The CraftStar Collectives - A New Way To Sell and Shop!

The CraftStar Collectives – Specialty Shops

As a seller on The CraftStar, I’m sure you’ve seen (I hope you’ve seen!) how hard our team works at getting YOU and YOUR items out there!  We are involved with every social media avenue, we are getting increasing exposure in major blogs, and our ad campaign has brought in a huge amount of new sellers and buyers.

As a site always looking to grow, try new things, and enhance the shopping experience, we are going to launch The CraftStar Collectives – Specialty Shops.  These shops will focus on themes, holidays, categories, etc.  They will be a single shop (per theme), run by The CraftStar, which will contain items from various sellers.

It’s totally up to the sellers to decide whether they want to participate.  The major upsides of these shops is that buyers can find what they want in one place.  I’ve been thinking about this approach for a while, but my mind was made up during a conversation with my mom yesterday.  She’s not at all internet savvy and was getting frustrated looking for greeting cards.  She didn’t understand that you can search quite easily, and more importantly, didn’t want to spend the time comparing and contrasting cards and their prices from a bunch of different shops.  So bing … that was it:  we’ll have a Collective Greeting Card shop where she, and many others like her, I suspect, will appreciate having what she’s looking for all in one place.

The benefits of belonging to a Collective Shop, you will get double the bang from your current listing.  If you decide you want to participate in a particular Collective Shop (or many of them), we will lift from your current listings and slightly alter the text and tags so as not to confuse the search engines.  Another benefit, the traffic the shops will get will be based on the density of key words, for different items, in one place – this will be a great driver.  We will also link back to your main shop on each item and we will list the Collectives as a key way to shop on the front page of The CraftStar.

To keep The CraftStar Collective Shops top notch, we will be somewhat curating them.  We want these to be fabulous, which means, you know what’s coming … GREAT IMAGES of your items!   If you want to be part of one of the Collectives, get those images POPPING!

To start this off, we will include up to 10 items per Collective from a single shop and see how that works.  The fees for sales will be higher than what they are in your current shops, as we need to cover the manpower this is going to take to get it going and keep it moving.  As the Collectives will be run by The CraftStar, we will take 20% of the sale at time of sale, and transfer the rest into your PayPal account along with an email letting you know of your sale and who your customer is.

I’d like to start with 5 Collectives and take it from there.  They are the following:

Quilting (HUGE handmade search term)

Bath and Body

Holidays

Greeting Cards

Earrings

If YOU would like to participate in one of these Collectives, please send an email to: customerservice@thecraftstar.com with: your name, your shop name, the Collective you’d like to be in, links to 10 items, and your agreement to the 20% sales fee. 

We’re really excited to get this going and think it will be another great way to shop for people who like things quick and punchy - and awesome leading up to holiday shopping!

Moving on up!

Bethan and The CraftStar Team