I know that a lot of you peeps who visit here also sell your creations on Etsy. I have been saying for a while that I would do some posts on ‘how to sell’ online handcrafted items. So this is post #1.
As part of our Handmade Code series, we’re bringing you news and how-to’s about the innovations emerging from the Etsy Developer Community. Located at developer.etsy.com, the Etsy Developer Community serves as a hub for third-party software developers who are making neat and helpful programs for Etsy shoppers and sellers. In this edition, magicjelly presents her and juln’s site, Craft Cult, which includes the incredibly useful apps The Heartomatic for sellers and The Vault for shoppers.
The Heartomatic was first developed by Julian, a.k.a. juln, back in 2007. He really only intended it for his own use, but told a few of his Etsy friends about it, too. One of them posted about The Heartomatic on the forums and word spread fast — soon there were thousands of people using it! In November 2008, Julian and I launched Craft Cult, a collaborative project. Julian is the programmer, I’m the designer, and we have lots of plans for new features. I think one of the reasons for Craft Cult’s success is that we are artists and Etsy sellers (and buyers) ourselves. I think that experience has really helped us develop tools that Etsians find useful.
What’s the basic idea of the application? What need does it fill?
The idea behind Craft Cult is to enhance the Etsy experience for both sellers and buyers. Utilizing Etsy’s public API, The Heartomatic provides sellers with statistics relating to their shop hearts, item hearts and views in a time-saving, user-friendly format, as well as providing information that isn’t readily available via their Etsy shops. The Featured page also shows sellers when they’ve been picked for Etsy’s home page, Gift Guides or in The Storque so they never need miss the excitement. We often hear people comment that Craft Cult is totally addictive!
Our utilities are a lot of fun and very easy to use, but from a more serious business perspective, they also provide shop owners with invaluable information about their shop activity that can really help when it comes to product development and market research.
We haven’t forgotten about buyers. We recently implemented The Vault, which is an archive of all the home page featured lists. The Vault is pure eye candy, very inspirational, and a great place for window shopping.
Our newest addition to The Vault is a “Share This List” button that takes you to a page where you can create an animated widget featuring items from Etsy’s home page, which you can embed on your blog. It’s a fantastic way to add some visual appeal to your blog while spreading the word about Etsy, and it’s a way for Treasury curators and sellers to preserve their moment of home page glory and show it off to the world.
Where do we go to find it? What’s the URL, etc?
You can find us right here… http://craftcult.com
Who is it for? How many people are using it right now?
Craft Cult is for Etsy addicts and people who love handmade and vintage. There are a LOT of them using our site, about 45,000 unique visitors and 2 million views a month, and growing steadily. Since installing Google Analytics a couple of months ago, we’ve had over 90,000 unique visitors using Craft Cult!
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