Artfire does a Regretsy, and movin' on up!

An advertisement on one of my ornament listings for a factory-made ornament

(note: this is something that was done by Artfire, not by me!)

(note on 4/27/15: Artfire added an ad-free option a week ago from all of the complaints from sellers about the ads. I took Artfire up on the offer to keep ads out of my shop, and I now feel okay about sending buyers there ... for now. I am still setting up my own e-commerce website, but at least I don't feel rushed, and can do it at my leisure. The rest of what I wrote, below, is the original post)

As many of you know (especially my loyal brick and mortar customers), I have been selling on Artfire for awhile now. The site was looking better than it ever has, it had gotten mobile friendly, and then, wham! Ads!

No, I did not want my listings for my handmade and fine art to be blasted with ads looking like an ad farm! 

And no, I will never put ads with handmade, fine art listings. And believe me, I could make this blog cluttered with ads too, and make good money doing so, but I have never taken that route because I don't believe it is respectful to my customers and it goes against everything small businesses and artists stand for. 

I liken the ads on my listings to this scenerio:

I shop for food primarily from local farms. I actually drive to a lot of farms. I love the drive to the farm where I buy my eggs for three dollars a carton, for instance. They are lovely eggs by the way, all different colors, by all kinds of different breeds of chickens, and some of them even duck eggs, and so much fresher and better tasting than stale grocery store eggs. This farm is a place I love to go to because of the lovely scenery, where I can meet and pet the chickens who produce my eggs, where I chit-chat with the owners and where I can walk around admiring the wildflowers, horses and cows. Sometimes I see herds of deer mingled in with the cows, or off in the distance. You can see at least a hundred miles into the distance on sunny days. Imagine one day I pulled up and there was a big billboard for "cheap eggs, only a dollar, at your local Walmart" stuck to the chicken shack, and many other billboards and signs blocking the scenery, making it confusing about whether I was buying their farm eggs or ones from a factory farm. Ick!

Well, that's how I feel about the ads on my listings.   

I had been planning to move to my own site in the autumn because I needed to offer wholesale and I couldn't do that on Artfire. I had to use it as a kind of e-mail service and explain everything, rather than have it spelled out in a listing (and imagine how much more confusing it is with these ads for wholesale buyers!). Anyway this has precipitated a need for a fast move, hopefully by next month. I spend my evenings copying listings when I am not trying to keep supplies of greeting cards and other art products stocked for brick and mortar shops in my area. So, I will let you know soon where I have moved to. Here are some other ads they plastered to my handmade ornament listing:

 NO THANKS!

As for other movin' on up plans:

I am also busy creating listings for Fine Art America because most of my customers contact me for print sizes I don't have listed, to get a custom size/order. Having a shop on Fine Art America will make it so much easier for ALL of my customers to order a myriad of sizes on different mediums, even huge 40 inch canvas prints. There is so much I can't do in my own home-based printing business; I have had to farm a lot out. This will give everyone a chance to own any size they want, and on any medium from archival canvas prints, to archival fine art paper, to posters for a kid's room, and greeting cards, and other products. This is a shop I was focusing on launching until Artfire distracted me, and now it's almost like a race to see which site gets done first, my e-commerce store or the Fine Art America store. The stores will probably be done in close proximity to each other!

As for Etsy, I am not invested in running any kind of major store there for my handmade or fine art. If you want to know why, this article explains my views. In movin' on up, I am by-passing venues. Etsy is being relegated to tiny experiments for different kinds of themes. Right now I have focused on a handful of owl listings.

Other things I am working on:

I have some Easter listings to show you soon.

I am doing illustrations for a book (someone else is the author). That's all I can share now.

I will be offering a lot more Victorian designs on the new website, but still keeping most products focused on story-book art, Celtic designs and Renaissance inspired art. 

Just because I have been silent does not mean I haven't been working extremely hard!

NO LINKS TO ONLINE STORES FOR NOW

   

Regretsy hits close to home!

Do you know the feeling when you don't get the joke because it is too close to home? Well, that kind of happened to me yesterday when I went to look at the recent items on Regretsy (which I have visited about 20 times now and always found to be either funny or appalling).

This was the item:

© Vermorlian

you can click on picture to be taken to the listing on Etsy.com

Okay, so this is the kind of attire our band wears (known to play Renaissance Faires and Celtic Festivals). The commentary after the picture was as follows:

you can click on picture to be taken to Regretsy's blog on the item

Ummm, definitely updating their MySpace band page! Please take note!

The listing also has this photoshopped version which very much reminds me of the photoshop artists on the Enchanted Folk social site (where I am a member):

© Vermorlian

you can click on picture to be taken to the listing on Etsy.com

Yup, and the Raven definitely goes with the genre.
And here I am with The Harper and the Minstrel at a Renaissance faire (no, not the same guy as in the pics above):

photo by Jim Lestrange

links:

Our Renaissance band site on MYSPACE

Our Celtic band site on MYSPACE

Vermorlian's Etsy shop

The Harper and the Minstrel's band site on MYSPACE

Regretsy

POSTSCRIPT: I sold a Renaissance album today, so definitely NOT unemployed. So there!

