Friday 13 September 2013

New designs, new shops

I’ve been glued to the computer this past week, loading all the new designs and setting up a new shop on Etsy. And of course it took 10 times longer than I thought it would. But I'm chuffed with the end result, so please go and have a look at the shop and all the new designs. 


The idea behind this big shuffle is to move away from having an online shop on my personal website. It’s sort of worked for me until now, but there have been more glitches and instances of customers not receiving patterns than I’m happy with lately. And as if to validate my decision, the whole shop went down during my Springcleaning Sale. The tech support crew has seldom managed to solve my problems and the live chat support function disappeared at the same time as my shop went on the blink, which I suspect was because of all the back-end changes made. If they’d let me know they were making changes, I’d have kept an eye on my site. But with everything else going on at the moment… a classic case of misplaced trust. 

The good news, however, is that it's sorted out and the sale is still on until midnight South Africa time on Sunday (realistically till early Monday morning, as I doubt I'll be making changes at midnight on Sunday night). So get over there if there's anything you'd like to add to your Projects To Stitch list.


Another aspect is that online selling platforms have improved radically since I started out, most notably to accommodate digital downloads. As all my patterns are in digital format, this is obviously important to me.

Craftsy is mainly an online video learning site, but it offers designers free stores for digital products. This allows me not only to sell patterns through my personal Craftsy shop, but also give away patterns for free. Etsy recently introduced a digital download function too, which is proving popular – as you can imagine. The advantage of having an Etsy store is that I can continue selling in £, but buyers can set their currency preference to any of 10 different global currencies to get around having to do conversions. And of course the advantage of both sites is the low running cost compared with a standalone website, as well as the benefits of being part of a like-minded community.


I’m also in the middle of setting up a shop in ZAR for my fellow South African embroiderers, which I’ll share as soon as it’s done (see first paragraph about everything taking 10 times longer than planned…).

Other than that, the trees outside my windows are greening up beautifully and the temperatures are rising rapidly. Summer is well and truly on its way to my corner of the world and I’m expecting sweltering heat and violent thunderstorms any day now.

6 comments:

Anna said...

OMG you have been busy! The new shop looks amazing! Congratulations on all those new fabulous patterns.
Anna

Kelly Fletcher said...

Thanks so much, Anna. It's the culmination of four months of winter hibernating with computer, needle and thread... Needless to say I'm looking forward to a bit of a break now!

Paula Marcondes said...

Great news! As we say in Brazil " Poderosa"!!!!!!!!! (Powerful!!!!)
The new patterns are nice, love the birds!

Kelly Fletcher said...

Thanks so much, Paula. I'm also partial to the birds, particularly Birds on a Wire. Glad you like the new designs.

Debbie said...

I love your embroidery patterns! They are so fresh and pretty! So happy I ran into your blog today!

Kelly Fletcher said...

Thanks so much, Debbie. Lovely to hear from you.