I’ve been selling my beads online for some years now on various online ecommerce venues including my own websites.
Some of these sites, when in their early stages, I came across only to decide against selling on them as they just didn’t quite have the same look and feel as the venue I was currently selling on.
When I could no longer ignore the press, forum comments about others that were gaining increased sales on one site - which became a sort of poster-child for selling to the handcrafting community - I decided to revisit that particular site. It was evident almost immediately that I had certainly been missing out on valuable sales and opportunities – my decision to not get on board sooner immediately came to mind!
I didn’t make the same mistake when I came across Artfire.
There’s always a learning curve of new features, down time when populating a new site, trying to manage both sites simultaneously and filling order – interestingly enough sales do increase.
The recent opportunity to express why Artfire sellers selected it as their main selling venue; along with the incentive to possibly win a $500 gift certificate got me thinking and as a result listing my reason for selling on Artfire.
Here are the top 5 reason why I enjoy having a Pro-member account selling on Artfire:
- SEO tools, tutorials, guides and results that are realized almost immediately as you see your items indexed in the major search engines and shopping sites; along with ease of listing tools, and integration with the major social media websites.
- Flat rate monthly fee no final value fees regardless of the number of items listed, no percentage of sales or relisting fees (ongoing promotions for Free monthly Pro-member accounts for referrals and during other promotions member fees can go as low as $5.95 - and I thought my original fee of $15.95 was an incredible bargain over what I was paying on another venue)
- The look and feel of your Studio can be personalized in a number of layouts and color schemes to fit your style or the season.
- At-a-glance dashboard – which seems to be always evolving for the better – offers several tools; but especially the blogging tools and collections features which amazingly do bring not only additional views to the products in your Artfire Studio, but also sales.
- All in all, any ecommerce selling site which is gaining traction due to bringing in sales, managing their challenges, and listening to their community will experience growing pains; however, when sellers are seeing increased sales month-over-month (you can view running totals during the month) even during these growth phases – glitches and all – it is a testament that Artfire’s management is doing something right!
