PPCalc.com started out as a web-based PayPal fee calculator and rough currency converter, but has quickly evolved into an everything fee calculator with pages for not only PayPal, but also eBay, Etsy, Amazon.com, Half.com, Overstock.com and a bunch more. This calculator lets you figure out the total fees you will be charged for your Etsy listings, including the associated PayPal fees (if a buyer pays by PayPal), and your shipping costs. A very useful tool for figuring out fair pricing, or for just playing and punching in random numbers for an hour, like I just did.

Etsy Fee Calculator - http://etsy.ppcalc.com/

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.

I just started using a new Stat Analyzer on the site called GetClicky in addition to my Sitemeter counter. There are quite a few things I like about GetClicky over the Sitemeter stats, but GetClicky seems to be lacking a simple counter to display. They do have some nifty (and huge) stats widgets if you are happy with your numbers and want to show them off, but nothing just showing a number of visitors to date. For this reason I am going to keep both, but I will be looking to GetClicky for any stats and analysis I need and just use Sitemeter to display a visitor count to my readers.

GetClicky has a very easy to navigate dashboard with many very satisfying little charts summarized right on the opening page after logging in. My favorite feature is the Feedburner integration allowing you to input your Feedburner URL and see your subscriber stats right alongside your visitor stats. I’m also quite taken with the spy feature that allows you to watch your visitors in real time, although it kind of feels like stalking them.

The best way to get a good feel for it is to go there and use the free demo. There is a Wordpress Plug-in available that makes it even more customizable and allow you to install the code without editing your template, or displaying the GetClicky button. There is also a  premium service available, but I have no idea what it adds since I am quite happy with all the fun stuff on the free version. They do have an affiliate program, so when you sign up and display your GetClicky thing-banner-button-whatever, you get credit for each time it is clicked and that person signs up (so click on mine, or the link in this post and sign up!!). I’m not sure what the credit is for yet. Maybe it’s just cash. Oh Boy, I’m gonna be rich.

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!!

I made some Twitter buttons with the old and the new birdy thing for you to use on your blog if you want. To use, just copy the code below the icon you would like to use, replacing the text in bold to your actual Twitter username. If it’s not working, you can always right-click save the images, upload to your blog server and use that way. Enjoy!

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-new-250px.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-new-125.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-250px.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-125px.jpg”/></a>

Here are a few handy online tools to help you spring clean (fall clean?) your blog and make sure it is optimized, tagged and correct. I am a notorious bad speller so I need to use a lot of these to find spelling errors, mis-linked hyperlinks and weirdly-spelled meta tags.

I do not own any of these sites and have tried most, but not all. Always use discretion when giving your email address, but the sites I have been to all had online reputations and recommendations and clearly stated privacy policies, so I felt safe with them.

Spell Checking:

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm

http://www.texttrust.com/

http://orangoo.com/spell/

Finding Broken Links:

www.linktiger.com/

http://www.creatingonline.com/site_promotion/broken_link_checker.htm

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/link_check.htm

Browser Compatibility Checking: (How does my blog look in other internet browsers?)

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/compat_check.htm

http://browsershots.org/

I didn’t mention any HTML validation in this article – that is a little more behind-the-scenes and a topic for a more in-depth article about website maintenance, but I will be writing about validators and other web developer tools in the future.

Guess what? Another cool thing offered by PayPal, only available to Americans. Being a Canadian Etsy seller can be really frustrating sometimes when it takes so long for new PayPal features to get to us, despite that fact that we are SO CLOSE to the states that we practically are one.

You’d think paying your bill by PayPal this would already be an option to us since Etsy and PayPal are such “BFF,” but there are a lot of things that you would think Etsy would have by now (like an RSS feed with images, a Public API, a mobile site, seller shop stats…) but since they are growing so fast, I think a lot of this stuff is getting pushed aside while they deal with keeping the site from exploding on a regular basis.

Well, rant over, here’s how to pay your Etsy invoice via your PayPal account using the The PayPal Plug-In, but it’ll only work for those of you reading this in the US. This plug-in allows you to use PayPal to pay for purchases on ANY site, regardless of whether or not they take PayPal. Go to the PayPal site and log in, go to the Products and services tab and scroll down to “more products and services.” The PayPal plug in is listed there. Download and install. It sits at the top of your browser and automatically asks of you would like to pay by PayPal when it detects you checking out from an online store that does not accept PayPal normally. To use it on your Etsy bill:

1. Go to “My Etsy”
2. Go to your Etsy Bill.
3. Select “change payment information”
4. Wait for the plug in to slide down and fill in your info. Make sure you tell it you will paying here again so it keeps your info. The plug in generates a “fake” MasterCard number that debits right from PayPal, no actual MasterCard needed.
5. Each month you can use the same fake MasterCard number generated by PayPal to pay from your account. Easy! And not available in Canada. Sigh.

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…

I finally added the most recent entries sent to me for the Etsy Sellers Blog List, so it is all up to date. Over 1450 Etsy blogs are currently on the list – Is yours? You can add it by going to the bottom of the list and filling out the little form-thingy there.

You can also link to the list in your link list or with one of the buttons I made.