No More ArtFire Shop

I am not particularly fond of the fact that ArtFire decided to do away with their free seller accounts. Yes, I realize that they are a business and that it is their prerogative to do away with the free seller accounts, but I think it was poor judgement on their part.

Allow me to explain myself on this bit of thinking. You see, some shops used the free version because they could not afford to put a lot of money into their shop. The $9.95 price for the pro version of ArtFire if you signed up before 8/16/11 or the $11.95 price for the pro version of ArtFire if you signed up after 8/16/11 may not seem like much, considering the pro version used to be $15.95, but when you are struggling to make ends meet, you might not have that much money. Especially if you are not making sales to help recoup that expense.

I learned that I have to limit myself on how much I post on Etsy because I can easily get myself to a point where I can't afford to pay my Etsy fees for the month. So you can imagine that I would not want an ArtFire account with a monthly fee! I did have a sale there on ArtFire, but I just can't see one sale being enough to make me want to go pro and stay pro when I have other things that $12 a month could be paying for.

Several of the shops I used to visit sadly had to close down their businesses because they didn't have any other resources - and ArtFire even took away access to our listed items so we could get our descriptions and the like from them so we could list them somewhere else! They want us to pay just to get our descriptions and the like back. :( My best friend is searching for a good alternative to ArtFire right now and has yet to find one.

So now I have no ArtFire shop. I am trying Addoway to see how that goes, but I may have to open a second Etsy shop for the baby stuff. I'll just have to see.