So, you want to open up shop but you're not quite ready to host your own website and the thought of learning html of any sort gives you the shudders? Well, you may want to start out opening a shop through a marketplace site.
Marketplaces offer easy shopping experiences for you and the customer both. They provide built in traffic, help through forums and other community members, often have traffic stats and blogs included, and other perks.
They're a great way to test the waters when it comes to selling your own handmade goods so you can see if you're making the type of items that people will actually want to buy! They're inexpensive, usually free to join with minimal fees charged upon the sale of your items and easy as pie to set up and get started.
Here's a rundown of some of my favorite handmade marketplace sites so you can see which ones might work best for your products and your target customer base.
Etsy is probably the largest and most well known handmade marketplace on the web today, and it's still growing! Described as "your place to buy & sell all things handmade" it's super easy to set up a little shop of your own featuring your handmade goods (they also allow you to sell vintage goods and crafty supplies.) All you have to do is register for free and you can start setting up shop!
The deets:
- It costs $.20 cents to list an item + a 3.5% transaction fee upon the sale of the item.
- You can have up to 5 different photos for each item + a description, a policy page, profile
- Payments processed through paypal, check or money order
- Open to international sellers
- Tracks traffic stats with google analytics
- Has a large community with forums and tons of resources to help you improve your shop and make it a success
- Built in traffic, large customer base, daily features of shop sellers by etsy admin on front page and featured sellers each week. Etsy works hard to help connect you with fellow shop owners and customers alike.
1000 Markets is one of the newest handmade marketplaces. It's centered around "markets" that group 2 or more shops under various themes, like "foodcrafters marketplace" and "inspired by nature", for example. It looks really nice and clean and is open to people selling handmade goods only.
The deets:
- Free to join, free to list items- when you make a sale, they deduct a 5.5% fee from the total value + $.50
- You can have multiple different photos for each item + a description, a policy page, profile
- Payments processed through Amazon Payments
- Not open to international sellers at this time
- Tracks your shop traffic stats
- Includes related items on product pages that point customers to other items in your shop, an integrated blog & lots of ways to organize your shop with collections & featured products.
- Has a growing community, new forums- just got out of "beta" mode to reveal the full, finished site.
- You have to apply and list a certain number of items before your shop gets approved and goes live
Dawanda is a marketplace based in Germany that caters more toward a European customer base. You can sell your handmade items and potentially vintage goods- must apply to sell vintage items and be accepted first.
The deets:
- Free to join and list items- when you make a sale, they take a 5% fee from the item sales price. *note- they plan to start charging a small listing fee in the future
- You can have up to 4 different photos for each item + a description, a profile page
- Must be at least 18 years old to buy or sell
- Site based on Euro currency- viewable in German, English or French language
- Payment processed through paypal in the US or through bank transfer in Europe
- Has pinboards, trends, special features, profiles of designers- a pretty good community and people working behind the scenes to bring the site traffic and exposure
Supermarket is the only curated marketplace out of all of these- definitely more design oriented, high quality art, handmade and designer goods only. You have to apply by sending photos, links and info directly to supermarket and can only set up a shop if you've been accepted by them.
The deets:
- Free to join and list items. Charged 10% commission once monthly on total sales for the month rather than as you make each sale.
- You can have up to 6 different photos for each item + description, profile page, news (internal blog) page
- Payments processed through Paypal
- Open to international sellers
- Can organize products by collection, add bulletins and "news" items through the internal blog.
- Since it's a curated collection, they carry only the best of the best of handmade/design items, which means higher quality goods all around, no yucky stuff to have to have search through to find the gems. They're all gems!
This is just a basic rundown of my 4 favorite marketplaces- they're the ones I head to to find new cool stuff to write about on Modish. They each have more information on selling on their individual sites that you can look into.
Some other marketplaces that you may want to consider are (with new ones popping up all the time!):
- Art Garage Sale
- Smashing Darling
- Mintd (Australia)
- Folksy (UK)
- Artfire
- iCraft (Canada)
- Shop Handmade
- RubyLane
- Not Mass Produced (Europe)
But remember, just because a lot of these provide you with a good base of customers and traffic, doesn't mean you won't have to do any work. It might be easier to find yourself in front of the eyes of potential customers, but you're also pit side by side against your competition. You'll need to work on standing out in the growing crowds in each of these places by marketing your shop, contacting blogs, advertising, blogging, networking and getting your business name out there.
There is no "build it and they will come" easy solution, unfortunately- your shop will only be as successful as the hard work you put into it, whether you run your own website or have your shop hosted through one of these marketplaces.
Speaking of having your own website, next week, we'll take a look at getting a domain name and options for building your own shop on it, from hosted sites to finding a good web designer to building it yourself.
>> you may also like: Selling your work in multiple venues: Recipe for success? Or surefire headahe?
