The date for the SweepIn broom maker’s gathering is approaching, and the event continues to grow! I have to say that when this idea first came up, I thought, sure, why not… it’s be fun to get a a small group together and talk about brooms. Small group? No! At present more than 45 people have expressed an interest in attending and the information has only been listed here on my website, the broom makers list, and there’s been a bit of word of mouth traffic.

I also thought it’s be nice to have a class or a demonstration or two. This has grown, too! At present we have 2 classes, 3 demonstrations, 2 presentations… well, instead of my rambling on, take a look at the schedule I’ve put together:

OUR EVENTS

These are tentative and subject to change. Note that Friday and Saturday events will be open to visitors.

THURSDAY

• Setup after 5 p.m.
• There’s also going to be some demonstrating on Mountain View’s Courthouse Square in the evening! Feel free to join us… let’s get the word out!

FRIDAY

• Setup before 10 a.m.
• Friday morning: Meet and greet! Enter art brooms.
• Friday afternoon: Traditional Round Ozark Fireside Broom Class with Bill Soetaert. Cost is $50. 1 pm to 4:30 p.m. class may end earlier.
• Friday afternoon: “Grow your own broom” presentation by Little John. No cost, open to the public. 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.

SATURDAY

• Saturday morning: Whisks 101 – Turkey Wings and Hawk Tails with Little John. Cost $50. 9 am to 12:30 pm class may run longer.
• Dyeing broomcorn demonstration – all afternoon
• Traditional Besom tying demonstration – Time TBA
• Broomcorn seeding demonstration – Time TBA. Demonstration may be repeated.
• Friday afternoon: “Grow your own broom” presentation by Little John. No cost, open to the public. 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.

SUNDAY

• Materials round robin and tool swap 9 am until it’s over
• Many fond farewells!

There’s usually music being played all around the square on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and your fee gets you into a concert either Friday or Saturday night at the Ozark Folk Center where the doors open at 6:30 and the concert starts at 7 p.m. and ends around 9 or 10 depending on the number of groups playing and the number of curtain calls they get).

Looks like there’s nary a moment to be bored!

If you’re wanting to attend as a broom maker, you’ll need to download, fill out, and send back one of the registration forms:

• SweepIn Registration Form in Microsoft Word Format
• SweepIn Registration From in PDF format

Popularity: 20% [?]

<<- Read the intro < – Read the previous review

There are a bare handful of online selling venues that offer something for nothing. This services goes one better and offers even more for nothing. Let’s take a look at the offerings and enticements and see if it’s worth the proverbial plunge!

Here, the seller chooses what to pay. If you choose to pay nothing, nada, zip and zero your listing will have to be sponsored – that means an add will appear alongside your product. At first I was against the idea of a sponsored listing. I was afraid that it would use some Google search algorithm to advertise competitors products next to mine, and I certainly didn’t want that… after all, you never see a banner ad on Google’s home page advertising for Bing or Yahoo. However, after listing an item or two, it appears that the advertisements are not from a Google database, but from sponsors of the site and service – and you get to choose who sponsors you. My sponsor is a scrapbooking company – no conflict! Additionally, there are options for smaller sponsorships with slightly larger listing fees – say, remove half the ad for 10 cents. Or, you can get rid of all the advertising for a $.25 listing fee.

Ah, you say, the listing fees can be eliminated, but what about those dreaded final value fees, the commission? How about 0%? That is unless you choose to pay a larger percentage. I really feel it’s fair to pay something, but like any other consignment shop, I don’t like the idea of paying up front. They point out that ebay’s final value fees run in the 12% range. I note that a lot of other services offer fees commission rates in the three to five percent range. I think I ended up around 5%

But wait! There’s more! No, they’re not offering a set of Ginsu knives, a toaster, or a shamwow. However, they do allow you to set up a store for free and promise to contribute to a rainforest protection fund in your name. All part of a carbon offset plan… they’re gonna set aside 25 square feet for a free listing and store and up to 250 square feet for small donations. On the one hand, I have never been real sure about these rainforest protection schemes. On the other, it can’t hurt anything, can it?

