Thoughts on listing items. Part 1

Having sat for a good few day’s looking over the survey results, thinking about how folksy works, and looking at current listing (how thing are being listed now) I’ve decided to break this down into stages, I’ll try and put up a post every few days (if nothing else than to keep each part short).

Before I write about the survey work, I though I would prepare the ground with some thoughts and observations.

When we list an item, what is our aim;-
Are we just trying to stock our shops?
Are we hoping to tempt buyers into looking at items, and then to visit our shops.
Are we aiming to use our skills to market the items.

What I would suggest to everyone is to take a look at the items from the ‘Buyers’ point of view.

You are visiting Folksy for the very first time, looking to buy some great handmade items. You have been told (either by a friend or Google), about folksy.com, the first page you come to is the ‘Home’ page with some great looking things, and you see five large tabs, the second one says buying, so you click on it, bingo, you see a page that has some nice featured items at the top, a column with ‘explore’ and some categories underneath, a featured seller on the right, a search box above, and if you scroll down the page, amongst other things you see a big section of ‘Handmade Goods’

In part one this is the section I will be paying most attention to, get used to what you see, and how you see it, go play with the pages on this, at the bottom of the section is a tab ‘See more handmade goods’, use this feature (buyer may not use this feature, but if they do, think about what they will see as you scroll through the pages.

Explanation? this section contains every item listed in folksy, in order from the last item listed moving down to (at the time of writing, page 1593) to the items that are just about to expire.

Take a good look at how many groups of items from one seller you see on a page, at one point I did actually see a page and a half all from one seller (18 items per page). Can you draw any conclusion from looking at this section, looking only at the seller alone (not what being listed)?

In part two, I’ll explain my conclusions and see if you agree.