I do remember toddling into home business back when Ebay was friendly¹ to small sellers. Back then, there were also smaller markets who attempted to model themselves after Ebay’s success, the thought being that we were into a brave new world of person-to-person business. For awhile, I used those other auctions, especially the specialty one: e-witch, epagan, and gothicauctions were places I did business and did it reasonably well. While these places are still around in one form or another, they’re the electronic equivalent of ghost towns. There are a few intrepid sellers here and there, but mostly people post things as a way of remaining loyal to old clients who don’t switch mediums/accept change very well and as a way of gently coaxing them into private sales or over to Ebay – or, in the right circumstance, Etsy.

Etsy is very different from Ebay, and that’s why it works. It is, in fact, an entirely new thing, a place for handmade artists and artisans to sell their wares at a set price. It is, arguably, the shopping mall or craft show as an offset to Ebay’s flea market approach. Etsy is about new and original items. Ebay is old and esoteric – and all too often, junk.

Etsy’s success has drawn jealousy, annoyance, criticism deserved and undeserved. It is also drawing imitators. People convinced that Etsy will fail, or people equally convinced that they can do much better than Etsy, and offering alternatives to the service offered. Maybe they can – there’s a broad range of sliding scales, fees charged or not charged, different ways to display work.

But I am older than most of the Etsy crowd and my memory is long. Humans are slow to learn and apt to repeat themselves. While Etsy has the benefit of coming out of a time that was NOT an economic boom² it’s starting to look like the boom-thinking that went behind ebay and its competitors applies: as long as Etsy succeeds, Etsy alternatives have a chance.

But if you stand back and look at the Etsy alternatives, the chances aren’t good if you’re relying on promotion through venue alone. The people that report success on alternative sites have done so by aggregating a powerful network of customers over time and it is those same customers going through multiple sites. The alternative sites by themselves are in the slow process of learning some of the same lessons that Etsy has for themselves – and even though the handmade market is totally different from the business of online auctions because of the way people think about these things – the results may well end up the same.

Like Ebay, like Amazon, like the Highlander, it might turn out there can be only one – and for the rest of us, it’s about making our own success on a small scale from the connections we create for ourselves. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I’d love to live in a world where multiple handmade venues work great. Certainly some aspects and decisions made by Etsy don’t suit me well – but as far as what’s out there, they’re still the best alternative to going out on my own.

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References

1. meaning affordable or at least not virulently greedy [↩]
2. and still miraculously found investors [↩]