You may have noticed that the Sixth & Elm Etsy Shop has been closed for a bit, but rest assured that this closure is only temporary and I plan to reopen at the beginning of February. I had a very busy fall season and I needed time to finish my lengthly queue of orders before I took any new ones, and I knew that I would need some extra time off once Noah arrived too. In addition to that, there is a rule against earning extra income for the first 13 weeks of maternity leave while collecting maternity benefits from the Canadian Government. I will get paid for the full year off like everyone else, but for some reason they do not allow you to work for the first 13 weeks. I don’t mind though. I am using the time off to come up with some new designs for the shop re-openning in February.

If you would like to be notified when the shop is taking orders again to can sign up for automatic email notification on the Sixth & Elm shop page (don’t worry, you won’t be signed up for newsletters or spam) or you can check back here as I will post once I am up and running.

Coming right on the heels of yesterday’s post about the new Third-Party Etsy RSS App developed by akendall1 is the news of a new site called Featsy (which sounds kinky, but it’s really just a mix of  “Featured” and “Etsy”), a web-based app (similar to the Heart-O-Matic) that will send you an automatic Email when any of your items is featured on the Etsy Gift Guides or on the Homepage. An alert system to notify sellers of an item being featured on the front page is something that Etsy Sellers have been waiting for Etsy to develop and this is another example of clever people taking the problem of these missing features into their own hands and developing third party apps, despite the fact that Etsy has not yet released a public API.

I signed up for both the email option and the RSS. The email worked beautifully, I got a little email a few minutes later telling me that my Floral Abstracts Box was featured on the Etsy front page on Tue Nov 11 20:30:50 CST 2008 and a little link to unsubscribe to this alert below. The RSS was confusing and I am not sure I did it right. After you enter your email and submit, it offers an RSS link – I got a feed that had just the title of my Floral Abstracts Box and a link to it, but no mention of where it was featured and when, and then it had some other seller’s items under it. Oh well, the email option works for me. Very handy.

No mention of the site’s privacy policy that I saw, so I hope they don’t sell my email address. There is a link to email the developer, so I could have done that and asked before entering my email, but…meh…

Via The Unofficial Etsy News

The Heart-O-Matic, the super-cool tool written by Julian of Juln.etsy.com has moved from Majaba.org to a new site, http://www.craftcult.com/. Craft Cult is co-owned by Julian and Karena of Magicjelly.etsy.com and features all of your favorite Heart-O-Matic Stats in a fancy new design, with more opportunity to advertise on the very popular site.

For the uninitiated, the Heart-O-Matic is a tool designed to help you easily see who has favorited your shop, which of your items have hearts and how many, and what your total item views are without having to click on each item or doing more math than any of us need in a day.  Go check it out if you are not familiar – you’ll love it. Of course, us Etsy sellers are so starved for shop stats that almost ANYTHING stat related gets us drooling.

But it’s not from Etsy.

Etsy Sellers have been asking (crying, shouting) for an RSS feed for our shops that is useful to us. For the unaware, an RSS feed for an Etsy shop is like a news ticker that will notify anyone following it when you post a new item. But an RSS feed is useless if it doesn’t entice your followers to click through to your shop, or if it provides so little info about the new listings that people stop bothering to look at it. The current Etsy RSS feed is just that – a boring list of your item titles and descriptions with no picture of the item and no price. A fine format for news, not for a shopping site.

Enter akendall1, who is not actually an Etsy Seller, he is an Etsy Member married to an Etsy Seller (soapdeli, to be exact) and I guess he figured getting involved with Etsy was his only chance of ever seeing his wife again, a lament many an etsy spouse can relate to. He wrote a beatiful app that gives you an RSS feed address to replace the Etsy RSS address that will show your listed items including pictures, prices and (wow!) an “Add to Cart” button right in the feed! And it somehow grabs my shop name as Sixth & Elm, not sixthandelm as the Etsy RSS does – much nicer looking.

How do you get this fabulous feed? The address for your “superfeed,” let’s call it, is hosted on the Google app engine and to access it you just use http://etsyfeeder.appspot.com/?userid=5034807 (replacing 5034807 with your Etsy user ID number) as your Etsy RSS url instead of the one you get from your shop. It is true that anyone subscribing to your feed via the button in your shop will not see this new feed, but you can promote the new feed address on your blog or twitter to get people to follow it, or import it into facebook, twitterfeed, indiepublic or any widget that accepts an RSS feed import. Please see the accompanying forum post on the new app, which includes info on what to do if you get a server error the first time you try to go to the address (just hit reload a few times – it means your shop is big).

Hello? Etsy Tech? Are you taking notes?

Is my Etsy ID different from my Etsy Username? How do I find my Etsy ID?

Your ID is different from your username. Your username is the name you chose and the one you log in with. Your ID is an Etsy-assigned number that you can easily find by simply going to your store. If you use a bookmark or if you type your “friendly” store address (www.username.etsy.com) you will always get redirected to an address that looks like this: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5034807 That one is mine. Pretty ugly and not very catchy on a business card, right? That’s why Etsy gives you the friendly address and it just redirects automatically to this one, I guess. Your Etsy ID is the set of numbers at the very end of the address after “id=” … so mine is 5034807.

Hope that helps!

I love finding free places to promote your shop and I can’t believe I haven’t found the EtsyMini blog before now. It is essentially a collection of all the Etsy Mini’s of anyone who signs up, organized into categories, and it is a great way to browse Etsy Shops visually. It serves as a little unofficial catalogue of shops in each category, and we all know how much I love catalogues. Wait, do we know how much I love catalogues? I wonder if I’ve ever said. Well, for the future, I LOVE catalogues.

