I touched on selling crafts online briefly in my last post but I thought I would discuss a few platforms/options individually. Third-party platforms provide a great low-cost outlet to sell your handmade crafts online, but ultimately having your own website allows you to develop more of an independent brand. There’s always a lot to think about.
Where Can You Sell Your Handmade Crafts Online?
I think Etsy and Folksy are a great way to start a business. Like with any online business though you should be driving your own sales by doing marketing and PR. Depending on your product some people may buy after discovering you by chance but to build a sustainable business you need to draw buyers in yourself. – Noisette Marketing
Both these points need to be considered when you embark on selling your handmade crafts online you can’t just set up a website/shop page and orders will come flying in **sigh** if only it was that easy! It takes time, PR and marketing and a lot of social media to develop a customer base and get your brand name out there.
Using Third Party Apps and Websites to Sell Your Handmade Crafts Online
Etsy
Etsy is a huge worldwide site. You are charged a fee to list your products and a 3.5% fee once it sells all fees are paid on a monthly basis through credit card or PayPal. You can integrate your Etsy shop onto blogs/websites via Etsy Mini which is useful in keeping your own brand and identity but ultimately driving traffic to your shop facility. There is a whole page of FAQ which I suggest you read before embarking.
Etsy is hard work and trying to get known is one of the major problems. I haven’t sold anything on there yet but ever hopeful. Etsy seems to like quirky type products and I’m not sure my current range fits in. Working on some new products for Etsy. – Caroline Watts Embroidery
Etsy has played a huge role in my business, it’s straightforward, drives a lot of overseas trade and has increased my customer base which allows me to concentrate on developing new products. – Graces Favours
Folksy
Folksy also charges a fee to list your products which is 20p and 5 % commission once the handmade item sells, fees are paid once a month via PayPal. Folksy is however just for UK residents only to sell. I would read through their support pages too.
Folksy, you do have to continually upload but you can also ‘join in‘ with the marketing, i.e I wrote a Folksy Friday blog for the site profiling my favourite shops, that was on the front page for a week. You can also join their forum and chat with other crafters. I feel it’s a lot more proactive and friendly. Plus their support staff are very efficient, I emailed them a query and had a response the same evening. Recommend Folksy over Etsy, you do have to keep on top to stay on top, but there doesn’t seem to be the same fight for the top spot. – Dufflebobble Crafts
Folksy has an excellent newsletter too, which I actually subscribe to. There’s a lot of useful information regarding driving traffic and social media which can be taken forward on any platform.
MISI
Boasting Free for life Shop, Free crafters Blog, Free Domain ie: http://yourshop.misi.co.uk, Low commission of 3% on sales, 20p per listing no matter what the quantity, Misi really does seem like a great starting point.
I would give Misi a miss. I was on there but it was so badly run and neglected that I moved to Folksy. They are much more proactive there with their advertising and I’ve had loads of sales. – Bubs Bears
Sell Your Handmade Crafts Online Via Your Own Website
Building your own website with a shop facility, Create (which I used for Charlie Moo’s) is easy to use you can choose to pay monthly or yearly a subscription package which varies from £3 to £36 per month depending on your business need. You need to take payment fees into account ie. PayPal, Google Checkout etc but having your own website to sell your handmade crafts online allows you to develop more of an independent brand. You can also look at adding a WooCommerce shopping cart to your WordPress site. As you continue to add inventory and build your brand, you will inevitably run into instances where complex documents are necessary for vendors, suppliers, and customers. By utilizing a program to extract data from documents, you will make your life much easier by never having to search for specific data points, instead, let the program do the work for you so you can get back to creating.
Remember when pricing your item to add in the fees otherwise, it will eat at your profit.
Read through all the information for each site and make yourself a list of pros and cons for each. Also, work out the prices you would have to sell your products at for each site. This will help you to make the best decision for your products.
If you sell or create digital services/products including knitting pattern downloads, online magazines, music and stock photographs (this list is not exhaustive) make sure you are up to date on #EUVAT and that you comply so you aren’t paying VAT across the EU.
Please leave a comment below with your own feedback or suggestions. I’d be really interested to hear about your experiences of where you sell your handmade crafts online.