Etsy Deluge, the Etsy privacy issue

Etsy Deluge

© 2011

watercolor, ink and a tad of colored pencil

painted in response to Etsy's latest buyer privacy issues

(note: only Etsians will get what this piece is about. But, to enlighten those not privvy to the joke, it has to do with Etsy's front page, which for years focused on owls, cowls, mustaches and certain kinds of rain clouds-- to the point of radically over-doing it, at least to many who sell on the site). 

For the moment, if you want this piece, it is available as an original 11" x 14" watercolor through this link

or as a 5" x 7" print through this link from my Artfire on-line store. Other purchasing opportunities may avail themselves at some point, so check back for the edit on this page.

Anyway, the privacy debacle started out in the Penny Arcade forums where a buyer's name came up in a google search with the artisan dildo she bought on Etsy. Yup, all out there for her grandmother, co-workers and the world to see! It was placed in the google search under her name on the first page of the search, right after her on-line job resumes. Why? Because Etsy changed their privacy policy to make real names of buyers come up in searches. The only way for buyers to change their privacy settings was to log onto the site and change them manually.

Etsy claims to have e-mailed everyone about the change, but the e-mail was buried in a newsletter about how to take great catalog worthy product photography. Also, many buyers only came to the site once to buy or discontinued their e-mail addresses, so many were not notified. I have strong spam filters on my web-mail address (if I didn't, I would get thousands of spam messages a day-- as it is, I get anywhere from 700 to 1,000 now). So, I never got the e-mail either.

From there, Ars Technica took up the story. In the Ars Technica comments section after the article, there was a "battle royal" going on in the forums between Etsy's CEO, Rob Kalin (along with some of his Etsy staffers) and the sellers and buyers of Etsy. What angered sellers and buyers most was that they had been complaining in the Etsy forums about the "opt out" (of having your name shown in searches unless you opted out)-- arguing that it should only be an "opt in" situation. Every forum that was brought up about the situation was immediately closed and some of the sellers were also "muted", i.e. not allowed to post in the forums any longer.

From the Ars Technica article, it went viral. The list was substantial in the end (click on each name to see each site's article on the matter): MSNBC, Washington Post, Consumerist, Huffington Post, Yahoo, BoingBoing, Forbes, Digital Trends, Help Net Security, NY Magazine, NY Convergence, Auctionbytes, The Business Insider, Gizmodo, The Village Voice, The Mary Sue, BuzzFeed, About, Reputation, Salon, Now Public and Geek Sugar.

This was preceeded with lots of other bad press including the rape card fiasco and the Glamour fiasco. Click on these preceeding links if you want to understand what it is about.

I was personally effected by the rape card fiasco. Two women customers, who saw the unflattering story break on CNN, came into a brick and mortar gallery where I was working and wanted me to sign the petition to force Etsy to take the rape cards down from its site. And then they looked at me and asked why I would want to sell on a site like that, not realizing that Etsy is not all about dildos, radical art and Regretsy type items. I do think the outside world mainly regards Etsy as an off-the-wall kind of marketplace filled to its brim primarily with Regretsy items and Keep it Weird items when actually the opposite is true: there are more artists making exceptionally unweird items than weird ones, they just never get much press.

It's not getting much better over at Etsy.com. The recent article in Inc Magazine portrays Etsy as a giant flea market and its CEO as crazy:

Inc Magazine, April 2011:
“Today, Kalin is socially awkward, reticent and given to eccentricities which seem downright crazy.”

Kalin speaks in the article too: (Inc Magazine, April 2011):
"I speak to people in the business world and the technology world, but I don't admire them", he says, pointing an 8-inch combat knife at me for emphasis.

There's more, but I won't go further.

I know a lot of sellers are having a difficult time selling, and many blame the latest happenings (if they are allowed to speak out-- you mostly have to look off of the Etsy site to find out how sellers are really taking it all).

Needless to say, I don't really fit in (in terms of what they like to promote). If I made owls, cowls, mustaches and certain kinds of watercolors and Regretsy types of items, I would. But I don't (normally!). I'm trying to figure out what to do about my own shop on Etsy and in the meantime primarily focusing on my Artfire shop and the brick and mortar gallery scene in my area, which is sober in comparison. I'm not recommending or actively advertising Etsy at all to my brick and mortar customers primarily because of the privacy issues. All I need is my brick and mortar customers coming into the store with "Why didn't you tell us that our names would be splashed all over google and that our e-mail boxes would be bombarded by spam!"

I still have a few things listed at Etsy. If you love Etsy, then make sure your privacy settings are the way you want them!

Here is a close-up of the owl's face, complete with mustache:

edited to add: more on this subject through this link.

links:

MY WEBSITE
SOME OF MY ART FOR SALE ON ARTFIRE

MY MUSIC LINKS (hear clips):

Music MYSPACE
My band, Saratoga Faire’s MYSPACE
My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort

MY MUSIC IN ON-LINE STORES:
CD Baby
Amazon
InandOutRecords (Europe)
My band, Saratoga Faire, on CD Baby