Nowadays there are many venues for selling handmade goods online. I researched the most popular of them, and also checked their Alexa Traffic Ranks. Alexa gives useful information about the traffic of the website. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and page views is ranked #1 (in case you are curious, #1 is Google, followed by Facebook and YouTube).
Etsy (349) Etsy is the largest and the most popular website for buying and selling crafts online. It attracts many visitors, but has over 200,000 sellers, so standing out of the crowd could be a challenge. You need to promote your shop outside Etsy, (by the way, that's valid for all third-party selling venues). It has great features, as well as resources to help you establish your store and make it a success - try out The Storque (Etsy's blog), the Forums, or the Virtual Labs. - Currency: US Dollar
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: $0.20
- Commission: 3.5%
Ecrater (3,101) Ecrater is a completely free online marketplace, where crafts and handmade products are just a part of the broad range of products. It is quite in the direction of Ebay, but with fixed prices and no fees to pay.- Currency: US Dollar
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: FREE
- Commission: FREE
DaWanda (3,863) DaWanda is a Germany-based selling venue with platforms in 3 languages - German, English and French. While the German platform is rapidly increasing its popularity, the English and the French ones attract rather moderate levels of traffic (yet). However, international sellers do not pay listing fees. What I like about DaWanda, is that it constantly improves the quality of its services.- Currency: Euro
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: 0.10 to 0.30 EUR (valid for sellers on the German platform only); International sellers do not pay listing fees at the time. They will be introduced at an unspecified future time, and sellers will be notified at least 4 weeks in advance.
- Commission: 5% (valid for all)
Big Cartel (4,399) Big Cartel is home to many fully customized shops selling items like band merchandise, jewelry, clothing, crafts, photography and art. Depending on the pricing plan you choose, you could build a real website with your own domain name, categories and up to 10 custom pages (for example, About, Ordering Information, Wholesale, etc). No matter if the shops have a custom URL (www.mysite.com), or a Big Cartel URL (www.mysite.bigcartel.com), they act as completely separate websites. There is a Big Cartel Directory, where popular, newly updated, and random sites could be found.- Currency: Optional.
- Monthly fee: FREE, $9.99 or $19.99
- Listing fee: FREE
- Commission: FREE
Artfire (10,686) Artfire is still in Beta, but already starts finding its face. It is a Etsy-like selling venue and even has a button on each product page to link directly to your website, Etsy shop, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, etc.- Currency: US Dollar, but you could view prices in many other currencies (just click on the price and choose currency from the drop-down menu)
- Monthly fee: FREE (Basic account), or $15.95 (Verified account) The verified status would eventually cost $20/month.
- Listing fee: FREE
- Commission: FREE
Ruby Lane (14,939) Ruby Lane exists since 1998 and has already made a name as a quality marketplace for antiques, collectibles, vintage, art and jewelry (they recently added artisan jewelry to their list of lanes). It is considered one of the 3 major online antique malls. All shops go through a review process before they are open.- Currency: US Dollar
- Setting up a shop: $75
- Commission: FREE
- Maintenance and advertisement fees: details here
1000Markets (47,307) I like the layout of 1000 Markets, which is clear and easy to navigate, but still aims to show as much of your work as possible. When you open a product page, you also see a box of 9 other items by the seller + 9 items from the same shop category. They use Amazon Payments for checkout.- Currency: US Dollar
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: FREE
- Commission: 5.5% + $0.50
Zibbet (81,258) Zibbet is an Aussie-based new selling venue for handmade products, which went live in February, 2009. It is in Beta and some features, like forums, are still to come. You can choose between Basic (free) and Premium account. However, the basic account only lets you have 25 active listings at a time.- Currency: US Dollar
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: FREE
- Commission: FREE
- Premium Account: $7/month (for a limited number of users, will be $15 when those are taken) They also have a Referral Program, which can earn you a free Premium account for life.
Folksy (94,638) Folksy is a UK-based marketplace for handmade products. It uses a similar model to Etsy, but has the British charm. They've been planning to open up to international sellers for ages, and unfortunately we are still waiting. Note: The only picture I managed to copy was the one of their blog, but the logo is exactly the same - it only says "Beta", instead of "Blog".- Currency: UK Pound
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: 20p (You can list up to 5 items in one 'handmade' listing, and up to 100 when listing materials.)
- Commission: 5%
Vondir (122,897) Vondir is a German-based selling venue, which mainly operates in German at the time. I only found it recently, and was taken by surprise when it turned out that it had a higher Alexa Traffic Rank than websites like Shop Handmade, Wink Elf, Silk Fair, or Made It Myself.- Currency: Euro
- Setting up a shop: FREE
- Listing fee: FREE
- Commission: FREE
- Premium Account: 2.49 EUR/month
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