Pros and Cons of Square Market

Ahhhh Square. Every crafter's reasonably-priced credit card processing friend. This lovely company recently started an online marketplace so customers could purchase items from local businesses without leaving home. I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, it turned out to be my least favorite option as a free Etsy alternative. Click on the image above to take a look at my Square shop.

Pros

• Operates under your existing Square account if you have one. When you add an item, it also becomes available in your Square app that you use to process credit cards.
• New look. My Square shop looks vastly different from my Etsy shop, which I like. I think Square's look is sleek and pretty.
• Unlimited free listings! Buyers use their credit card to purchase items and Square takes a small percentage of the purchase price. The rest is deposited into the seller's bank account. I love the fact that Square only makes money when its sellers make money.
• Items are only available to buyers who live in the USA. Others might see this as a "con," but it makes shipping profiles a lot easier to handle. With the skyrocketing price of international shipping and those pesky customs forms, I can't say I miss it here.

Cons

• Difficult to set up. When you first start, your items are "online" but not "for sale." You have to check a box in your shop profile to sell publicly. For the longest time, I tried checking the box, and it would uncheck itself. It finally "stuck" after about 20 minutes.
• It takes FOREVER for your items to show up in a search on Square's main page. We're talking weeks.
• Only one photo per item. Come on, Square! ONE photo? REALLY? I feel like I have to link to an entirely different web site with alternate views of my products. Or create one photo that's a montage of many photos. Ain't nobody got time for that.
• There's a semblance of a "quantity" feature there, but it's so limited I can't use it. The options for availability are "one" or "many." What if I have 10, list my quantity as "many" and someone orders 15?
• Square has a variation feature (so you can add options for size etc.) but your customers only see it if they're using an iPad. Wait... what?
• Items and sections are listed alphabetically. I wish it was arranged by date or relevancy. I named my sections "section 1 - rings," "section 2 - necklaces," etc. to get them in the order I wanted. I'm tempted to do the same thing with my items. "Amazing necklace," "beautiful necklace," "cute necklace," "delicate necklace"...
• Listing items is pretty easy, but it's also sort of easy to skip over the "price" section while you're filling in other things. The default price is $0, and they don't stop you from posting items for free. Every time I put something up, I have to check to make sure I'm not giving things away ;)
• No shop stats at all. Nothing. I have no idea how many times my shop or items have been viewed. It makes it very difficult to gauge the potential of this site.

I had trouble sleeping again last night. I was exhausted, but I just couldn't go to sleep. At least I've found a new way to keep myself occupied when I'm awake. I've been doing research surveys at mechanical turk by amazon. They pay you (practically nothing) to waste your life taking surveys and performing stupid tasks that computers wouldn't do as well as a person. Most of the stuff I did is still waiting approval, but I made almost $2. yippee.

My little husband is working from home today. We've been sitting next to each other on the couch with our laptops like dweebs all day.

Put some more pendants in my shop:

Glaze, Artbeads, Spanish

I got some "Diamond Glaze" in the mail today. I bought it on eBay. An eBay gift card was pretty much the best thing ever to put on my wish list... it makes me feel like I can buy all kinds of new craft stuff without the guilt of spending "real" money.

Anyway, Diamond Glaze. They should probably just call it MOST-AWESOME-STUFF-EVER. I took all of my photo pendants out of my store because they got sticky after they sat around for awhile. I needed some kind of coating for them, but everything I tried was either sticky or murky. Things that other artists pointed me to were either too expensive, or too complicated/messy for me to want to try. Diamond Glaze was relatively cheap and has a little applicator. All I did was squeeze the stuff out on my pendants and pop the little bubbles with a safety pin. No waste, no toxic fumes, virtually no mess. I can spread it around with my fingertips if I need to, and it comes right off of my hands. My little pendants aren't sticking to anything anymore. LOVE IT. Kind of want to buy the ridiculously large refill bottle now... but we'll see how long the little bottle lasts me.

If anyone bought one of my old "sticky" pendants and wants a new glazed one, I'll replace it for you. Sorry I didn't detect the problem sooner!

Artbeads.com was nice to me today. I ordered a Swarovski pendant for a necklace I want to put in my craft display. It had a huge crack down the side of it. :( Their web site says you have to return items before they'll send a replacement, so I e-mailed them and asked if I could put it in bubble wrap and mail it in a letter-sized envelope (since it was already damaged anyway). They replied and said that they were just going to send me a new one. Couldn't believe it! Usually when I deal with big jewelry supply sites, they act like huge jerks when I have a problem. Go Artbeads!

I've been practicing my Spanish. I listen to language-learning podcasts when I'm making jewelry, and I've been spending some time at www.lang-8.com. It's pretty cool. It connects you with native speakers of the language you're trying to learn, and the idea is that you help each other learn the other's language. It's nice to feel like I'm doing something intellectually stimulating... haha.