There are some portions of the service that aren’t free. For instance, getting a product featured on the front page is gonna cost. How much? Set a price… bid on it. They also offer a $.25 top-up option and I wasn’t able to quite figure that one out. However, rather than bullying a person into any fees, there’s a message stating that top-ups and feature gallery bids are for more advanced sellers and that they should be left alone while starting out. Imagine that! A firm saying “don’t spend your money here, yet. Make sure you know what you need first.” Refreshing.

So far, it sounds too good to be true, and with all things that sound that way, there are some problems:

Their traffic is dismal. Quantcast reports a mere 44,700 per month. Granted, that’s more than my home shop gets, but my niche is quite small and this is a bit broader. TrafficEstimate shows them with around 147,000 visitors in the past 30 days. It’s only fair that I note here that these number do indicate growth. Between the time I started this series and the time I published this section, the numbers rose significantly.

Their listing process is designed to be easy, but somehow it isn’t. There’s a 5 step process, with easy to understand fields to fill in throughout. The problem comes not from the forms, but from the button marking the five steps. Rather than having buttons that need to be clicked, these are rollovers that display the form with a flick of the mouse. Nice, unless you’re using a laptop and, halfway through writing your listing, your thumb brushes the trackpad and obliterated what you were doing. That said, it’s not too bad. The steps included are the description with offers fields for a basic description, a materials field, tags, price, shipping – the usual suspects. Then there’s the photographs with space for up to 5 total pictures. The listing section gives you the options to list everything for free or choose to pay a little, get sponsored, protect some additional rainforest. The final step contains the warning against putting your items in the gallery and then gives you the option to bid for gallery placement.

I think I fit in here. At present, I have the only handmade, non-imported brooms (the others are the small straw brooms obviously imported), and the only hand-carved crochet hooks (the other is a bamboo crochet hook with a sheep made from, I’m guessing, polymer clay mounted on it), but there seems to be a lot of handcrafting going on.

Where they’ve fallen down is in the social arena. They appear not to have a presence anywhere.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 8% [?]

<<- Intro  <– Previous review

Next review –>

In cruising through my stats last night I noted a couple people searching for a review of WinkElf… here it is!

Let’s start with the good!

Listing fees between $0 and $.40. The 40 cents is broken down like so: $.05 for a bold title, $.10 for Category Feature, and $.25 for Main Page Plus Feature. When an item sells, there’s a mere 2.5% commission. A basic store is free and that includes unlimited listings and the ability to add upgrades as needed or desired. Or, you could choose a month-long or year-long package for $5 or $50 respectively which includes all of the whiz-bangs and frills and reduces your listing fees to zilch, your commission to nada.

The listing process  is pretty straight forward. You’re walked through 5 screens where you choose a first category, a second category, add a description and media and select a payment type, a preview of the listing and a confirmation page.

The listing really shines on the 3rd page. Here, you can type in a description using a visual editor, use tags, add up to 5 pictures and a video! Further, the service allows you to select from a plethora of payment options for those disenchanted with PayPal. Although there is no auction style listing, there are options to accept offers or barter. Yep, you read right, online bartering!

Looking through the extensive list of categories, it would appear that I would fit here nicely even though I am the only person, at present, offering the wares that I offer (which is often the case). Their guidelines specify items be handcrafted, vintage, craft supplies, or “everything else” which still appears to be acceptable with a noticeable lack of iPod sleeves and docks bid lots of brick-a-brack.

Now, let’s look at the not so good.

Their traffic is rather dismal when compared to some of the other offering out there. TrafficEstimate claims they’ve received around 64 thousand visitors in the past thirty days. Meanwhile, Quantcast says they’re only getting an average of 5,600 people per month. It is showing some growth, however.

Their social presence is a bit odd. They are on Twitter with around 1,400 followers, but I could not find them on Facebook. The footer on their site also has links to Squidoo and AllTop.

Finally, let’s take a look at the truly bad.

