Is anyone using Etsy?

Trisha F.
Trisha F.
  • 7 years ago

I have a small storefront and have been doing pretty well selling our handmade candles but am looking into expanding online. One of my friends mentioned Etsy as a good place for handmade items, has anyone tried it? Would it be ok for someone who has little (read next-to-none) e-commerce experience?

I have used Etsy, it's very easy to set up a store so I wouldn't worry about that. The issue you may have is marketing. You will need to drive traffic to your site in order to get sales. They do offer the ability to "promote" your product for a price and there is always Adwords.

You may want to have a look at Amazon's product for handmade items (I can't remember what they call it) or fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) as another option.

Either way, you are going to have to do some online marketing (probably less with the Amazon products though.

Etsy is ok, I get a few sales from them but nothing I'm going to be able to retire on. Jake is correct about the marketing aspect though, if you do well on that front and have a good product, it will probably work better for you.

Jake also mentioned Amazon as an option, there are a few more as well (Big Cartel comest to mind). Just do a google and you'll find a bunch of info.