SHOP CRITIQUE OF SIMPLY KATIES BY MARILYN RUSH

written by Marilyn Rush

As I looked thru Katie Lynn’s shop I found little to improve on. Her shop is small at this time but it’s chock full of beautiful artisan wire jewelry. Katie describes her jewelry as being a  minimalistic design. Her theory is that the woman should be noticed first when she walks into the room, jewelry second. I am not sure this jewelry would come in second Katie, it’s noticeably lovely.

 The banner is nice and is an excellent symbol for artisan wire jewelry. Being in grays and steel blues it has the feel of cool metal so that you can almost reach out and touch it. Directly below lies the shop announcement area. Katie uses this area to explain her jewelry design ideas. You might  use this area for the announcement of sales or any special deals you might be offering your customers. Holiday announcements or special policies could also be mentioned here. You can also use this area to welcome people to your shop and invite them in and give them a word picture of what they will see on the journey through your shop.

One tool that Etsy provides that you are not taking advantage of is the FEATUREDS. Etsy allows a space for 4 items across the top of the front shop page. You can pick any of your items to be here and you can change them as often as you like. You can use these for sale items or for your new items. I like to change mine often. I put up 4 items that are somehow related, perhaps all bracelets done in blue, or earrings done in red. And then I put them on sale for 25% off,  that gives me a reason to advertise them. I can take them to all the teams I am on, post them on the sale discussion threads. You could also take it to Twitter, Face book, Pinterest, or any of the social networking sites you may be associated with. This is a great way to shine a spotlight on some items that are there in your shop just collecting dust. It’s a good idea to use the Featured Spaces and change them often, and use them to breathe life into items that may have grown cold.

I looked at your “About” page and WOW, it is great. One of the best that I’ve seen. That is a wonderful advertisement for your shop. The pictures tell what your shop is all about. The first picture with the pencils and paper with the drawing show how you design a piece first, and how you could design for a customer as well. The pictures of your jewelry pieces are gorgeous,  followed by the picture of your workspace with your tools, they finish the story.

Another word about the About Page. The pictures you took of your jewelry for your About page are excellent, I would like to see more of those in your shop. Those close-ups that hone in on a striking feature are so effective. It is not necessary to show the entire item in each picture or even your first picture. Most people know what a bracelet, earring, or necklace looks like, so when shooting pictures concentrate on a particular feature that will really define your item.

I am going to group several smaller things together here. Let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter. It would be a good idea to work on your likes and follows. You want as many people to see you as possible. But that is nothing to the biggest market you are missing out on, that being Etsy. You are only in 49 circles and have 33 admirers. The first thing you need to do is to start clicking on every Add To Circle button you come across. A good place to start is with your teams.  Go through the membership page clicking on each members picture. When you do a menu will come up,  click on ADD TO CIRCLE, most people will also add you if they haven’t met their limit. I have met my limit, so occasionally I go to my favorites page and delete some of the oldest ones so I can add some of the more current shops. But keep adding shops to your circle until Etsy tells you that you cannot add anymore. Then when you click on something it will go out to all of those people in your circle and it will continue through the circles of the shops that are in your circles. What you have favored has just gone out to thousands of people. You may ask why do I care if people are looking at these items that are from other people’s shops.  One word. Reciprocation. They will reciprocate and click on your items. When you are looking at things on your activity feed you can favorite them as you look at them, others are doing the same thing as they look at yours.  This is somewhat of a give and take game, yet it is very serious, there are whole teams focused on nothing but clicking on the members of the team, so that they guarantee each others that they will be on the activity feed many, many times each day. A clicking team can keep your items appearing for the full day. Your views will go up and increased views means sales. 

Now let’s look at something else, those titles and tags. Google, Etsy, and other search engines use the titles and tags to find items that people are searching for.  

You can start with Etsy’s search on your shop’s front page. Let’s say you are ready to list a bracelet. If you want to know what tags to use when you list it, type in the word Bracelet and see what pops up in the box below. First you will probably get For Men,  For Women. You could click on either of those and Etsy would bring up pages of bracelets that fit into that category. So you would probably want to add a tag to indicate which it is such as Women’s Bracelets. A customer might know she wants a bracelet made of beads, so you could put into the search box, bracelet bead, beads, or beaded, what will come up will include handmade, design, plus more, a useable tag might be beaded bracelet, handmade beaded bracelet, and so on. Some people might just enter in the search box jewelry or bracelet jewelry, that brings up quite a few choices, friendship bracelets jewelry, charm bracelets jewelry. You can use this same method for the Google search box and you will come up with their particular search terms, they will be quite similar to Etsy’s.  Using the tags that are recognized by these search engines guarantees that when someone is searching for an item that you sell in your shop, Google or Etsy will send that person to you.  And using the best tags will get you on the front page or close to the front page. You want to be one of the first shops that people go to.

Now let’s think about what a woman looking for jewelry might put into the search engine.  Jewelry, women’s jewelry, bracelet, bead bracelet, beaded bracelet, green bracelet, pearl bracelet, woman’s bracelet, fashion bracelet.If you had used the tags that came up in your tag search each one of those tags would work for you.  Not only do the search engines use the tags they use the title. So you want to use tag-like phrases to describe your item.  Let’s change the title to this:  Beaded Bracelet, Green Beaded Bracelet, Fashion Beaded Bracelet, Woman’s Beaded Bracelet, Woman’s Jewelry, Pearl Jewelry, Crystal Bead Bracelet.

  You can’t think like the crafter or shop owner. You have to put yourself in the position of your customers and how they think. In general people don’t know technical terms, or quite how to describe just what they want. They may not know what they are looking for in jewelry, let’s say a bracelet, if you describe all the features of your bracelet, let’s say this is your listing, bracelet, hunter green Czech 7mm crystal beads with pink rice pearls and silver plated jewelry findings, 7.5” long,  toggle clasp. Let’s say as a title you say Dainty Pink Pearl and Hunter Green Crystal Angelina Bracelet. Now for the tags: bracelet, pink, pearls, green, crystal, pink pearl, rice pearl, hunter green, Angelina bracelet, dainty bracelet, woman’s bracelet, Czech crystal, light pink.  13 tags, what Etsy allows.
                                     

 

 You can see more of Simply Katies Designs at http://www.etsy.com/shop/SimplyKaties