It has been a good holiday sales season thus far, as Christmas comes and goes I realize my work is never done. While many others will spend the holiday weekend blissfully lazy and enjoying family gatherings with days off of work, I will be once again editing all of my shop's listings. 😏
Changes to tags, keywords, holiday, occasion, etc. as I shift from Christmas to Valentine's Day and re-work the gift wrapping description to apply all year round.
Yep I have to edit all 140 listings. . .again, this is a continuous thing shifting focus with the seasons. Happy shoppers are completely un-aware of the work on the backside of a business, they search, they find they buy, it seems to easy to them. ~LOL~
We are in the grips of a winter storm and for once I'm glad to not have orders 😇 as I'd really rather not drive my shiny new car in this muck. ~LOL~
I've re-created the mini rainbow trees, I've made a new gold and pink super cute tree with fancy new butterflies that just got listed yesterday. 😉 Today I'm planning some new chaninmaille, we'll see how far I get with my plan. ~LOL~
I've been working on establishing a Pinterest presence and it's an odd place I haven't quite figured out. I post and pin and link back to my listings and I have seen some traffic from it, but I'm not sure how to get more people to save and re-pin and share.
Pinterest is a bit like this blog I keep trying but it doesn't seem to have much of an audience. ~LOL~
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ♪♫♪♫♪♫♪
I've had several orders recently that I know will be gifts. 😇
I did a holiday craft party with a library youth group. 😊
It snowed last night, just a little bit but the green grass is now covered in white. 😉
I am somewhat surprised that no one has added the gift wrap to their orders, but it's ok. Etsy has continued to change and re-write things so I'm not even sure how many people get to see the gift wrap option. To combat the Etsy oddities in layout and hiding things, I went ahead and created a listing to add gift wrap, it's the same $3 price point with the same sample photos and I made it a "featured" listing on my shop page so at least people can/will see it. Ironically the gift wrap listing got favorite'd. 😄
I am re-making the mini rainbow trees since they just keep selling. Plus I really need to get other new stuff made I'm back down to 138 listings and apparently 141 is my magic number. After sales last week I was down and I found chainmaille rings that weren't listed yet so I added them and that put me back up to the 141 but then more sales. (not a complaint I'm ecstatic)
I am also noticing that whatever wire tree I put up as a "featured" listing sells. I've had to change that row 3 times, the tree sells I pick a different one then it sells. LOL So I'm going to have to start paying attention and rotating things through there more often.
I have been trying an assortment of promotions, sales at differing %, free shipping, posting on assorted social media. Doesn't seem to be doing much though, it's a bit disheartening, honestly. 😡
CYBERMONDAY17 coupon code click to pre-load
take 25% off orders over $10.00 (discount applied at checkout)
Sales currently running include 20% off orders over $30.00 and FREE Shipping on orders over $60.00
You would think I would have had more than one sale. 😩
Facebook is broken, it's semi-functional, functional enough that the average user probably doesn't realize how badly it's broken. You may have noticed some page lag, slow loading, failure to load, site unreachable timeouts that seem to correct when you refresh the page.
See I thought I was in facebook jail being punished for complaining but now I'm pretty sure facebook is just broken. 11 days ago I wrote the post Thanks a lot Facebook complaining about my business page blanking out years worth of historical activity data. I thought it was a glitch or server brain fart but it has never come back, apparently it's not likely to either. 😩 I thought I was being punished because 4 days ago I posted a link to one of my instagram posts and it got no views, literally its been 4 days it has 1 person reached so obviously it was never served up to my 100+ followers. 😒 In October I was averaging 40-170 people reached per post now in November it's 2, 15, 1, 10 ridiculous. So the instagram share post with it's pathetic single view I was considering "boosting" but the button says "boost unavailable". 😮 I clicked the link and tried to figure out why but it doesn't seem to make any sense none of the reasons listed seem to apply. 😵
So I posted a fresh post yesterday about the layered sale in my shop, actually wrote the post on facebook not a shared post from somewhere else. It seemed to work better, it gave me a boost button but when I tried it failed, it gave me some error. It looked weird it wouldn't give an estimated audience like it normally does and it error-ed and failed. I tried 3 times yesterday and after it would fault out I would get a notification from facebook encouraging me to boost my recent post "page admins boosted similar posts. .yadda . yadda." . 😫 Why keep telling me to do a thing that is clearly not functioning?!?!
So this morning I tried again and again and I think it finally went through but popped up a box that they received my request and my ad would be reviewed and could take up to 15 minutes to be approved. 😕 This is weird, I've had the page for over 2 years this is not the first time I've advertised, my payment method is confirmed and unchanged, it's jewelry nothing offensive to be reviewed. Previously it's been about 30 seconds between clicking the submit and getting the notification of approval not 15 damn minutes. So I checked and it now says approved and I never got the notification of approval.
Something is very wrong with Facebook. I complained to my husband about the weirdness over a week ago and he admitted while "facebook jail" is real and facebook does punish people who complain or cause problems it's not likely that that is happening in my case as my page is such "small potatoes". However, he told me of a much larger problem with extreme and prolonged cyber attacks on the backside of facebook, for about 2 weeks they have been jedi style cyber battling and it's all hush-hush no one is supposed to know or talk about it. Hey I just got the notification of my ad approval. I hope they get this under control soon because it's starting to get ridiculous. I got a 1 notification on my page but when I clicked it and went to the notification page there is nothing there, literally the most recent thing is yesterday nagging me to boost the post not even the ad approval shows. 😐 Although, it clearly has been approved because when I look at the page the post shows it as an active promotion. Also it went from 11 people reached to 51 people reached in a matter of a minute after a page refresh so now I'm questioning if that is actually valid and accurate. 😵 It's just weirdness and inconsistency that I'm not used to seeing on Facebook and it's been going on for a while now. I hope they get it together soon as it is normally one of my best advertising options for my etsy shop but not if it's not functioning. 😩
So this morning I log into facebook, and there is a notification on my RainbowMaille page but when I clicked on it, it went to a blank empty page that said no new notifications. Now the numbering being a lying misrepresentation of new activity would have been bad enough but it was a TOTALLY BLANK page as in no historical data for the page. 😞 Seriously 2 plus years worth of activity data just gone. WTF?!?!
Facebook shit the bed on me, I don't know if they are having some sort of internal problem or server problem or whatever what I do know is my business page currently has no history, no data, no record of activities at all. This is troubling since I post regularly and just recently did a "boosted" post that netted fresh likes and followers, and multiple clicks of the shop now button, you know lots of activity. Finding a blanked out page with a suggestion to promote my business makes me want to choke someone. 😒 I did promote my business but now I can't even look at the data because facebook forgot. ?!?!?
I often wonder how many "etsians" are actually business savvy and daily I am disappointed in the low percentage that are. 😡
Today someone posted a thread about the possibility of Etsy changing the fee structure, this entire discussion is based on some second-hand information and guess work because someone's friend got a survey asking about fee structure. Now it has been pointed out by someone else who received said survey that there was a non-disclosure clause and confidentiality agreement before the survey but apparently the person who posted thinks it's ok to go ahead and quote questions and give out private information because she was not the one who took the survey, not understanding that their friend is violating a legal agreement by sharing protected information and that she is in fact violating said agreement by proxy by publicly posting private and protected information that should not be being discussed in a public forum. ~sigh~ stupid is as stupid does 😒
Yet they all get so offended if you point out to them that they are not real businesses, that many of them are not licensed and have no idea how to properly collect and remit sales taxes, they do not understand even the most basic concepts of business management, actually annoyingly many of them seem to have no reading comprehension or understanding of the meaning of words such as confidential.
