Thursday, May 26, 2011

Artfire The Premiere Online Selling Venue

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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)
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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!
Become an ArtFire Pro with this link and get your 3rd month free!