Another Etsy seller who is absolutely wonderful, was kind enough to share findings the other day. The program she found is called Animoto.

What is Animoto?
- It is a program that produces TV-quality music videos using your photos in just minutes.

How does it work?
- Choose your photos (about 20)
- Upload your photos to the program (very similiar to uploading photos to your Etsy listings).
- Choose a song.
- Click complete.

The program puts everything together and VOILA, you've just created your first absolutely fabulous 30 second video!

But what does it cost me?
- Well, if you know me, you know that I love free! So, of course this program is absolutely FREE!

What do I do with it now?
- I'm in the process of looking for places that I can advertise add my new video. So far, I've found Flickr, YouTube, Facebook fan page, and my blog but I'm still searching!

So go forth and create!

I came across this absolutely fabulous new tool that can be a total life saver for any Etsy seller. What is it you ask? What does it do? Where can I get one of my own? Well, hold on, and I'll tell you!

What is it?
- Craft Weasel

What does it do?
- Tag finder helps you choose the best set of tags for your items. Enter one or more tags and Craft Weasel will search Etsy for items with those tags, then generate graphs and suggest related tags that might be suitable for your items!

Where do I one?
- http://craftweasel.com/TagToolQuery.do

Best of luck, I hope someone else finds it as useful as I do!

Well I've been hoarding the supplies for about a month now. Basically, practicing to make sure I was happy with the final product. After quite a few hits and misses, I'm lauching 2 new lines of pendants.

First, after searching for nearly 3 months for the perfect cutters, I finally found a great circle cutter to create my round clay photo pendants, like this one:

Second, I know that glass tile pendants have been done over and over and over again and I had bought some glass tiles to experiment with last year but I just wasn't happy with how the glass was shaped, so I sort of gave up on the idea and kept working on new pieces. Well, I finally came across a wonderful Etsy seller who was offering something different and I am incredibly happy with the final product. I love the way the glass curves along the edge, instead of having harsh edges, it flows beautifully! Here's some examples of my new line of glass tile pendants:

Let me know what you think? Should I keep going with either of these?

As usual I was lurking in the Etsy and Ebay forums when someone posted that Paypal was holding 10% of their funds for 60 days. After a bit of research, I came across a hundred or so others who were in the same predicament. Paypal was holding their funds for apparently no reason. On top of that, Paypal hadn't issued any changes to policy requirements, leaving a lot of people wondering what the heck happened. Well after I sent off a quick email to Paypal, basically asking if and what their changes were. This is the response I received:

"Hello XXXXXXXX,

Your business is important to us, and we are working hard to provide an easy, fast and secure payment service to you and your customers while keeping our prices competitive. We're also committed to clearly communicating changes to our policies and procedures. To that end, we are writing to inform you of a change to your PayPal account, which will take effect 30 days from the date of this email.

Beginning 07/26/2009, a small percentage of the total payments you receive will be held temporarily as a reserve in your account. This small reserve amount helps to ensure that funds are available to cover payment reversals or buyer chargebacks, if you do not have a sufficient PayPal account balance and do not provide the funds to do so.

A reserve is like a security deposit for your PayPal account and is standard practice in the payments industry, especially for retail segments like Cell Phones & PDAs where there is a higher-than-average risk of reversals or chargebacks. This does not mean that you have done anything wrong. We are requiring a small reserve in your account because you sell in a category that has a higher risk of reversals and chargebacks and because you are relatively new to PayPal as a seller.

Your reserve amount will be 10% of the total payments you receive, which will be held on a rolling 60-day schedule. That means 10% of the money you take in each day will be held in your account, and then made available for withdrawal 60 days later.

For example, if you receive $2,000 every 60 days into your PayPal account, then a reserve amount of about $400 would be required on a rolling 60-day period. In other words, about $6.67 would be held in reserve each day, then released 60 days later.

If you are a PayPal Money Market Fund customer, you will still earn interest on your total balance while your money is in reserve. Click here for more information or to enroll in the PayPal Money Market Fund.

We recognize this is a change in the way we do business with you. By requiring some merchants to reserve money in their accounts, we're able to lower our own costs. Keeping our costs low helps us to continue providing competitive pricing for all sellers who use PayPal.

If you have any questions about this change, please call us at 1-877-729-7252. We appreciate your business and look forward to a continued partnership.

Sincerely,

Paypal"

So, in case anyone else was wandering lost in the dark about this situation too, here's the facts straight from the horse's mouth!

Are you having trouble choosing those perfect tags or writing a captivating, informational titles? Well, really, who isn't!

I'm in the process of redoing my tags and titles, so that I can basically get the most bang for my buck. I've been reading through articles and websites and compiling relevant info to use. I figured there was probably others out there with my same dilema so I figured I would share the info I've found!

Etsy Storque Articles:
- http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/guidelines-tips-tagging-on-etsy-281/
- http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/seller-workshop-recap-tags-titles-descriptions-and-most-rele-4090/

Free Tag Suggestion Search Engine:
- http://craftweasel.com/TagToolQuery.do
- This free search tool allows you to enter a tag or 2 and it will build a list of suggestions of tags based on the tags other people are using for similiar items!

These 2 were the some of the best pieces of information I've come across so far as I find more, I'll be adding new info!

Good luck!