Well I had a Heartsy deal about a month ago, many of you read how that went. If you missed it here is the information on my 1st deal:
http://galla15.blogspot.com/2011/05/raw-deal-on-heartsy-find-out-inside.html
Monday, June 13th was my 2nd feature. Heartsy heard my complaints and tried to give me a 2nd experience that would be better.
Was it better? I really don't think so. I am trying to be objective and reasonable so let me start out with some positives to give the facts on both sides of this experience.
1st: John at Heartsy was extremely nice and I think he probably did all he could for me with what he had to work with. He e-mailed me quite a bit, and called me multiple times. He tried to offer some special perks to me that I am not at liberty to speak about for the sake of their business. And I appreciate the effort on John's part.
2nd: I did sell 10 more vouchers this time than the last. NOT great at all, NOT more money but at least it was SLIGHTLY better in that one aspect.
Now on to the rest of the facts. Just like the 1st deal I only had ONE person truly spend over the voucher amount. Heartsy will tell you repeatedly that when considering a deal with them to keep in mind that most of their buyers do spend over the voucher amount. I asked John how they know that, because I have personally convo'd several shops that were featured and flat out asked if they had people spending over the voucher amount and most said no. John said that the majority of the people report back that they had most of their sales over the voucher amount. I guess I could just be in the minority, but twice now that was not true for me or quite a few other shops I have spoken too.
The 2 main ways you can make money with such a huge discount is:
1. hope people spend more than the voucher amount
2. hopefully turn these customers into repeat buyers who will buy full price from you down the line.
I had a handful of buyers that I had to send an invoice out for $2 dollars to cover some of the shipping charges, but only 1 went over the voucher amount in merchandise. So based upon my experiences I have a very hard time believing that the buyers on Heartsy will spend money over your voucher amount. As I suspected in my previous blog post most of these buyers are bargain shoppers and will not be spending large sums of money in your shop. And I HIGHLY doubt these buyers will come back to buy full price items when there are so many deals on Heartsy each day. Why spend full price when you don't have too? So I really doubt I will see future sales from these buyers.
I sell jewelry which is one of the most saturated categories on Etsy. So I understand that Heartsy probably has a huge amount of jewelry sellers applying to be featured on their site, but the day of my feature there were 4 other jewelry sellers featured. So 5 jewelers in one day. I would like to think my jewelry is different than most, but lets face it this is really not the best structure to create sales.
Since this was supposed to be a way for Heartsy to create a more positive experience for me I really would have thought more consideration would have been taken into account. That didn't help me with sales that is for sure.
It is a lot of little things that (to me) add up to a bigger picture. So here are some of the details that I wasn't happy about.
1. I submitted 4 pictures of items for my feature but they show 3 of the 4. I had 2 amethyst necklaces up with earrings most of the day (until the 1 necklace sold). Why didn't they show the necklace, earrings and ring instead of 2 necklaces? Variety is better right?
Or ask me which 3 I want featured if they can't feature all 4 pictures the way I submitted them? Yes yes I am sure that seems a bit picky but it is the details that will make or break a deal! A variety of items showing would clearly help more with attracting buyers.
2. I was e-mailed on the 9th that they would finalize all the details for my deal and e-mail me "tomorrow" with the details (the 10th I should have heard something). Well on the 12th the night before my feature I had never received that email. I had to e-mail and ask them. (And not that they could do this with all features, but I would think since I had such a bad experience the 1st time I would think they would have contacted me after my feature to see if I was happy but they didn't)
I never received the final details, like final tips on how the deal would go down, or what I needed to do to prepare. I realize I had a deal prior to this one but they are a new site that is changing constantly. There should be a standard form e-mail they send to every shop being featured with standard/basic instructions. Their format is completely different this month than last month. The last deal I at least received an e-mail that stated what I could do to prep my shop for heartsy customers and phone numbers if I had questions the day of the feature etc.
