Community
Happy 1st Birthday Coriandr
Posted by onI can’t believe that only 12 months have passed since Coriandr opened it’s doors! It’s been a fantastic year watching the community grow, things take shape, and sales steadily build. Since our launch in Oct 2008, our 220,000 visitors (from all corners of the globe) have viewed over 1.3 million pages, and those numbers are growing (in bigger leaps) each day!
It’s been great fun designing, building and running the site, and getting to know everyone (I’ve learnt so much that I must have gone up at least 2 hat sizes!). For a bit of birthday fun I’ve stitched together a “quilt” made up of a selection of our 1st year’s worth of listings, hope you like it! :)
Listings Quilt 2008
Finally, a big thank you goes out to all the crafters, bloggers, friends and family that have supported and helped grow Coriandr over the last year; it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Don’t think we won’t be calling on you for another year running though, we’re all set to make some big waves during our “terrible twos”, and we’ll certainly need your help to do it!
Working together to boost handmade sales
Posted by onI wanted to blog about a few exciting happenings that are making a huge difference to visitor traffic and sales on Coriandr. Is it a brand new marketing campaign? Or some cunning web-wizardry that auto-submits a seller’s listings to every blog in existence? Have we invented a perpetual motion machine that also makes a perfect cup of tea?! Nope. The answer is much simpler than that, and Coriandr itself has absolutely nothing to do with it!
The beginning of May saw PiratePixieCrew get busy with promotion. She’s organised an excellent promotional idea which has since been dubbed “The Coriandr Express“. The basic idea is that sellers can sign-up to ride on the Coriandr Express, and once it has left the station they each take it in turn to be a VIP for a certain number of days. For those days, it’s the job of everyone else on the train to promote the VIP and their products in whatever way possible; Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. The response has been great, as the first VIP Digtheearth has shown with a recent post. If you’re interested in joining the Coriandr Express then visit the blog or catch up on how the whole thing is developing on this forum thread.
The second development I wanted to share was a phenomenon that took me totally by suprise. Most of you may have seen the “share” button on right-hand side of item pages. This button is an easy way of sharing that item page using whatever method you fancy; email, Twitter, Stylehive, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc… Having shared items via Twitter and Facebook before now, I knew how good this button was at getting an (almost) instant boost to item views, but BlueFishHandmade got her timing spot-on the other day when she submitted her Black Lace Gloves to StumbleUpon.
In less than a day her listing had attracted 300 views! Compared to some of the more established craft marketplaces that may not seem huge, but given how young Coriandr is that number is massive, and really highlights how effective social media can be in promoting your creations. If you’ve not used the share button before, I strongly suggest you try it out!
The results of all these efforts is that Coriandr’s visitor traffic is up by over 42.5% on the same time last month, and climbing every day. So a big thank-you to everyone in the community who has been involved in recent promotional ideas, especially those behind the helm.
Summertime feature update
Posted by on
Hooray for friendly gremlins with spanners!
During the last few weeks we’ve been busy tinkering away with some of the “behind the scenes” code over here at Coriandr HQ. That’s all very well of course, but it’s not very exciting for everyone else out there, so now (with the help of our friendly neighbourhood tech gremlins) we’re turning our attention onto some much more fun feature updates!
Something that has (in hindsight) been missing from Coriandr is it’s community features… We don’t give you any way of interacting with each other’s shops; of letting each other know how fantastic you think each other are; even of letting everyone know what your favourite items are! All that is due to change over the next month. There are two big dates coming up, the 8th May and the 1st June.
8th May (v1.1)
- Order communication. To make order communication easier, we’re adding both a convo shortcut and the email addresses of each user to the order details page. This information will only be visible to the two people involved in the sale, but will help massively when dealing with those last minute, but important, order questions.
- Favorites. Why, oh why wasn’t this here sooner?! You know how it works; if you like a item or a seller, add it to your favourites! You’ll also be able to share your favourites via email, and even use them to build a Coriandr Seedling!