ArtFire (A Sad Farewell)
Sadly, I've had to make the hard decision of whether or not to stay with ArtFire. I've been on there for a couple of years and while I absolutely love their tools and layout, the sales just haven't been there. I'm not saying that just because ArtFire hasn't worked out for me that it won't for you. Some people have much success there! The people in the forums are very nice and have helped me with many things. However, over the two-year course, I only made about 13 sales and after re-joining Etsy late in October 2013, I've had over 7 sales. I just need to go where I'm going to generate some sort of income. It's not to say I won't re-join ArtFire at some point, but the $12.95 can go toward other expenses for now. Since I made an announcement in their forums, I have received numerous very kind and sincere messages from fellow artists wishing me the best and hoping for my success. This has meant the world to me and now I hate to leave, but I have to stick to this decision for the time being.
By the way, my ArtFire Studio closes on January 26, 2013 and until then, each item there is marked at 25% off, no coupon code needed! Go there and see what great items are on sale!
Markalino Jewelry Website (Bye For Now)
You may notice that the links to markalinojewelry.com are gone and that is because I've decided to just sell my jewelry through Etsy. The reason I shut down the website is because I didn't make the right choice when it came to a web hosting service. I was using Wix and I admit that I was dazzled by their templates and also by the ease of use. I hadn't created a website for quite a few years when I was making websites for a living using Microsoft FrontPage and I've fallen a bit behind in that department. I'm also not someone who can afford to pour a ton of money into it, but I figured I'd spend $19.90 a month for the service. That turned out to be $19.90 a month down the old drainpipe.
What I should have researched more with Wix was what I could and could not do using their service. After building the website starting with a template and then making it my own, I thought "How great this is and it's so easy to do!" Then I got into the online store part of it and that is where I found things that weren't too keen. It's no wonder when you sign up as a premium member paying month-to-month how they start urging you to sign up for a year and pay it all in-full. Granted, they offer a bit of a discount for this, but they really want full-year sign ups because they know their service sucks so they want to suck you in before you find out how awful it is.
First of all, you are not able to designate a tax rate for one state only. For instance, I'm in California so I would want to designate that purchases made by customers in California be charged tax. Nope, if you want to set a tax rate, it has to be for the entire country. Not good.
Next, I learned that you couldn't charge for shipping based on a specific weight, it has to be a weight range. There was also no option to add insurance to specific items, or other shipping-specific costs.
If you wanted to create a coupon code for your shop, you could do so, but it had to be toward anything in my online shop, not toward a specific item or a specific category of items. Plus you had to turn off the coupon code manually, or else it would still be online and usable past the expiration date.
Not only were these features bad in the online store part of the site, but I could not verify through Google Webmaster Tools that I owned the site, because there is no way to properly add the code into the site's home page. Not to mention if you want Wix to give you a report using SEO Tools, you're only going to get SEO information for your home page. If you try to do it for the whole site, you are re-directed to an error page which says that the function could not be performed. Uh....in this day and age why would a website hosting service not be able to give full SEO information? You can connect your website with Google Analytics using the "UI" number, but good luck in getting decent statistics of how your Wix site is doing, because thanks to Wix and the inability to fully connect your site to Google Analytics, it gives you a minuscule report with very little information. What little information I was able to obtain through Google Analytics was that there was very very very little traffic going to it. In four months, I had about 28 visitors and that was primarily by people that I knew or from the link I provided on my Facebook page and Twitter feed!
Another thing which annoyed me was the fact that while Wix will swear up and down that they can see the mobile version of your Wix site and say that it "looks great", I would not be able to tell because when I went to the mobile version of my website, all I would get is the web browser version. Granted, I have an Android-based SmartPhone, but Wix says that it should show up perfectly as the mobile version on my Android phone. No, it did not and when I went to seek help on this, I got their generic answer based on them looking online in a web browser how the mobile version looks, not by verifying it by checking it on an actual SmartPhone. All they did was provide a screen shot image of the mobile version from inside Wix, the same version I saw when I was building the site.
Saldy, while I was able to see my Wix website just fine on my computer and in my browser (Google chrome), friends told me that it was slow-loading, which was not what I was hoping to hear. And their computers aren't old, my website's pages just loaded slowly on their browsers.
So, that's my bit on Wix and my recommendation is to not use it!!! I'd love to hear from someone who might know of a better hosting service to use where there aren't such limitations. You can email me at [email protected] if you know of one!
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