A What? ... Artisan Stimulus Package?

What’s a Artisan Stimulus Package?

I landed on this site after reading Cindy Davis Art blog and she did a nice write up on the site which prompted me to sign up as a verifed member.

Artfire has a creative marketing campaign called “Artisan Stimulus Package”. Artfire is another Handmade Ecommerce site like Etsy but has more features for Artists to shop, sell, forge (trade) and interact. A nice comparison chart is on their signup page of how they compare to Etsy.

The special offer is you can get a Artfire verifed account for $7.00 a month for LIFE

(Regular Price $20.00) They are only offering this to 5000 accounts. Right now there are only $1,981 accounts left.

Register on ArtFire.com

( Update! - Only 1,977 special accounts left to sign up for! When I started writing this blog, there were 1,981 special accounts left and now it’s dropped down 4 accounts in the short time I started to write this blog post. )

But I have questions…..

How they are going to bring in buyers?

They state that they have already locked in the back cover of “Craft” magazine for the next two years, purchased numerous display, broadcast and web ads, as well as over 75 million views of ArtFire ads on websites such as Facebook, Mother Jones!, Google, various blog sites, “green” webzines, arts & crafts webzines, and many other channels in the last 100 days. And will continue to buy advertising and increase that budget every month for you. Their site traffic has grown more than 3,000% because of this marketing.

And Why? No listing fees, final sale fees or renewing fees... what’s the catch?

Here’s what they say “There really is no catch. We used to sell on other ecommerce auction sites. It costs those companies about 2 cents per listing (in hardware and bandwidth); then they charge you 30 cents to a dollar in listing fees plus a commission. We just thought it was crazy to pay that much for such a simple thing.

Go ahead. List 500 items, list a thousand – sell a thousand, you still pay US $7.00 per month for life. Really. Since we don’t have a corporate jet or cool clubhouse headquarters, skyboxes or free meals in the company food court, we can afford to run the site while charging such a low fee. Heck we even buy our own coffee. In this economy, who would you rather do business with - people like you, living frugally to make things work or the big corporate types who think another “sales retreat” at a spa/golf course is critical to this quarter’s stock price?”

They want us to be Happy...

“It may sound odd, but we built this for you and we really just want you to be happy. We want you to sell, even if it is not with us. In fact, as a verified member you can link to your Etsy store on every item and we’ll even help you track the traffic.”