A New Site Survey at Etsy, Amazon Wish Lists at ArtFire,a Banner Sweepstakes at Zibbet, and More: The Handmade Venue Update
June 22, 2010 | By
Welcome to HandmadeNews’ Handmade Venue Update! Here, we summarize all the recent events for the week of the top most used craft marketplaces on the web. That way, whether you sell at one site or several, you need only stop in here to get the news you need.
The venues listed below are all arranged in alphabetical order with links for additional information.
There have been no new updates for DaWanda, Ethikl, iCraft, Madeitmyself, or Silkfair this week.
1000 Markets
1000 Markets is promoting a new site launched at the end of May, Bixbe.com. On Bixbe, members can sell anything from cell phones to handmade candles. Bixbe appears to be a social shopping cart site in which members sell on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog, without any on-site shopping on Bixbe.com itself. Bixbe has just launched a new Facebook application, allowing members to set up a “for Sale” tab on their Facebook profile and page.
ArtFire
After receiving a notification from Google Merchant Center, ArtFire has built in automatic sentence case (where the first letter of each word is capitalized) on all ArtFire item titles on Google Base. This will not affect how these titles appear on ArtFire, but it will help ArtFire items from being removed in the future due to excessive capitalization. Read more about this update here.
ArtFire has removed the Facebook “Like” button from the item pages, as it was greatly slowing down the load time of the page. The “Amazon Wish List” button has also been removed from studio pages, as studios are not able to be added to Wish Lists. Going forward, ArtFire will continue to monitor page load times for the best possible conversions.
ArtFire is also encouraging all members to create Amazon Wish Lists with their items, as Amazon will be offering some free promotion for Wish List items going into the fourth quarter. All products on ArtFire have an “Add to Amazon Wish List” button, so members can quickly populate a wish list with ArtFire items.
For the past few days, some international users have reported issues reaching ArtFire.com. ArtFire has determined that the problem is “DNS Poisoning” and has posted specific instructions for fixing this issue here. If you’re having trouble loading the thread, you can also view the post on this off-site blog.
Etsy
Etsy is reminding members that they are participating in The Cooper-Hewitt national Design Exhibit, which is now open. Members in the New York area are encouraged to check it out.
Etsy has sent up a site survey to better understand how members use Etsy. This survey is open to everyone—buyers, sellers, and visitors. As in incentive to get users to complete the survey, Etsy is offering a sweepstakes to win a new iPad and handmade iPad case. This sweepstakes is open to members in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Etsy has started to update their search result pages to make them wider, however, as they’re doing this very slowly, only a small percentage of users will see them initially. Read more about this update here.
Folksy
Folksy has started a Craft Fair Secrets series in their site blog. Members are welcome to email in their questions or leave comments for topics to be covered in future posts.
Zibbet
Zibbet is getting ready to launch their re-designed Ning community page, but first they need a banner. They’ve asked community members to vote here on their favorite banner type, and one lucky voter will be randomly selected to win one premium month free on Zibbet.
(As a side note, Design 1, 3A, and 2B all have the same font style as HandmadeNews.org’s banner. It’s a certainly a popular font! ^.^)
Sara Moore is the Head of the Content Department on ArtFire.com.
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