Craft Venture: Shaping up your shop

Welcome back to Craft Venture and Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were as memorable as mine. I’m Brenda from Phydeaux Designs and Phydelle. As much as I enjoyed the holidays, I’m glad to return to normal routine. And like so many others, I’m cleaning and organizing post holidays!

We’ll kick off 2010 cleaning and shaping up our shops! During January, we’ll talk about replacing holiday photos, descriptions and text with Winter colors and text. We’ll talk about tags, titles and keywords. We’ll also debrief from the 2009 holiday season, sharing what worked for us and what we’ll do differently next year.

Let’s start this week with holiday clean up. Sometimes, the last thing that a small business owner wants to think about this time of year is more work involving the holidays; however, the last thing that most customers want to see this time of year (other than super sales) is goods and references to the holidays. This is the perfect week for cleaning up!

A checklist for you to use as you go through your shop:

1. Replace your holiday banner and/or avatar
2. Read your announcement(s) – are there holiday deadlines to remove?
3. Revise your holiday policies (except those for exchanges and returns)
4. Update your shipping options/prices
5. Also, make sure you have your country’s up-to-date shipping costs
6. Check your automated message(s) to buyers for holiday references
7. If your photos are Autumn or holiday-themed, switch them out
8. Unless you’re holding a sale for those items!
9. Don’t forget to replace your holiday ads on blogs and other websites

Another checklist for you to use with listing:

1. Does the title have a keyword or two (for search engine optimization)?
2. Remove holiday specific tags and keywords (unless appropriate)
3. Read each description, removing holiday references
4. Check spelling, grammar and punctuation!
5. Revise shipping if needed
6. Revise price if needed
7. Revise quantity if needed (inventory time!)
8. Update, switch around or replace photos

We’ll talk more about photos next week. Winter’s short days create all new challenges for product photography! Start thinking about January colors for your photos:  neutrals with splashes of colors. And start thinking about Winter styling!

What about you? Have you started (or finished) shaping up your shop post holidays? Any tips or tricks to share? What have I left out of the above checklists?

Images:  Stacking Thimble Cups by Pigeon Toe Ceramics; Crystal Gypsy Necklace by New Fashioned Whispers;  Wool felt circle trivet by FilzFelt