Sorry, I can’t help myself, I know it’s personal, but WinkElf is a terrible, horrible, awful, no good, very bad name. It is a name I could sell through, but I wince every time I hear it and a shudder every time I say it. Writing it only brings a smirk or, at worst, a giggle.

Although they have some social integration and even have a “tweet this” built in to the listing process, they are a little short in what I feel they should be doing and a little overzealous in other fields with literally tens of tweets per hour. This borders on Spam in my opinion. This is brought on in part by the “tweet this” mentioned earlier. A better solution, perhaps,  would be for the tweets to show up under the users Twitter account and have the WinkElf account only retweet featured items.

The site feels half baked. Even though, in this day and age of the permanent beta, there is no beta tag on the site, it certainly feels and acts like a beta. For instance, the entire help page yielded 404 errors. I could see the topics I wanted to get help on, but I could not visit the page. This was a problem elsewhere on the site, too.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 2% [?]

<<-Read the intro <– read the previous review

Read the next review –>

Depending on what you list, how you list, when you list and where you list, listing fees can vary wildly. One item can cost as little as $.03 or as much (est.) as $3. Personally, I think it’s far too confusing. I grant that there is a fee calculator and a lot of 3^rd party services that offer to lower listing fees and make listing easier, but still, ebay, by itself, is convoluted and hard to navigate as a seller.

When you’re through with the listing, you’re not through paying. There’s the Final Value Fees which hover, I think, around 12%. Combine the two, and your fees will run in the 18% range. Add in a storefront and you can be up to more than 25%.

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to selling on ebay including, again, a plethora of third party listing tools and a general sense of well-being and conformity knowing that you’re selling where most everyone else shops.

On the other hand, this is also where everyone else is looking for bargains and the quality of merchandise can vary wildly as can the prices – from low cost to high dollar to high quality to absolute garbage to the occasional real treasure. Hey, where else can you sell (or buy) a piece of toast with Elvis’ face for a couple grand? After all, this is not Christie’s.

Then there’s the Feedback system. Here there are some rather ridiculous protections for buyers (and I understand some of the necessity), but precious little protection for sellers. Feedback is all but useless anymore as all a person needs to get a positive feedback as a buyer is pay… when they want, how they want as long as they pay. Meanwhile, if the seller isn’t Johnny-On-The-Spot in every regard there are dozens of ways to get dinged. Seriously! I’ve received a ‘neutral’ feedback when I did everything right… right product, right price, speedy shipping, no additional shipping or handling charges (and buyers really don’t understand, unless they’ve been to the post office to send more than a letter or postcard, just how expensive shipping has become) – a textbook perfect transaction.  But the buyer claimed that it wasn’t what was expected – a purely subjective response – and requested a refund. I refunded the money and the shipping charges and never received the product back. Yet I was required to accept a neutral feedback while required to give the buyer a positive feedback.

Ebay has a fine Facebook presence including feeds and apps. The also have a large following on Twitter. Facebook, Twitter and advertising has led ebay to be #4 on the internet. Pretty impressive! In fact, Quantcast estimates that the get more than 96 million visitors per month. TrafficEstimate claims they only got around 54 million in the past 30 days. Pick a number, any number, they still beat the competition pretty much hands down.

I note now in day 6 of this series that I did not include a column in the chart for feedback system.  Oversight? Perhaps. Ebay’s feedback system is broken, yet a lot of other services allow the import of ebay’s feedback to prove worth on their service. Broken, yes, but it’s what we gots… Knowing this, and knowing that I am very disappointed in ebay’s feedback system and that it’s personal, I left feedback off the chart…

By the way, our feedback on ebay is more than 1700, 100% positive and features a near perfect detailed seller rating, too. My disappointment with the feedback system is not sour grapes, but a matter of principle and a single bad experience.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 8% [?]

<<- Read the introduction <– Read the previous review

This is the kind of article you’d expect to find at the end of a series such as this… the catch all just before the conclusion. When I’m reading a piece such as this, though, I find it annoys me to get to the second to last line to find that the information I was looking for all along wasn’t even considered. Wasn’t covered, wasn’t research, wasn’t written.

