So how was Handmade at Amazon's launch?
Really rocky first day, a lot of issues. For instance:
They had a big Handmade banner that you could click on, but when you did, only 300 plus items showed. If you then searched (thinking you were searching within Handmade), you got the general Amazon with regular Amazon items in the front, a sprinkling of Handmade. You had to know to go to a sidebar and click on a category within Handmade to get a search bar for handmade.
And results showed large clumps of a few sellers' items with no variety. I did find my house portraits , they were in a block together, just like other house portraits artists who have a different style from mine. Just blocks of one artist! So you would think there were only a handful of sellers within each category. It took me three tries and about 10 minutes to figure out how to navigate through to find a working search that showed Handmade.
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| English Bulldog Custom Portrait by me artist Robin Zebley |
Really rocky first day, a lot of issues. For instance:
They had a big Handmade banner that you could click on, but when you did, only 300 plus items showed. If you then searched (thinking you were searching within Handmade), you got the general Amazon with regular Amazon items in the front, a sprinkling of Handmade. You had to know to go to a sidebar and click on a category within Handmade to get a search bar for handmade.
And results showed large clumps of a few sellers' items with no variety. I did find my house portraits , they were in a block together, just like other house portraits artists who have a different style from mine. Just blocks of one artist! So you would think there were only a handful of sellers within each category. It took me three tries and about 10 minutes to figure out how to navigate through to find a working search that showed Handmade.
The banner is gone now. We don't know if it's because of the above and they are working to fix or if yesterday's banner was the Big Announcement and it's over now.
The drop down menu for Search for all departments does not include Handmade.
The stats do not work. We do not know if we got even one view yesterday.
Don't think it's an Etsy killer, at least not as of today. Sellers aren't disappointed with the lack of sales (some did sell, but nobody expected Day 1 to be a big selling day), but at how hard it is to find Handmade at Amazon. At all.
I had a TON of views yesterday at Etsy, so am wondering if all the "Etsy Killer" press Amazon stirred up actually worked in Etsy's favor? Anyone truly interested in handmade would find Etsy a much more favorable shopping experience. At least yesterday.
Hopefully they are working on fixing all of the above to buyers can find us! I'd hate to see the hours it took to list ONE BY ONE (they didn't think to program a copy feature for handmade, guess they thought we all made different things different days, not similar things) go to waste.
But until or if Amazon does some serious work, I won't be wasting another moment building there.
I'm portrait artist Robin Zebley, I blog about art, animals, the artist's life, selling online and venues. My work can be found at my site robinzebley.com, I'm an Etsy artist at CustomPortraitArt.etsy.com, and sure wish I could add Amazon to this list!
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2 comments:
I'm also selling on H@A, and I think we are actually the beta test, which is why they're not charging us a monthly fee yet. I've made 4 sales there so far; 3 were in the first week.
They added a COPY tool in the 2nd or 3rd week. The banner has not returned, as far as I know, however Amazon does have several ads in the current issue of Oprah's magazine. H@A shares a page with "Amazon Wine."
Support reps are mostly clueless, especially the ones which seem to be located off-shore. The biggest issue is that they're giving different answers to the same question! Almost as if they were making it up as they go! I'd rather receive a canned but ACCURATE response.
I'm also selling on H@A, and I think we are actually the beta test, which is why they're not charging us a monthly fee yet. I've made 4 sales there so far; 3 were in the first week.
They added a COPY tool in the 2nd or 3rd week. The banner has not returned, as far as I know, however Amazon does have several ads in the current issue of Oprah's magazine. H@A shares a page with "Amazon Wine."
Support reps are mostly clueless, especially the ones which seem to be located off-shore. The biggest issue is that they're giving different answers to the same question! Almost as if they were making it up as they go! I'd rather receive a canned but ACCURATE response.
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