3. Their newsletter that notifies their subscribers of the deals was sent out about an hour before the deal goes live. (During the 1st deal the newsletter went out about 6 hours into the deal so at least this time it went out early!!) Their newsletter this time only highlighted ONE shop out of 8 of the featured deals! Honestly I don't understand that, if their goal is to drive traffic to their site and to the featured shops why would they only feature 1 of the deals? Maybe a coincidence but that deal sold out! Because they had a lot more exposure than the rest. The exposure for each of the deals of each day should be as equal as possible since we are all contributing the same thing. They should rotate the positions of the deals on their site, and include all the deals in their newsletter etc. Just copy and paste the deal page into the newsletter, it shouldn't take any longer to do that!
Maybe I am being too picky or have too high of expectations... but I am generally an organized person and it seems there is a pattern with my experiences where details keep getting missed that definitely affect the outcome of features.
And these mistakes or things overlooked do add up!
I submitted my deal and waited a month for that 1st deal and then to have all the glitches and problems. There was a lot of time and effort involved in preparing. People spend their time and money to list a ton for these deals, buy extra shipping supplies, time promoting Heartsy's site for them!!
I expected above and beyond care for the 2nd deal since they new my feelings on the first one. If they were trying to change my point of view then I would have thought all these details would be covered.
Maybe it is from my time in the military but we had to have an SOP (standard operating procedures) for EVERYTHING. It was the most detailed instruction book for everything you could ever think of. It made sure that everyone knew what was expected, what to do, if this situation arises you do this _______....
To me Heartsy needs a little SOP. Detailed instructions that prepare a shop for their deal. It should explain how to navigate their account to find the deals, how to check the vouchers, how to find the money in the heartsy account, how to set up your etsy shop for the deal, a form letter that the Heartsy staff can just fill in the blanks of the date and details of each deal... It should be clear who handles what details, and who the customer should contact for which issues.
I think they have tried to break down the jobs, because one person negotiates the details of the deal and another sets your deal up. But after 2 deals I am still not completely sure who is handling what details, and obviously they don't either since many details are overlooked.
Anyways, I am not an expert on their website and I am not privvy to behind the scenes information but from an outside standpoint there is a lot of room for improvement.
I still appreciate John's help in trying to make a better experience for me but I can't recommend the site to others. At least not at this point, maybe as time goes on and they get more organized and established things will change.
I stand by my previous statements that these customers do not spend large amounts of money, they will not likely become returning customers because they want a deal. They are not going to pay full price for anything (most I should say), the only way to achieve high sales is to offer a large voucher amount and have lower priced items. But you won't be making a boatload of money.
I did send a list of questions to quite a few featured shops from Heartsy to ask about their experience and very few had large sales and if they did they offered quite large voucher amounts.
PS- There are a lot of other negative things being talked about throughout Etsy teams that would serve as further warning. The voting system they are using is being manipulated, if you sell jewelry you get all your friends to go through and vote NO for all other jewelers up for consideration (just as an example). There are teams of people on Etsy doing this!!! Since Heartsy sends out this information to their frequent buyers and VIP's to determine if your deal will be popular, I don't think us getting 60 votes for consideration is really a valid evaluation of a shops potential for a deal. Just because I will vote for my friend to help them, doesn't mean I will actually buy from them. The voting system is HIGHLY flawed and ineffectual in predicting outcomes of deals.
Also, because the wait can be a month or more to hear back on whether you get a deal with Heartsy, many are submitting multiple times. That is clogging up their systems with multiple entries, and people are annoyed that they have to vote on the same shop several times.
There are a lot of things going on that are leaving people feeling negative about the site and so I would just caution you to consider all of this before jumping into a heartsy deal. Just consider your personal goals when signing up and find out if your goals will be compatible with how the site works.
MY FINAL RESULTS:
I did have quite a few item hearts but I was listing like crazy to prepare for this deal so I can't be sure how many hearts resulted from my listing efforts or from the Heartsy people that visited. If you are just looking for a flood of views then this could be ok. But the VERY next day after your feature your shop will go dead.
There were 4 other jewelers selling my day.... 1 had 10 sales, several others had 30 and 36 sales. The last one I couldn't figure their sales since it is on Artfire. The 2 shops that had sales in the 30's offered vouchers for 40 or more dollars!!! So again I stand by my theory you either have to offer over 40 dollars in merchandise OR have very low priced items so that the buyer can get multiple items with their purchase.
So there you have it.
Janet
http://www.galla15.etsy.com/
