The owner, Tony, is as slick a used car salesman as they come. And he comes loaded with a team of zombie-like followers who on his every word. In case you forget, they are always there to remind you how lucky you are to be a member of their #1 site.

Don’t be lured in by the free basic stores as Tony himself has recently admitted that they are set up to fail. “the basic account was not created to help you sell product effectively. It exists to allow you to setup your studio, learn the tools, make some friends with other sellers and do the “foundation” work for your ArtFire studio without having to pay for all of the setup and learning. If we built a free account that sold anywhere close to as well as a paid account, we would quickly go out of business. Our goal has to be to generate revenue for ArtFire so that we can hire developers, pay for marketing, buy servers, pay for electricity and coffee ( we drink a lot of coffee)…. Most of the sales on ArtFire go to Pro sellers. Why? Because we built it that way. We reward and support the people who pay for our service.”

A lot of misinformation is passed on to community as gospel truth. And Lord, do they believe his every word. For example, the fact that “Pro accounts make up 15% of our sellers but account for 85% of the sales on ArtFire” is a common lure to convert free sellers into monthly paying subscriptions. But the reality is that most basic (free) stores are inactive. Just look at the stats… of the 1,171,558 items listed, 896,553 are from pro sellers. With 76% of the items available for sale from pro sellers, is it any wonder they make up the bulk of the sales? Don’t you love being given a skewed view of things?

And everything is chalked up to the SEO value of your titles and description. No traffic? No sales? It must be your SEO… you need to re-work it Artfire has built success into their failings using the SEO. They know there’s no internal site traffic so sellers must rely on the keywords in their titles and descriptions to bring outside traffic from sources like search engines, GoogleBase, TheFind and FaceBook. What a great marketing concept – you pay them to tell you to do all the work to bring traffic to your store since they have failed at bringing traffic to the site.

Facebook apps and syndicating feeds is nothing new. It’s quite commonplace with most all marketplaces as a way of getting more exposure. You’ll get the same amount of traffic from a small marketplace that offers a Facebook app and submits your items to Googlebase and TheFind… but for much less and with less of you competition around. And that includes your own website as these are common features in most ecommerce environments.

My favorite is how sellers rejoice over the fact that their items are now on page one of a Google search for their keywords. Bless Artfire for all their hard work! Of course Tony dares not explain how Google search uses your own browser’s history to customize your search results. The more you search out your own items, the higher those items will rank… for you. Everyone else sees results tailored to them. What happened to transparency Tony? Or is this another one of your trade secrets?

You’ll instantly notice that the forums are a happy-happy place moderated by the community for the community. Just dare not voice a different opinion, question or criticize. The zombies will descend on you faster than your screen can reload to ruin your forum “reputation” and effectively silence you. It’s controlled and effective back-door moderation at it’s very best. Ironically, it’s the mavens (a group of sellers to help and mentor other sellers) that are the meanest in the bunch.

http://www.artfire.com/modules.php?name=forums&op=view_topic&tid=28812

Just look at all those mocking comments with the thumbs up icon (mavens) and the blue flame icon (fire mentors) next to them for an eye-opening glimpse into the heart of this marketplace. And all for just $20.00 a month!

Congratulations to Tony… Could politics be in his future?
Reminds me of a cult.