Etsy Review Handmade & Vintage items

WWW.ETSY.COM


Well, you learn something new everyday. I have been under the impression for a long time that Etsy.com was for handmade items only. I have never heard anyone speak about selling vintage items there...until today.

Sure enough, Etsy does allow vintage items in their vintage categories. Since we do vintage, I signed up and tested by putting up a more feminine item for sale. By the look of things over there, the site is filled with the female persuasion. I am not too sure that a Coleman lantern would do well on Etsy.

I took time to view the site, test load times, checked out some sellers, even bought a few things to test out the shopping cart. I signed up as a seller, made a banner, set some rules up, yada yada...so here is what I like about Etsy:


WHAT I LIKE:

• Just as with what I love about ecrater and BISI, Etsy is a VENUE of individual sellers and will not get into buyer / seller issues. This again is what eBay intended to be, and severely failed at due to greed. On Etsy, sellers make their own terms and have to follow the laws of the common land we all share.
  

• Etsy charges something. That's right, you read that right......they charge something. What does this do? It eliminates the free mentality of "let's list everything I find in the bottom of my trash can in hopes that someone will buy it." There is a vast amount of people who do not realize that if the item has a horrible sell rate on eBay, it will have a horrible sell rate anywhere. No online venue needs 1000 copies of the same John Grisham book.

The fees at Etsy are 20¢ per item for a four month listing. If an item sells they take a small 3.5% of the selling price. Very fair.

• Etsy is very keen to the responsibility that buyers should be held accountable for their own actions.
  

A buyer has three days to pay by Paypal or let the seller know if they will be sending another form of pay the seller has stated they will accept. If the seller does not hear from the buyer, the seller CAN CANCEL THE SALE AND LEAVE APPROPRIATE FEEDBACK. Gee, what a novel idea. Non paying members can get booted....eBay ...are you listening???

• Etsy software was no more difficult or confusing than ecrater or BISI. All places have a learning curve, even eBay. The software basically worked in the same way and I give them kudos for their easy meta tag input fields that are similiar to BISI.

• Etsy allows you to set up a storefront with your name at the beginning of the URL.

This is the same as ecrater and BISI. Etsy got it right like BISI has done by providing a direct link to the seller's store when using the search feature. I found shopping to be fairly easy. Again, all places have learning curves and we cannot expect a site not to. Old dogs just have to learn new tricks..me included.

• I was very impressed with the speed and quality of the site. The users take this place seriously and I saw a lot of really neat handmade goodies and vintage nostalgia.

• Besides being able to drive customers right to your Etsy store, Etsy does have a common search function to search all Etsy stores. This is vital to for new sellers and buyers..if you want to know more about my mall analogy concept, scroll farther down for my BISI ans ecrater reviews. Fact is, it works. This search feature is very important to sales.

• Etsy has a lot of listings. I was quite surprised when typing in random items in the search box..they do get a lot of use.

• The Etsy community seems very friendly...crafty people usually are.
  

• Etsy has the RSS feed ability as well as ecrater and BISI.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE:

Honestly...I haven't found a thing. While Etsy is for girly things and will not fit everyone's stuff, I think it is definitely a great place to buy or set up shop.

As I find out more, I will add more. If anyone has info to share, please email me or post to the comments!