Before I give you the list, let me tell you the primary reasons I chose not to review the following sites. If the site was for a designer – someone who came up with a clever piece of furniture and made one to be shipped off and mass produced – it wasn’t for me. If the site was specific to a region, it wasn’t for me (note that I am reviewing Dawanda which is based in Germany, I think… I was able to list there). If a site was gender specific, I decided not to review it. If a service was media, method or market specific, it was excluded.

Without further ado, then, here’s a list of sites I looked at and decided not to put in the series, along with the reason they were excluded

• HandmadeMarket.com
  • It’s been “undergoing maintenance and will be back next week” since I began researching this article. I might have waited and reviewed them, but I have no way of knowing – since the message includes no date – whether they’ve been undergoing maintenance for a day, wekk, month or year. I may still review them at a later date.
• Trunkt
  • Relaunching April 2010
• Twolia
  • For women only. Bummer, cause some of the prices and policies looked rather nice. Free setup, .20 per item listed, multiplies with inventory (4 of the same item = .80), 3.5% commission. However, I’m not gonna lie about my gender or have my wife list items in her name. In fact, this kind of annoys me… I don’t recall seeing a man only site… Maybe there’s a market there?
• Shopify
  • $25 to $700 per month. This is more of a website design service than a selling service. And at these prices, probably not a good fit for the handcrafter.
• Imagekind
  • Appears to be 2D only. Kind of an interesting fee structure… worth looking into, but not a fit for my crafts.
• SupermarketHQ
  • More for designers that have products mass produced.
• Yessy
  • Describes itself as an escrow company that seems to be focused on 2D art. $59 setup and 10% commission.
• Elsewares
  • More for designers that have products mass produced.
• Folksy
  • UK. Might be a fit otherwise, and may be reviewed later.
• Erayo
  • More for designers that have products mass produced.
• Coriandr
  • UK. Might be a fit otherwise, and may be reviewed later.
• SmashingDarling
  • Fashion only with an 18% commission and a wee bit of a snide attitude.
• MISI
  • UK. Might be a fit otherwise, and may be reviewed later.

If ever you catch me in an error, have a different opinion or want to add your voice, feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment in the field below.

Popularity: 4% [?]

<<-Read the intro  <– read the previous review

Read the next review –>

In all fairness, this site has the look and feel of a startup and it might be worth looking at again in a couple months… or years. At this point in time, though, and this is just an opinion, mind you, but I don’t think this is the pace for an artisan crafter.

We start with a dizzying series of listing fees and options and store fees and options… enough to make ebay look rather simple.

We add to that the nonexistent TrafficEstimate numbers and the Quantcast verified numbers indicating that there are between 4 and 126 people on the entire globe visiting the site on any given day. Quite honesty, I get better number staying at home.

They do have a respectable Twitter presence, though with more than 900 followers and they seem to follow back. I was unable to locate them on Facebook as either a person or page.

If their fee structure is any indication, listing on this service would require a PhD from MIT! There are too many options. However, I might be wrong…. it could be simple… however, I did not test it because I was not going to sign up and pay additional funds to get verified, plus the listing fee, plus the final value fee, plus the store fee. Note that I did spend a rather frustrating hour trying to figure out how to sell and that they do give you a $3 credit to get started. More good news? There are some freebies. According the website, they will submit your items to Google and Microsoft for free… however, at present the submissions were marked as “coming.”

Taking some additional pages out of ebay’s book, they offer both auction and flat rate listings and do not, in spite of the name, focus on artisans. The latest Tweet as of this writing promotes a digital camera and the second featured store on the front page was a discount electronics store.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 11% [?]

<<– Read the intro <– Read the last review

Read the next review –>

There are some serious benefits to keeping it all at home. There are also some serious drawbacks. After all, if it was easy and worked well, everyone would be doing it and services like Etsy and ebay would never have made it off the ground.

