Wednesday, December 17, 2008

My review of Artfire

ArtFire - Buy Handmade - Sell Handmade

Artfire is a new up and coming site to rival Etsy.

Here are some lists of pros and cons as I see it-

  • Pros
  • STATS! Oh my gosh, you know where your shop visitors have come from! this is a feature for a verified account
  • Verified accounts are $7.00 a month if you're one of the 1st 5000 to sign up, depending on how much you list this can be cheaper than Etsy.
  • Oh, I didn't mention that Artfire doesn't take any final value fees or listing fees. $7.00 a month is it if you're verified and if you're free, then its well...free!
  • Listing is simple, one page!
  • So far they've been listening to bug complaints and fixing things relatively quickly.
  • They are doing quite a lot of advertising!
  • Cons
  • They're still a baby website...this is kind of a big con. There are a lot of bugs, there are a lot of problems, but luckily as I said earlier, they seem to fix things pretty quickly and listen to the sellers!
  • It isn't quite as pretty as Etsy, the layout is a bit less polished.

    Overall though, I LOVE Artfire and I'm positive it will be up there competing with Etsy soon.

The artfire mini viewer (like the Etsy mini) for your shop is cute, its a window! You can pick which items you want to go into it, not just your most recent (although you can have your most recent if you want). This is a cool feature. Right now you can only show 4 items but they will work on different customizations of the window.

I've never really liked any of the other Etsy alternatives, this one on the other hand, I am a fan of. I think though, you either need to have the patience to deal with the beta testing, or wait until later to join up.

If you're going to register please use the following link as I get benefits for referrals. I may do a give away for those of you that sign up under my referral. :) I'll post about that tomorrow!

Register on ArtFire.com

5 comments:

ShinyAdornments said...

I really like Artfire so far. Their admin are responsive, their business model is unique and the seller functionality, including statistics, is pretty fab.

And, according to the latest traffic metrics from Alexa, they are garnering more and more visitors each day. Pretty sweet for a brand new site.

You can check out the latest handmade venue selling site traffic statistics and see how Artfire is moving up in the rankings on my blog at
"Where to sell handmade online?"

:-)
Kristy
ShinyAdornments on Artfire

Nightshade said...

Thank you for your information!

Anonymous said...

Hi - I had a terrible experience with artfire.com. I LOVE esty, have great sales there and have had a wonderful experience with their customer serivce. I decided to import my etsy.com transaction to artfire.com and had to upgrade the account to do so. It didn't work, they were all jumbled, i tried it three times. Finally I emailed their customer service. Three days later they tell me there's a glitch and they dont know when it'll be solved. Well this was the whole reason I upgraded the account. I asked for my upgrade fee back to go back to the basic account. They said no. Because it only effected me, they wouldn't grant it. To me this is really not looking out for customer needs. I would never treat a customer this way. I paid for a service that doesn't work, and they dont know when it will and refuse to refund my money. I would stay away from them. On top of this Ive had no sales when I sell at least one item a day on etsy.com. Thanks for listening, just word to the wise, not a great company.

Anonymous said...

Terrible customer service. The sellers are late sending things and do not answer e-mails. You cannot get through to the service dept by e-mail, nor can you reach them on the phone. Try writing to them: no response.

Pam said...

I agree with the terrible customer service....I am still dealing with them as a seller to downgrade my account and to respond to me. All of my friends speak very highly of Etsy and I would go with them over ArtFire any day.