The Crafty Beggars

Well, our first couple of weeks have been quite a success.  We’re still finding our feet with EBay but feel that we are getting there!!  We’ve also made some enquiries about hosting our website in a more flexible way, so hopefully there will be changes to the site soon.

Our initial stock is now starting to run low so we’ve placed a further order with Small Beauties and will be extending our range with products from Redhotbed.  I’d give you a link but their website is currently under construction.  They have a new catalogue coming out soon so hopefully there will be a few new products in our order.  Their range is massive so we’ve stuck to our guns and will only stock Die Cut.

When it arrives we’ll get pictures up as soon as poss.

Hopefully this is our hard work starting to pay off!! We’ve made our first sales!!

What a fantastic feeling. Our margins are so low that we’re really not making much of a profit, but that was the idea of getting things going as cheaply as we can. We thought all along that we would prefer to try and pass savings on to our customers. There has obviously been a fair bit of work to get our web ‘presence’ up to what it is now, so the idea that people are starting to like what we’ve done is great. Thanks to the folk that have taken the plunge and bought from us!!

Now that we have the basics of our business up and running, we would live some comments about how people think we’re doing. The website is very basic. www.thecraftybeggars.com was set up to try and showcase what we had to offer. We thought about selling direct from the site but worried about how to drive traffic there. That is why we went for EBay. However, we are very aware that not all people like EBay. With this in mind, we tried to make access to our email address as easy as possible. We hoped that anybody that didn’t want to use EBay would contact us direct. To date, no-one has done this.

Now this might be completely normal and most websites may get very little direct communication, but I’d kind of hoped we would! If it’s something you’ve considered, I would really appreciate a comment left here, or an email sent direct telling us if there is a reason you have felt unable to contact us in this way. We’re not scary, we just want to communicate!!

If anyone has any pictures of completed Small Beauties Decoupage they would be happy to share with us, we would love to put them on our site. We’ve been thinking of a ’showcase’ page where you can show off your skills. We would also be interested in ’suggestions’ and ideas regarding the use of decoupage in general. This might form the basis of a completely new Gallery page giving inspiration to those that can’t quite get their idea clear in their heads. You never know, it could be the start of a brand new ‘Crafty Beggars Corner’!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

This week we’ve updated our strategy and launched our EBay shop.

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/TheCraftyBeggars.com now displays all of our stock. Admittedly, this isn’t huge at the moment but it will increase!! We will continue to specialise in Die Cut Decoupage and intend to branch out, adding another couple of manufactures soon. Watch this space!!

Remember, you can still get us through our own website at:  www.TheCraftyBeggars.com

We decided to launch www.thecraftybeggars.com on Thursday evening, mainly because we thought it would be a good idea to have our ebay, 10 day listing finishing on a Sunday evening. I’m not sure now that this was the right thing to do but……anyway!

An hour before we were due to list our first items, ebay sent us an email saying ’sorry you have decided to leave ebay, your account is now locked and you will not be able to list/bid any items from now on’!!

Of course, we had not asked ebay to do this, so it caused a little worry. Right enough, the account still existed but it was locked and wouldn’t allow access to the selling section. Time to PANIC. An email was dispatched immediately but, for all we knew, this might not be read for several days…..DISASTER.

Fortunately ebay did read the email and eventually we were able to start listing just a couple of hours late. Strangely though, the email ebay sent to confirm this started ‘I’m pleased you have changed your mind about closing your ebay account’. It didn’t give the impression the email I sent had been read!!

The upshot?

We started listing on Thursday. The business is live!!

To start with, we decided to list half of our stock, adding the rest next week. This means, if we list every week we will have a steady amount of items showing all the time.

The next step will probably be an ebay store. We’ll see!

We’ve spent the weekend trying to get our site ready for launch.  The site will have details of all our stock, www.thecraftybeggars.com will not actually sell direct to the public, instead acting as an information site and providing links to EBay where customers will be able to buy.  Our intention in the long term is to sell direct from the site but the costs involved add a significant amount to our overheads.  Of course, if we want to offer the cheapest prices possible, we need to keep our overheads as low as possible.