Adventures of an On-Line Seller
Continued: Just Beads
Continued: Just Beads
To continue with recollecting my on-line experiences, I wanted to talk about a lovely site I used to use to sell my polymer clay beads on, called justbeads.com. It was a refreshing alternative for ebay, and there, in fact, people were selling beads only – polymer clay, lampwork, metal, commercial supplies – but beads, and beads only. I am talking about this site in the past tense because, as I just found out this morning, the site is currently closed. Here is an excerpt from the announcement they posted a couple of days ago: “We've made some great progress this week! Now that we've completed the rebuilding of the JustBeads.com Auction site, we've been free to concentrate on the many site modifications we wanted to implement...We've still got a lot of work to do....but we are definitely getting closer! Please check back often for our status reports and watch for announcements of our Grand Re-Opening! ... Stay Tuned! “ So overall it looks like something exciting is going on and the site is going to re-open even better and stronger than it was.
When I just started selling there in 2004-2005, the site was quite active, and I was able to sell everything I listed, with people competing for my beads. Later the situation changed – beads (and not only mine, it seemed like a common situation) would still sell, but there were no bidding wars anymore. One bid would appear just seconds before the auction was about to end, and the lot would sell for the minimal preset price. I really did not mind that, although selling in an auction situation was more fun. There were small fees for listing and a percent from the sale price, as far as I remember. You also had to pay for some extra features, such as additional pictures in your listing, a thumbnail picture, some ways to highlight your listing on the page, and the place at the front page, if you wanted any of these tools. One feature I really liked was an artist of the month article/interview they did once a month. There was a nice craft fair-like atmosphere on that site.
I am really eager to see the new changes they make. I left this site when I started making more finished jewelry, built my own site (which is an adventure in itself – more about that in my next post), and then Etsy came along with their lower fees and an option to leave the listing up for months rather than days or weeks like on Justbeads. Anyway, I am willing to reconsider this site once they re-open and I am urging everybody for makes their own beads to do the same.
The pictures in this post are some beads I sold through Justbeads.com. Anybody who knows my work now would see that I was still experimenting with various techniques and looking for my own style back then.
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