We’ve Moved Our Blog

Yesterday we decided to move our blog to our own hosting servers.

We hope that this will integrate our blog more effectively witht the rest of our site.

You can now find our blog at: http://www.craftybeggars.co.uk/blog

The homepage of our site can be found at: http://www.craftybeggars.co.uk

We’ve said in a previous post that we also hold the domain names:

http://www.thecraftybeggars.com and http://www.thecraftybeggars.co.uk

Both of these domains currently point to our main homepage given above.

If you are really interested, you can still view our original website on:

http://www.thecraftybeggars.com/home

This remains live because it is still generating links for us through Google!! It is no longer updated!!

Any questions?

Click on our homepage link above. You’ll find our contact details there!

Shop Site Open

Well, since adding more stock from RedHotBed, our Ebay site has been getting more traffic. This is obviously a good thing, but there are some limitations in the way Ebay let us do things. Ebay’s fees also become an issue, especially because of the low cost of our individual items. This is making it difficult for us to maintain the low prices we aim to provide.

To get round this problem, we thought it was about time we started to think about putting together our own store site. This can be found at www.craftybeggars.co.uk. For those that are interested, we went for hosting with Lunarpages and eCommerce software from CubeCart. We’ve tried to add a bit more detail with some extra pictures, so we hope you’ll agree, it’s worth a look.

One strange thing. It was actually cheaper to take a new domain name rather than transferring one we already had! Our portfolio now consists of three domain: www.TheCraftyBeggars.com, www.TheCraftyBeggars.co.uk and www.CraftyBeggars.co.uk. At the moment all these domains point to the same place, but we do have plans to rectify this and build connected sites with differing content. It’s early days but we’ll get there!

We would love comments about the site. Any ideas for getting it to look more appealing would be welcome and criticism, if constructive, would be equally well received.

New Stock Coming Soon

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.

First Sales

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’!

EBay Shop Launch

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