Interview with Jon of Goimagine, a handmade platform

[BadBob]

This sounds very good to me, and they are cheaper than Etsy. For 400 listings on Etsy, the cost is $240 a year. I can have 1,000 listings plus a website that I get to manage myself for $120 per year.

Edited June 27, 2023 by BadBob

[kmmcrafts]

On 6/27/2023 at 2:28 PM, BadBob said:

This sounds very good to me, and they are cheaper than Etsy. For 400 listings on Etsy, the cost is $240 a year. I can have 1,000 listings plus a website that I get to manage myself for $120 per year.

I might have to check into this but most of these places are struggling to bring in traffic.. there are sites where you can look at the sites traffic and how many shops etc are on them.. I realize that these smaller marketplaces have to start and grow from nothing just like you running your own site does.. I've been there done that on so many of these smaller sites and the amount of work it takes to get page views and sales only to have them go out of business or just not grow. It's really hard to grow a customer base. 

Then you have sites that cost a lot of sell on and live by their rules etc.. but they handle a lot of the bookkeeping and have traffic like a mall would so very little effort to get sales.. 

This site was mentioned on a sellers group I belong to and it was mentioned that they were "loosing" sellers and traffic to the site.. I haven't checked or verified that myself.. so take that with a grain of salt I guess, LOL

[BadBob]

I have been approved. There is a bit of a vetting process. I'm going to start adding things and see what happens.

[kmmcrafts]

29 minutes ago, BadBob said:

I have been approved. There is a bit of a vetting process. I'm going to start adding things and see what happens.

After watching the video, I might join up as well.. This business model reminds me a lot of how "Artfire" was.. I learned most of my selling stuff from Artfire.. unfortunately I put my all into Artfire and sold nowhere else.. then the company changed some of the employees and management and the site went downhill fast and having put everything into just that one site was a lesson learned.. 

Another site similar did the same thing to me which was called Zibbet.. so ever since the smaller 3 selling venues that dried up after putting tons of effort into it, I've become very cautious about just joining up with "that new site that says blah blah blah" or so and so is selling on this new site very well you should join. etc.. BUT, I like how they want to keep it handmade.. Amazon started this way but it also very quickly became a sort of drop shipping / handmade whatever mess.. I've heard it all I've been a part of several new venues that had failed.. Etsy and many other sites have outgrown ( maybe not outgrown ) more like got greedy maybe.. but they also do have a following of handmade customers.. many are getting frustrated as are the sellers for having to sort through garbage to find actual handmade stuff.. The site is too big / known to really fail quickly.. seems like the same thing is happening with it as happen to eBay.. that was once my favorite selling venue back in the early days.. but again.. greed ruined it for most and they changed a lot just to stay in business.. and that's the same path I see etsy on. 

I'll look into it more and probably join up

[BadBob]

I got logged in and did a bit of looking around. They don't handle payments for you. You must have a stripe account that costs 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.  The stripe account is required to accept payments. The more I read and watched videos, the less I liked what I saw. It looks like way too much work.

I don't think I'm going to stick with it.

[kmmcrafts]

Artfire did similar however they started out with PayPal and then added stripe.. If I remember correctly stripe supposedly offered a deal to new subscribers through the Artfire store But at that time it was a monthly fee.. and many of us didn't figure we'd make enough sales to make it worth that monthly rate. I think now days some of these payment processors now realize a % works better than a subscription, LOL.. I do wish some venue would pop up with juried handmade goods only that had only higher end handmade products to offer on their venue.. There is a lot of not so great quality handmade as well as "reseller" junk on etsy these days.. Same with the handmade section on Amazon.. even though you have to be juried sort of to be accepted on Amazon.. Their workers have no idea what's really handmade and what isn't or they just don't care.   

[kmmcrafts]

On 7/5/2023 at 5:08 PM, BadBob said:

I got logged in and did a bit of looking around. They don't handle payments for you. You must have a stripe account that costs 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.  The stripe account is required to accept payments. The more I read and watched videos, the less I liked what I saw. It looks like way too much work.

I don't think I'm going to stick with it.

It looks like you can also set up PayPal, but Stripe is a must for some reason and paypal can be a secondary option. 

[BadBob]

My first listing is finally up. I thought I had it done, but I discovered there was much more to it than I had thought. Many more options are available than Etsy listings, and some of their documentation is a bit outdated. There is no mention of "Custom H1 tags" in the docs or videos.

I had my Etsy shop imported. In hind site, this was a waste of time. The goimagine settings are so different, and you need to edit so much that it would have been easier for me to copy,  paste and drag and drop.

Support is responsive. Usually, they get back to me within a couple of hours. Compared to emailing support at Etsy, which seldom gets a response.

I can have as many product photos as I want. There is also a section to add photos and descriptions of the build process.

Etsy tags are imported with underscores. If I remove the underscores, it complains that I have too many keywords, and they only allow 30. I have not figured this out yet.

[kmmcrafts]

 

I applied and was just accepted yesterday.. haven't had a lot of time to really look into it yet.. I've taken a look around the seller dashboard. Took me forever to find how you add a listing then it hit me DUH.. the plus symbol.. Not sure I've mentioned it but I hate symbols rather than just having a word or drop down menu, They should have the add a product in the drop down menu under products.. 

I really haven't looked into signing up with stripe yet.. I see they take PayPal but I think it's a secondary option from what I can tell. The whole thing really reminds me of Amazons seller dashboard.. but unlike Amazon which is done by HTML.. Yeah you'd think as large of a site Amazon is their seller software is from the dinosaur age, LOL

I've played around with many different sites. I'm sure this is all pretty simple once you learn where everything is, It's just taking that time to find it all in the beginning.  

I'm planning to do some laser cutting for the next few weeks " hopefully " and making things on the laser gives me computer time while the machine runs, so maybe in-between set ups I can at least look around and maybe get a listing up. 

Have you seen anything about shipping labels? I'm thinking that they don't have any integrated shipping label set up like Etsy and Amazon does.. Not sure if that is done through stripe either.. I will definitely walk away from this if I have to manually enter shipping through third party or on usps site etc.. No way I have time for that stuff during the holidays. 

I like what this site / company is all about and how they have the seller's' interest at hand.. This could become what etsy once tried to be but failed.. I don't think etsy failed as a site but I think they failed the " handmade small business model " that they originated on.. Now it's all about scrambling to make a buck for the stock market, LOL.. 

 

[BadBob]

34 minutes ago, kmmcrafts said:

Have you seen anything about shipping labels?

GoImagine connects with Shippo. I understand that orders are passed to Shippo, and you print your labels there. I have no personal experience with label printing there.

 

 

38 minutes ago, kmmcrafts said:

Not sure I've mentioned it but I hate symbols rather than just having a word or drop down menu, They should have the add a product in the drop down menu under products.. 

Same here. I think they (all of them) are trying to make everything look similar to a smartphone app.

 

41 minutes ago, kmmcrafts said:

I really haven't looked into signing up with stripe yet.

I have done this, and I don't recall having any issues.