Are products still handmade?

When it comes to buying and selling handmade products, the Internet has a lot to offer. eBay is the traffic king but there are several smaller ventures stealing pieces of a growing market. While the nuts and bolts of these sites are quite similar – you built a platform for sellers to list their items and buyers to search for things they want – the reasons for success are varied.

It’s true that the more people that use the site the better the site will be – more sellers will increase inventory and SKUs and more buyers will generate revenue and in turn more sellers will be interested in listing items on the site. The network effect takes over.

Here’s the traffic data for a list of websites offering handmade goods (as of December 2009):

Name Unique Monthly Visitors
eBay 70.2M
etsy 6.1M
zazzle 4.0M
ecrater 1.8M
rubylane 0.8M
elsewares 0.1M

There’s a dramatic difference between an online store like etsy and another like elsewares. I think the missing ingredient is social networking. It’s important for buyers and sellers to interact with one another, share common interests, and build a stable community.

For instance, the homepages of etsy and ecrater have a prominent “Community” link. They both offer discussion forums, but etsy takes it a step further by showcasing the official etsy on twitter feed and promoting a concept called ‘etsy teams’ where sellers band together to network, share skills, and promote their shops.

For etsy, this user-generated advertising represents free advertising. They’ve built the incentive structure of the site in a way that a seller’s success is also etsy’s success.