The primary benefit is, of course, the freedom. There’s no one besides law enforcement telling me what I can and can’t write about. Put an obvious link to another site that sells products – even if they are not products available on ebay – in an ebay message and see what that get’s you. Here, I can link to whomever I like. Likewise, I can sell items outside the list of categories allowed on other services. If I want to run a listing for a crochet hook, that fine. Right along side that, I can list an old lathe or a ball of lint. Doesn’t matter.

The primary drawback is the traffic. I’m small potatoes. I one person. I do not employ an SEO agency. Therefore, I have to rely on word of mouth and presence elsewhere to get traffic to my site. TrafficEstimate says I don’t exist and Quantcast shows me with a verified 300 people per month and that I’m ranked around 12 million. That’s at once pitiful and heartening… after all, that means I’ve beat out several billion other websites…

I am active on Facebook as both a page (in need of updating) and a person, and I use Twitter (though not very religiously), and I am an early adopter of Google Buzz. Using these services does draw some visitors for me, but as I am just the one person and most of the folks that follow me know me, it’s kinda like preachin’ to the choir.

The fees can vary wildly. My yearly budget for my website is around $280. I can recoup a great deal of that by assisting other people with hosting and design services. This number also includes a lot of secondary domain names that point to my website. Trilooms.com, for instance, takes you to the specific page for my TriLooms (which needs some serious work). Broombesom.com takes a visitor directly to my brooms page (which is in much better shape). Also included in that number are several domain names for friends and associations. If I were to strip it all down to the bare minimum, I could get away with spending around $84 per year. There are a lot of alternatives to that $84 per year and some of them are free, but as you look closer, some of the benefits are stripped away. This is by no means the best deal out there, but it’s what I got.

Meanwhile, I take a half dozen orders or more per month. If I were to break it down, I’d say my fees run in the neighborhood of 4% of the total sales. Pretty competitive overall!

Since it’s my site, there’s no question of fit! Of course it fits!

Another drawback to having your own site come in the form of the ease of use. There are a lot of software packages out there that will allow you to design and host a site, but they all will require a degree of competence with the computer and the internet to install and use. If they say they require no experience, chances are they’re lying or the end result will look like no experience was used. It’s no secret that I use and promote the use of WordPress. It’s easy (for me), free, and has as many options and designs as Carter has Liver Pills. It is possible to plug and play, but that’s not going to get  the best results. To get the best results, some digging around under the hood may be needed. All of that aside, I’ve finally settled on a plug-in to WordPress that allows me to put up a post and place a price on the item featured in the post. Simple.

Ladies and gentlemen, the table if you please…

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 11% [?]

<—- Didja miss the intro? It’s not too late to read it.

If you want to read the next one, you can do that here —->

In checking my site stats I saw that several people were looking for HandmadeCatalog.com reviews. That, I thought, gives me a place to start the Online Sales Showdown! Remember, I’m taking a look at Cost, Ease of use, Fit, Integration and Traffic.

And what a rough start it is…

From what I could find, this site has been around for a couple years. In that time frame, they’ve managed to attract only a very small segment of the market. Quantcast estimates that they receive about 2,200 visitors per month. TrafficEstimate claims the number is more like 6,300. Neither number is a verified number… just an estimate.

They appear to working on improving that number, but they are going about it oddly. Instead of having a Facebook Page, they are a Facebook person and in order to get updates, you have to friend them instead of fanning them. If they miss your friend request, you get no updates. Meanwhile, their Twitter persona had a total of 387 followers and appeared to be tweeting about 3 times per day during the writing and researching of this article.

I cannot write about the ease of listing because I couldn’t list anything. I did not want to enter into a contract with no guarantees and up-front costs simply for the purposes of researching this article.

You read right… contract and up-front costs.

The fees involved are high compared to other similar services:

• $4.95 per month (or $40 per year) and 15% commission for up to 50 items.
• $7.95 per month (or $60 per year) and 10% commission for up to 250 items and 3 featured on the front page per year.
• $12.95 per month (or $100 per year) and 5% commission for up to 1200 items and 5 featured on the front page per year.

