The ups and downs of online selling

     I've tried several online selling venues to augment the money I make at art fairs.
So far, I haven't had a great deal of luck -- but I keep trying!
     I made the most money selling my jewelry on a web site called 1000Markets. The site design was very elegant and I made several nice sales there. But alas, the owners sold their company to Bonanza, an eBay wannabe, leaving hundreds of artists and craftspeople to migrate to Bonanza or try to find another place to sell their wares.
     Numerous other venues are possible. The most successful -- at least for the owners -- is Etsy. It gets millions of hits. Some people do well on Etsy. I have a shop on Etsy, too, but I shuttered it for the summer and probably won't reopen because I only sold one thing over a two year period.
     Early this year I set up a shop on ArtFire, another online selling venue. It is sponsored by several craft-oriented retail companies including Jo-Ann Fabric and Crafts Stores. I set up a basic account that doesn't cost anything but has only what you'd expect for free -- just the basics.
     Now that I've lost my 1000Markets shop, I've ramped up my ArtFire shop by purchasing a monthly account with all the bells and whistles. One of them you can see below. It's a mini store that can be implanted in a blog or website. I've set this one up to show a random array of jewelry from my ArtFire shop. I've also got an ArtFire widget on my Facebook fan page.
     So we'll see how that goes.
     In the meantime, I'll work on more jewelry for the shows I hope to do this winter in Florida if Bank of America ever gets around to approving our offer on a short sale home in Cape Coral.