And the listing never stops

I've been taking more days off at the day job recently, and spending more time at home. I was working three days a week when I was home, but I've now whittled it down to one day a week. My online shops seem to be doing well, and I thought about it and decided that I want more time to work on new listings, make jewelry, and process orders.

Yes, my world is all about listings. Etsy and eBay, and ArtFire. I want to consistently stock and restock all of my online stores. This means organization, it means staying on top of things, and it means taking pictures. At this point I take about 300 pictures a week, and sometimes as many as 500. Each picture needs to be edited. It needs to have the proper levels; it needs to be cropped, straightened, and resized, sometimes to different specifications. For new listings, I need to write descriptions, take measurements, and fill in information. For existing listings that I'm restocking, I need to revise minor points of the listing.

The most important part of the listing is the picture. Without a good picture, you will not attract the eye. It's incredibly important because customers zoom through pages of products so quickly that you only have a bare moment to catch their interest. I'm always trying to take better photographs. Up until today, I've used two 500 watt blue incandescent bulbs which are good for six hours of life. I'm on my third pair of bulbs, and today one of them blew.

But I still had photographs left to take!

So I took pictures with one bulb.

(two bulbs)

(one bulb)

(two bulbs)

(one bulb)

I know, this blog is so exciting you can hardly stand it.

With some pictures, there isn't much of a difference, but with others, there's a big difference. I need a second bulb. I went to B&H Photo Video to look at bulbs. I found the bulbs I've used before, but then I decided to take a quick look at jewelry photography sites to see what they suggested. It turns out that some sites are suggesting using compact fluorescent bulbs instead.

After weighing the pros and cons, I've decided to go for the fluorescent bulbs. They use a lot less electricity, they last for thousands of hours, and they don't put off the same heat. This is exciting, because it means I might be able to get the lights much closer to my lightshed.

It's good to second-guess my methods every so often; it helps me make sure that I'm on the best path.

Beware the pitfalls

Last night I hung out with one of my very favorite people, someone who also has an Etsy shop and works very hard at her craft. We commiserated about many things; lines at the post office, customs forms, the pressure to keep producing new and interesting work.

She paged through my Etsy shop and pointed out things that I never in a million years would have noticed. For example, none of my Etsy listing titles contained the number of pieces in the listing. In some cases this isn't a problem, as it's a single piece. But for people like my friend, an experienced Etsy buyer, this presents a hassle. For the other listings, she can hover her mouse over the listing and it will show the entire title, and she knows in an instant how many pieces are in the listing.

I would never have figured this out; my internet connection is slow and I never bother to hover over the pics because often it doesn't work. If I want to know more, I click on the item.

She also pointed out that having so many different countries listed in the shipping area is confusing. So I have now gone through and edited all of the listings to include the number of pieces in the title, and I've changed the shipping.

We talked about steampunk jewelry and its amazing popularity, and we looked at some of my new earrings:



I mentioned that these earrings are getting tons of views in my Etsy shop, but not many favorites. Perhaps it's because there are just so many pieces out there already on Etsy. I think I might try some new pictures and see if that makes a difference.

It's wonderful to look at things through someone else's eyes!

And now...semiprecious stone

I've sold vintage beads and cabs and glass gems on eBay and Etsy for a few years now, and I always hesitated about selling semiprecious stone. I mean, everyone else is selling it, right? You can get everything you want at any time and at rock bottom prices, right?

But then I took a good hard look at the things I can get, and the prices, and I realized that I have access to a lot of funky semiprecious stone that most people will never ever see. Amethyst slices, ammonite beads, gorgeous rhyolite and fossil coral...why not share? Sure, there will always be someone who will have something cheaper. But they won't ever have that exact bead, and if I choose the really standout stones, and I have them for a good price, then it could be something great!

So I went out on a limb and picked up a few strands of yummy beads. Smoky quartz handcarved rounds, rhyolite and fossil coral disks, lodalite quartz, some fantastic ammonites...and guess what? I took them to a couple shows, and they sold! Beaders liked how unique they were, and they liked buying just one or two instead of a whole strand.

Now I've decided to try this in my Laurel Moon eBay store and my Laurel Moon Beads Etsy shop and see how it goes. I've already sold a few lots, which is exciting, and I just put a few new pieces up, including this standout ammonite bead:



Can you see the opalization at the center? Just fabulous. I love sharing these awesome beads!

The new look of my Etsy shop

I'm getting very excited. Laurel Moon on Etsy, my beading supply shop, is undergoing a facelift. This is what the scans looked like:



Here's the beginning of the new look, with pictures instead of scans:



I like the closeup pics. They make it less obvious when Etsy crops them slightly. I think I'm going to try doing that for nearly all the pictures.

Sadly, this translates into more work, of course. But to have a nice look, it's probably worth it.

Pictures, pictures, pictures

I have taken nearly three hundred pictures this week. My camera has been working overtime!

