~ Grand Opening! Artfire Supplies Shop ~

I took a look at my Etsy bill for my supplies shop and realized it's getting more and more expensive every month. That's good in a sense that I am selling more. But, I think this month was really bad because a bunch of my items were up for renewal. So my listing fees were off the charts. So, I decided to open an Artfire shop because of the flat monthly fees. I was thinking about Zibbet, but Artfire has "Item Importer" to import my 188 items from Etsy. That helps a lot. So in about 45 minutes, after Artfire forced me to put in my bio and such , I imported my items and my Artfire shop is up!


Now comes the fun part of recategorizing all the items and setting the primary colors and such. Thankfully, Artfire has global editor. I love how you can specify items by searching through the ones you already have. However, will it kill them to put an "Add All" button to this so I wouldn't have to sit there and click on +Add 30 times? I must say though, for this task, Etsy's batch sort may be faster because you just click on each item to sort. With global editor, you have to find the items for 1 category, click on each of them, submit the change and do the next category. But this global editor allow you to globally change the price on items. It's like one of the most asked for feature on Etsy.


One thing I noticed is how they imported the text of my listings. In all my Etsy listings I put this at the end:
.•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•.

All Happy Cloud Supplies items will be shipped within 2 business days of payment through USPS First Class.

Take a look at my shop for special sales and announcements!
http://happycloudsupplies.etsy.com

.•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•.

Bad thing is....all the pretty stars are gone. Good thing is that they replaced Etsy with Artfire. That's pretty smart and it shows how much care and thoughts they put into implementing their features. I appreciate it a lot as a user and as a developer. Though it was funny that it renamed "Betsy Bunny" to "BArtfire Bunny".


So here are the steps to move from Etsy to Artfire Pro account:

1. Sign up for an pro account.
2. Follow their steps to set up shop (upload avatar and banner, write bio and policies, set up payment methods...)
3. Import your Etsy items using their item importer.
4. Make categories for your studio.
5. Use the global editor to move the items into the right studio categories.
6. Use the global editor to move the items into the right categories. You can probably use the studio categories instead of specifying items here.
   
7. Use the global editor to set the item primary colors.
8. Rearrange your shop if you like.
9. Set up a coupon code for your Facebook fans or Twitter fans.

Now, I am just going to sit back, relax and wait for my first Artfire sale. I am going to give it 2 months. If sales are not good, then I am downgrading. Oh yeah, if you buy from my Artfire shop, use "happyart" when you check out for 15% off! Sale ends next Sunday!