Free Etsy Alternatives: Yokaboo

And we’re back in the second of a long postponed series on Esty alternatives. This is probably the nub of why my online stores never fare very well, I don’t tend to spend enough time tending to them.

With Yokaboo however, I really don’t think it’s all my fault.

Zibbet, the previous hand-made vendor site that I reviewed, had taken a lot of what worked well on Etsy: clean design, easy layout, a welcoming home page full of thumbnails of homemade and vintage goods visitors instantly wanted to buy and detailed store set-up that asked a lot of hard questions. Bundled with this was a well connected, welcoming community full of members dropping by each others’ pages full of praise and support.

Yokaboo on the other hand, lacks in basic inter connectivity between pages within its domain that everyone familiar with the endless choice of clicky buttons that Facebook, Twitter, Zibbet, Etsy, or pretty much every other site recently provides.

From my shop, I cannot directly access my admin panel and I can’t travel to other people’s stores. I can click on my own items listed… and that’s about it. I actually have found you can click on the Yokaboo logo and return to their homepage and then on from there to the small array of handpicked stores (more on this in a moment), so it’s not quite the dead end of the internet I was tempted to characterise it as. It’s more of the annoying, unnecessary detour of the internet.

I can’t blame Yokaboo for the colour scheme. That was me playing around with the customisation.

The home page is very trendy looking, but seems more like the creative designer’s  pitch was used as the text, hoping that people would appreciate all the listed features and not notice the lack of physical ones.

So easy to create your own store, it says, easy as falling on your backside. And it was easy, compared to Zibbet which I honestly had to do in multiple sessions, Yokaboo was a cinch. Trouble is getting anyone to ever see my store unless I link them directly, and after having experienced the drive-by viewing and appreciation of stores like Etsy and Zibbet, that’s just not enough for me any more.

Top of the homepage. Cute design, right?

Bottom half of the homepage.

“But, ” all my perceptive and good looking readers will say, “But wait a minute, I see a “Stores” tab. Surely clicking that leads a potential shopper to where they can exercise that Paypal account? ”

Sure. It does lead to stores. About 23 in total “featured” stores, most of which haven’t been rotated in the many weeks since I set up an account here. 23 stores that you can directly access. That’s it.

I attempted to do some research, like I did with Zibbet, and send out questions to the various, lucky featured store owners. I ended up hunting down three via Facebook as the security code on the contact form didn’t load, and therefore didn’t work.

One replied:

“I use yobakoo it is very user friendly, I sell lots of art and other merchendise, it works really well for me and for my clients, it’s easy for them to buy my products. I have a paid acount and I am happy with yokaboo I have never used any others I don’t think I need to, it has google analitics and all the markenting tools I need.

cheers,

The Krah
http://www.thekrah.com/”

A positive review. It made me wonder what extra tools is the paid account getting and would they make me like it better?

Well, the ability to sell more than 6 products would be good, and having more design control over the Geocities-esque design interface might be nice, but for 15 to 25 pounds a month? I leave that question to you.

At the end of the day, if you want to have another free venue to hawk your (6) wares, Yokaboo, I guess is that. It lacks many of the features that come standard with other sales sites, though this maybe to reduce complexity. This is not all that is reduce though and despite being amongst a reputed cohort of 8523 stores, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more disconnected.