Pictures for eBay and Etsy are important. You're only as good as your pictures, after all, and they must convey everything about your product in a very short period of time. They need to be clean, focused, and interesting, all at the same time. For Etsy, they should also be somewhat unified, so that your shop looks visually cohesive.

I have been thinking about overhauling all of the pictures in my Laurel Moon vintage bead shop on Etsy, and I finally had a block of time this week to do it. So I went through and pulled all merchandise that was still represented by scans, and I've taken new pictures.

Some of the pictures are okay, and some of them are great improvements.

This was my original half-drill bead assortment pic:



It was a scan, as you can tell. It does give the size and shape, but there's just something about a picture that makes me much happier:



I'm now experimenting with glamorous closeup pics for my thumbnails, hoping that they'll entice more people to click:



Well, I guess they're only glamorous if you like beads.

The thing about Etsy is that you have to list or relist things continually in order to be seen in their search results. Because I have such low-cost beads, I am reluctant to relist, and therefore I try to avoid it. But for these new pics, I definitely will. I hope it'll draw some new traffic in. Plus, when it's done I'll have a much more cohesive shop appearance because everything will be on a similar background.

My 100th item is up at my Etsy jewelry shop!

I've just uploaded a new necklace to my Etsy shop, bringing my total to 100 items! To celebrate this occasion, I've activated a coupon code good for 15% off, good for this week only. The code is ETSY100.



I've hoarded a small collection of stamp pendants for years now. They're really nicely made, with sterling silver frames, lovely smooth backs, and glass set in front of the stamp to protect it. I have several from many different countries, but some of my favorites are the stamp pendants from China. I love the beautiful clothes and the long white expanse of negative space around the figure. I'm so glad to celebrate my 100th item with such a great pendant!

Click here to see the Chinese stamp pendant necklace in my Laurel Moon Jewelry Etsy shop

New charm earring listings, now with color choices!

I've been really thinking lately about my Etsy jewelry shop. I've been revising things and adding a few new listings. I'm about to start working on some new designs, but in the interim I was thinking about what sort of items I could add to the shop to make it interesting.

Then I remembered: charm earrings. When I first started making jewelry, charm earrings were one of my very first projects, and I really loved them. I wore them all the time. And I've sold many, many pairs of them over the years. I have a few good sources for high-quality charms and I'm always looking for new designs.

I have lots of charms stockpiled, and I thought that it might be nice if I set up listings that were made-to-order. I could just provide a single set of pics for each style of charm, and then have a couple photos that show the different colors to choose from, and then I'd make them to order.

Nice, right? But that means I need to make a sample pair of each kind of charm.

And then it hit me: I already did that!

Yes, two years ago, when I was working on putting together my website, I made a sample pair of earrings for each style. Today I dug out a few bins of beads. I dug through vintage Italian lampwork beads, brass stampings, French glass, silver scraps, and Czech satin glass necklaces, and I finally found a little bag containing the treasure. Earrings!

I photographed the colors of Czech firepolish beads that I purchased for this very thing. I have them all labeled with their color code, and I bought a hank of each, a few years ago, so I have a good supply stashed, and the color will remain consistent through many pairs of earrings. (Sometimes Czech beads do vary slightly from lot to lot.)

Best of all, I can just keep relisting these without having to take a new photo for each listing, which definitely simplifies thing!

Here are my color photos:





I like the way they look. I cut and pasted them together so that I could get eight color choices into two images.

So here goes. I'm going to start stocking my shop with these. They're cute and inexpensive and I love the different charms.

What a cool widget!

I love Craft Cult. If you're an Etsy seller, it's a great way to keep track of your items' hearts, views, and if you've been featured on the front page of Etsy or the Storque (Etsy's blog).

But there's something new! Check out their Treasury Widget page. This awesome widget generator is incredibly helpful. You basically put in your Etsy shop name, pick which treasury you want to make into an image, choose sizing options and whether you want the widget to be live or static, and then Craft Cult creates a terrific image of the treasury to add to your blog or a blog entries. It's a clickable image, and it makes it so easy to share when you've been featured in a treasury.

Here's the widget, in all its glory:



Nifty, isn't it? I love it! Can't wait to keep using this in the future.

I've been tinkering and photographing and tweaking, oh my...

And sometimes it's fun to just stand back for a second and look at what you've done, you know? Helps me to see if I've made progress, or I've slipped further under the mud. Today's experiment: Has my Etsy shop improved at all in the past two months?

I've begun to change the backgrounds, simplifying everything into a white background. I've added a banner and changed my icon to match the banner. And I've worked on taking all sorts of new photographs, some successful, some not-so-successful.

It all leads to this:



The new, improved Laurel Moon Jewelry Etsy Shop. I like the way it ties in with my blog, my other Etsy shop for supplies, and my website.

What do you think? Any suggestions for improvement?