Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Part 1 :The Heartsy Deal - Jacaranda Design's Positive Experience


During early March I was lazily browsing through the Etsy forums on a  Sunday afternoon when I stumbled upon a posting about a relatively new site called Heartsy. I read that Heartsy offers special deals on selected Etsy shops, a little like Groupon. It sounded like an interesting promotional opportunity so I decided to investigate further. It turned out that in order for a shop to be considered for a promotion on Heartsy, the shop owner was required to add a few photos of their products and submit their "deal" for consideration/voting by the customer community.

A few minutes later I had submitted my Jacaranda Designs deal and moved on to other things. A couple of weeks later I had an email from Heartsy informing me that Jacaranda Designs had received sufficient votes to qualify. Heartsy administration were very responsive to my emails and questions, always getting back to me promptly. Together, we finalized the details of the promotion and a few weeks later, Monday April 13th, Jacaranda Designs was featured on Heartsy.

On the day of the promotion, I woke at 5am and around 7am began a wonderful, crazy busy day (to top it all my son was home sick from school for the day!).  In fact the entire week flew by as I prepared invoices, packaged orders and responded to inquiries.

I'm a pretty organized person (with a background in project management) so I thought I would be able to handle the load very efficiently. Although I did manage to package heaps of orders and mail them out within the three business days I had promised, I see now that I could have been even more efficient with my time.

All in all it was an enormously successful promotion. I know there has been a lot of discussion on Etsy forums regarding whether sellers should sell their handmade crafts at such a considerable discount and this is my opinion. I wasn't approaching this as a quick way to make lots of sales and profit. This was another form of advertising and marketing. I usually pay for advertising of Jacaranda Designs and I figured Heartsy was a way to advertise that would not cost me money. 

Anyway, I thought I would talk about my experience on my blog and hopefully help other sellers prepare for the big day or at least make a decision whether they want to participate as a Heartsy seller.

Part 2 (later this week) will discuss the math you have to do ahead of time. Yes, I know, many people hate math but in this case, you will have to do some number crunching to make sure you end up making, not losing money.


Stay tuned....

6 comments:

  1. Thank you for your reflections on this. I appreciate hearing many different voices.

    Stitching in Circles

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  2. Great information Jane! I look forward to reading part 2 (even though I hate the math part!)
    I am busy too, with Mothers Day and Spring break for us this week.
    Cheers to your success!
    Nathalie

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  3. Hello Jane-
    Thanks this is such a nice post. Even though I don't have an etsy shop, i read it and learned a lot. Thanks for investing the time in this post and sharing it. I have been meaning to visit your blog ever since we took the BYW class together but only now found the time to do it. Congratulations on your hard work :) Regards,
    Pinar

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  4. Just wanted to say thanks for writing the posts on Heartsy. This is something I'm considering and you've given me a lot to think about.
    Heather of CharmedbyHeather on Etsy

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  5. You are very welcome Heather - feel free to contact me if you want any other info - I'd be happy to help.

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  6. I was just now searching for about this when I discovered your post. I’m just stopping by to say that I really enjoyed reading this post, it’s very well written. Are you planning to write more on this? It seems like there is more depth here for more posts.
    http://www.jacobandco.com/

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