Etsy store.  Picture below is my 150th item YA!



Mind you this has been a very long and drawn out process that I need to blog about.

Several years ago I opened up my Etsy store.  I have been making jewelry, beaded accessories, rosaries, etc., for a long time.  I've been selling also for a very long time what I make.  

I prefer to do custom work, given that it really becomes a One of a Kind piece for the person, but to get traffic you have to make stock.  And I did/do.

That, is where the problem starts.

For every item you want to sell, you need to take a few pictures of it, document what the materials you made it from, create some blurb about it and post.

I decided 1/2 way through this process to standardized on keywords, additional information text and style of presentation.

I just recently decided to add in my SRAJD Number to the descriptions and a picture with the pieces.

Etsy doesn't have the ability to do html in the body of the descriptions.  This is frustrating.  Links don't work in the body, so if you make a matching bracelet or earrings and want to sell them separate from the necklace - the URL will not become a hotlink.  I like using tags, and pretty fonts and formatting to make my descriptions pop, similar to what is on Ebay.

Instead of breaking their page into smaller sections, especially for those of us that crash using Firefox (another beef of mine - great browsers gone bad), if you need to change a picture, or add a new keyword - there isn't a good way.  You have to go through all of it to change something small.  

Keywords and Components you can't edit, you have to remove and re-add.

Worse of all, there isn't a template so I can have a 'more info' and expand the section to show the rest of my standard verbiage in the description.

It takes me about 20-30 minutes per item to post.  I try very hard to catch mistakes, such as formatting or upper case/lower case issues, but it is so cumbersome to do.

Not sure if going back to hosting it off my own website, where I can do library, templates, java scripting and other widgets.


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Anyway,  I entered a weekly challenge with one of my latest designs. 


I had a ball making this piece.  It is up on the Etsy store (with matching bracelet and earrings).  The design is called Hopscotch, though I am not sure why - it was what it wanted to be called.

Tomorrow is more picture taking, more posting, but I am starting to see the end of the backlog of already made stock.  I need to figure out next set of steps to get more traffic to Etsy, to the block, and to my FB page for Vampkitty Designs.

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