A red flag went up when I read that payments would be made to the crafter by the service via check or PayPal after the sale and before shipping. Payments do not go directly to the crafter as they do with many other services. I much prefer services that connect me to the buyer directly. Although the service acknowledges the problem in a roundabout way, there can also be issues with shipping when business is conducted in this fashion.

Fees and pay structure aside, this does seem like a fair fit for my products. I found no brooms there, but there were some handmade broom covers I might consider buying. I found no knitting needles, crochet hooks, or drop spindles, but I did find a plethora of yarn related kit and crocheted items.

In conclusion, this service – which is not a true competitor to ebay or Etsy, but a crafts catalog – has some worrisome fees, contracts, and usage issues. There is no serious traffic to speak of and their social presence is small in spite ofd being on the web for a couple years. As a crafter on a limited budget, this is not a venue I would choose.

Ladies and gentlemen, the table if you please…

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 9% [?]

Pssst. Wanna skip the intro and dive right in? —->

For the past several years, we’ve been selling at local shows, on this website and on Ebay. However, I’ve always thought that there had to be an alternative. I had heard of Etsy, and there have been vague rumors about other sites and services starting with the intention of competing with ebay and Etsy.

It turns out that the rumors are true. There are more then 20 alternatives to Etsy and ebay. But I find that, short of signing up and trying them out one at a time, there’s precious little on the internet that compares the alternatives in an easy to read way. None of the reviews I have read compare them at all! That’s not to say that there aren’t reviews out there that compare… that’s just to say I haven’t found them.

To ease my mind and make my decisions easier I started researching them. Now, I want to share what I’ve learned with you.

The first thing I learned is that there’s no possible way I can compare and contrast all the services and sites in the course of a single blog post. I began this story about 2 weeks ago and after some 40 hours online, I had generated more than 3000 words, a dozen or so charts and tables, and I wasn’t close to being done. This is suited for a book (hello, publishers… contact me), or a series of magazine articles (again, hello publishers… you out there Crafts Report?), or a series of blog posts.

Until the publishers drop me a line, then, that’s what I’ll do… a series of blog posts.

What I want to do in this series of blog posts is tell you about a single specific service at a time, and then use a table or chart to compare it to all the other offerings. To that end, I’ve chosen a fairly broad range of elements to look at and review:

• Fees – how much to list, what percentage of sales in commission, how else does the service provide for itself (advertising, etc.) – What does it cost?
• Fit – I make crochet hooks and knitting needles, looms and brooms, a fairly eclectic mix of items. I do not think my products will sell well opposite a gaggle of Made in China products or a huge list of used computer components – Do I fit here?
• Ease – Some services make it easy to list, some seem to require a post graduate education. Personally, I don’t want to think – How easy is it to list an item.
• Traffic – I could have the most wonderful product on the planet and if I set up shop in Antarctica, I’ll probably have very very few customers. Likewise, a service that offers low fees and easy listing and a perfect fit, but gets few visitors isn’t going to help me. – How many people visit the site.
• Marketing and Integration – People are already starting to call Web 2.0 old hat and turning to the social web, calling it Web 3.0. This trend came about with the widespread adoption of MySpace (which I did not check as I do not use), Twitter, and Facebook. Google Buzz was debuted as I was writing this and is not included. This segment might well be the hardest to justify, but I feel it’s important to have a social presence as that can potentially drive more visitors to the site. – Are they working for you?

Without further ado, I give you the table… soon to be filled with all kinds of interesting and useful information… click on the title of the service on the score card below to view a complete review.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 16% [?]

As you may have read earlier, we’re planning a broom-makers get together in April at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, AR. The response has been much larger than I had ever imagined! To streamline things, I’ve put together an information packet and a registration form. You can download it here:

MS Word .DOC File

or

Acrobat Reader .PDF File

If I missed something or you have an additional question, please feel free to email me.

Popularity: 23% [?]