Websites - Good Thing???

[Solunar Silver Studio]

It is well worth looking at some of the other, older threads in the Cooksons Forum Business and Marketing section if you want some extra imput on how to sell your stuff and how to make your website work ...(a particularly good thread by Mooncottage, Di, on website optimisation).

People tend to forget that allong with the twaddle a lot of us put out there - there are some true gems of information!! Most of us struggle with similar problems and so these same questions - in different forms - keep coming up!!

[lesley]

I'm new to this selling lark and I went the website route 'cos I'm too shy to do fairs.
I have a Mr Site package and it is easy to use but I've had terrible problems with it - emails not working, guest book disappearing, listings duplicating, disappearing or moving around. I once spent four hours trying to remove text that just kept multiplying until I had twelve descriptions for each item!!
I'm on a couple of other forums and I know my experiences are unusally bad although others do have regular problems.
Generally problems are eventually resolved but this unreliability really bugs me now. If I could do my own site I would.

I started in May and sales are very slow although I have to admit I'm not very clued up about marketing. Word of mouth seems to be my best tool. People seem genuinely impressed when they receive the pieces and some even ask for some business cards to hand round.

I also set up an Etsy shop a couple of months ago and have sold nothing so far. I think it's true that people buy components and beads on Etsy but rarely the finished item. Plus, there's so many US sellers with ridiculously low prices.
I'm not sure if I'm kidding myself hoping for a discerning customer willing to take a risk on someone who has no selling history on Etsy?

Has anyone got an Etsy success story?

[Boo]

I have an Etsy shop and have had moderate success there (enough to make it worth doing) - 70 sales - although recently a chunk have been for a gift box tutorial - but I see those sales as paying my fees there and anything else I sell is a bonus. I'd do better perhaps if I worked it more. But it compliments my own UK site pretty well (where I do rather better) - I've settled on concentrating on those two on-line venues and abandoning the others - it ends up way too much work to do well otherwise.

If you're struggling with Mr Site - I went a different route (and I spent a LONG time trying things before I settled on this) - I bought web hosting that has access to the more common cart systems - ZenCart, OS Commerce and I settled on Cubecart - you can install them and set up your shop that way - I tried them all before making a decision.

I find CubeCart very easy to work with - now I have it set up how I want (although there are some further custom mods beyond my skills that I want when I have funds) and have been much, much happier since I got it going with a decent amount of stock listed. It's just about at the stage where I'm pretty happy with it. The URL's in my sig if you want a nosey.

The end result isn't quite as elegant as I had in my mind initially, I fully intended buying a lovely custom skin for it, but when I was testing the basic system using a tweaked standard template, I got friends and family and other forum buddies to test it for me before I committed to the cart and they all said they preferred the clean lines and ease of use to the skin I showed them - so I stayed with it and fine tuned the design a little - it's a custom colour-way and I re-did the graphics to match, but it's a fairly standard template.

[Di Sandland]

FWIW - even though I have access to Microsoft Front Page and have used it to create previous websites, this time I really couldn't be bothered with the hassle (not that I don't care but I don't have as much available time).

My solution was to use a webhost that offered an 'idiots' web-writing package. I'm happy enough with the result - I was unable to personalise it as much as I would have liked - but the feedback has been good. It took me just a couple of hours to get it up and running.

Would I use it again? Yes but only because its so quick and easy. If a truly one-off, individual site is important to you its not the way to go. However, if all you want to do is get an online presence, that looks relatively professional, fairly quickly this will do the trick.

A number of web hosts have variations on a theme. I have used the 1&1 package as well but I didn't much like the company.