Lion Brand Notebook ®
If you’ve been knitting or crocheting for friends and relatives and are considering turning your skills into sales, you may want to take a look at Etsy. It’s an online marketplace for all things handmade. Etsy provides a venue where you can sell individual handmade items or open your own virtual store. In April, we visited the Etsy offices in Brooklyn and were really impressed with how creative and customer-friendly they were.
It costs 20 cents to list an item plus 3.5% of the selling price. You can find out more about how to sell here.
Here are a couple of products for sale today that are made with Lion Brand Yarn. The hat is listed for $25.00 and the slippers for $20.00. We’d love to hear from people who have tried this and would like to share their experiences with others.
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ekgheiy
Etsy was and actually still is a great concept, but fails in use … in my experience, at least. 🙂 I wish I could say that I’ve met with success on Etsy, but I haven’t.
The search function really isn’t useful. Your listing becomes burried pages-deep in a short amount of time. And while $0.20 is cheap for a listing, it can add up to a big disappointment when your listing(s) doesn’t sell- or worse yet, doesn’t even get viewed.
I’m thinking that if you expect to do well on Etsy, it’d be a good idea to have a marketing strategy to drive traffic to your Etsy Shop. But if that’s the key to success with Etsy, then I fail to see what Etsy has to offer that running your own shop from your own domain can’t offer. :-/
I give a heartfelt congratulations and “more power to you” kudos to those who’ve found success on Etsy; otherwise, don’t shy away from considering alternatives. 😉
kim luxuch
I joined stay in April of this year, and while only having 4 sales on the site thusfar, I have had much sales off the site due to people viewing my shop. I have business cards made so whenever someone local asks about something I’ve made, I give them a card so they can look at my other available products. I’ve sold many items this way. So while success on etsy is not definite, it has helped boost my local business a bunch. I think the .20 listing fee is a fair trade for this. It keeps me from having to carry around tons of my items all the time.