Getting your mini included is as easy as leaving a comment with your name and shop number under the category you best fit into. There are also lots of opportunities for more exposure by becoming a volunteer and assisting in the maintenance and marketing of the EtsyMini Blog.

Supply and Vintage sellers are not left out, either, as there is a SuppliesMini blog available as well.

To ensure that your Etsy items are showing up in relevant product searches, you must periodically upload your items to Google Base. I didn’t know about this, but I have been hearing a lot about it on the Etsy forums, so I did some digging and found this on the Let’s Ets website:

Google Base is a service that lets you tell Google about the items you have for sale. After your items have been loaded in, they will appear above the normal search results for relevant Google searches. Our GoogleBase formatter takes item details from your Etsy store and converts them into a format that Google understands.

So, the info we upload will be included when someone makes a Google Product Search (www.google.com/products):

Or above a regular search as a “teaser:”

Let’s walk through the process for doing this using the handy formatter provided by Let’s Ets:

1. Go to www.letsets.com
2. In the “Google Base Formatter” box, enter your Etsy username and click “Fetch My Items”
3. Scroll down to “Step Two” under your item list and click “Download Bulk File” to download this list as an XML file. A window will Pop-up asking you to open or save this file. Chose “Save to Disk” and chose where on your computer you would like to save it. If you have your computer set to download directly to your desktop, then you will not be given the option to save anywhere and the file will be ready for you on your desktop. If you are given a choice of where to save your file, make sure it is being saved as an XML file (.xml). It should automatically save as an XML file named after your username. For example, mine would be sixthandelm.xml
4. Go to www.google.com/base
5. If you do not used GoogleBase before, go to the right side of the screen and choose “Data Feed” from the options available (“One Time,” “Data Feed” or “API”)
6. Sign in with your Google Account, or create a new one if you do not have one yet. If you have a Gmail, blogger, or Picasa account (or a few others) you already have a Google account.
7. Accept the Terms of Service, if you agree with them
8. Fill in whatever profile items you want, such as your website, and click “Next”
9. It will take you to the next step automatically if this is your first upload, but if not, you will have to click on the “My Items” tab and chose your Data Feed, or “New Data Feed” if you didn’t get one made yet.
10. Set up your Data Feed: Chose the Country (we will need to use United States since our file has the items listed in USD) and chose “Products” for item type. Product items will need to be updated every 30 days (or earlier if your items change quickly) or they will expire. Chose GoogleBase for the feed type and enter the name of the file in the “Name of Feed” space (For mine I would put sixthandelm.xml). Click “Register Data Feed” at the bottom of the page.
11. On the next page you will see in the middle column Manual:upload file – Click on the upload file link. Browse to your saved XML file and click “Upload and Process.” The status column will change to “Processing,” which will take a few minutes to a few hours to finish. You cannot use the scheduler, listed above the manual upload link since Etsy’s RSS feed does not give images (or prices, I think).
12. Once the feed has finished processing, the page (when you refresh) will show either “Success” or “Failed” (or a Partial Success message). If the upload was successful, you can now click on the “My Items” tab and view your active items. If it has failed, but sure to click the details link next to “Failed” to find out why. Help can be found in the GoogleBase help, or by searching the Etsy forum for “GoogleBase Errors” to see problems other sellers has come up against.
13. When you want to repeat the upload, in 30 days (or less) you can keep the same file name and data field name and GoogleBase will just replace the old data, saving the number of clicks for each item as it recognizes that the new upload is a renew of any repeat items.

All Done!!

With Christmas closer than any of us are willing to admit, it’s time to start finding that perfect gift. If you’re dedicated to buying handmade this season, this means you’ll be spending lots of time on Etsy. To save you time, grab the Etsy Search Plug-In for firefox or IE7 (You’ll get a dead link in safari or IE6) and you can search Etsy listings right from your toolbar. This saves you going to the homepage for your searches, jumping right to your results from whatever page you were on before.

This tool is provided by Etsy, so you can trust that it is safe to download and install.

My day job revents me from reading the storque back to front, or reading all the admin forum posts so sometimes I miss new features, like the Moo.com partnership with Etsy. Did you know you can print your Moo minicards, stickers and other stuff from your product listings, instead of going through Flickr? You did? Oh. So I was the only one who didn’t know? Damn. Never mind.

I wish I had found out sooner because there was a coupon code for a free keychain/card holder, but it expired in may. I found the deal by randomly wandering through the “Community – Resources” section on Etsy and clicking on the “MOO” tag. Wonder what else I can find…

Fellow Etsyian, Loopy4ewe is participating in the 60km Weekend to End Breast Cancer Walk next June, and she is attempting to raise $2000 to participate. Once she let the other Etsy sellers know what she was up to, they responded en masse by donating tons of items they have made – large and small and mostly pink – and listing them for her, all proceeds to go toward her walk.  She didn’t even ask for donations, but she didn’t have to.

I added my little bit by adding the most popular item I sell, the Scripted Box, stained in Antique Pink in honour of the cause. I sanded it down a bit it looks cute and vintage-y – like a little Parisian treasure. All of the money I raise from the sale of this item will go to Loopy and hopefully get her close to her goal.

Here is a list of some of the other Etsy sellers who have listed or donated items as well:

KritterKnitter

StuffbySteph

PaisleyBaby

NancyWallisDesign

HarvestMoonPaper

UxCritter

Loscann

Adornyourself

StringMeAlong

MyHandboundBooks

Gillian’sBeads

How can you help? Easy, buy something from someone on this list!