For more information on running a craft-based business check out my book – Crafting a Successful Small Business: Making, marketing and merchandising
*contains an affiliate link*
Found this useful wondering how you can show me your appreciation? Well, there are some ways you can say thanks and support my website: ➡
Hi Joanne, I’ve only just set up my online shop/blog ‘Odds & Soxlets’ http://www.oddsandsoxlets.co.uk. This was after a great deal of consideration from all the other sites you mentioned! I decided that I would have greater control doing it myself and after your blogging for business workshop I looked into running my business through wordpress and adding in pluggins to make it an e-commerce site! I originally had my website set up with a site similar to create through 1-2-3 reg however the blogging facility wasn’t great and I wasn’t able to costomise the site how I wanted with my own artwork 🙁 I decided that wordpress would give me a much better site and so far I have not been disappointed! I then also used your advice to set up a facebook page amongst various other things and although it’s very early days (only launched last wednesday) I have already had 4 orders and hopefully more to follow!
Erica x
Hi I use create as I didn’t want to have to use the name of another company. I also wanted to be able to add friends pages on my link page to help them along the way. Free publicity is a great way of getting your name out there.
My site has only been up and running for a few months I can say that on average I get up to 100 hits a day I also average 2 or 3 sales a day. Its ealy days yet.
thank you, this is so helpful!
thank you Lucy 🙂
I use create too to set up my own website. I found them to be extremely helpful, the forum is a great source of help too. customer service from the create team is so good. Since I made my own website I haven’t looked back 🙂 (though I know it looks a bit amateurish as I made it myself – a lot of the create websites that people have made themselves are absolutely amazing but I do get sales enough to keep me pretty swamped!)
Hi Joanne 🙂
I currently have a Mr Site pro website, but want to change as I’m not happy with a few things. I am intrigued by Create!
I was looking at making a wordpress website, but all the themes I have seen so far are so dull. There is very little choice for craft or women’s wordpress themes 🙁 especially if I want it to be an ecommerce site.
I don’t have long to make the decision as my current website is due for renewal soon. So I will definitely be looking into the Create option. 🙂
Thanks
I must admit I don’t like Mr. Site at all. Create.net is much better and so easy to use plus the designers are so helpful!
I recommend selling via ready-made craft site like http://www.folksy.com or http://www.artulis.com : its a lot simpler overall and the harder technical stuff taken care of.
I used http://www.selltag.com and worked very well and is free.
We are currently developing The Little Craft Shack which may be of interest to you.
i must say after reading all the comments on here about create I think I`ll have a look at that as I have used etsy and didn`t think much of it,,anybody selling crafts or anything else try and look elsewhere.
Author
I think with 3rd party sites like Etsy it can be really hard to get noticed.
Good luck with your business
Great post! Creating your own website can be quite time consuming though if you are focusing your attention on your craft.
If you have a real passion for creativity and are thinking about selling your work, you should check out our site Bewtsy.com
We’re a new community website dedicated to providing a free marketplace for sellers to showcase and sell their work in their own shop. We don’t take any commission, there are no signup or listing fees, and use Paypal for secure payments.
Check us out @ https://www.bewtsy.com
Author
Thanks for stopping by. Will go check Bewtsy out.
If you love creating crafts inspired by our lovely coast, have a look at our new business at http://www.thelittlecraftshack.com
We are based in Dorset, we charge a commission only on successful sales and we have a £15 set-up fee which includes uploading some of your work to your own shack to get you started.
We use PayPal and other debit/credit card payment processors. However, the fees these companies charge for processing a customer payment are absorbed in our commission.
Lastly, we select our crafters so we don’t have lots of the same craft and we are 2 ladies always at the end of a phone line.
What a great list of places to sell handmade – thank you for taking the time to put this together! May I make a suggestion? How about adding a WowThankYou (www.wowthankyou.co.uk) to the list – we are established marketplace (since 2009) and support UK based artisans, crafts people and designers. We are friendly community and always welcome new partners to join us. You are welcome to select the type of shop you have with us and commissions start from 3%. We have a symbolic joining fee (currently £15 a year) which includes comprehensive directory listing. There are no listing fees and you can add as many products as you like. We have also recently updated our website to include Etsy import tool, which makes setting up your shop easy and quick!
Author
Thank you for including these details.
I do believe I included WowThankYou in my book Crafting a Successful Small Business.
I’ll be in touch x
Etsy is great and both my husband and I have used Folksy too. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of MISI before so that’s a new one to me to explore! I also use and love Create too – they have one of the best customer services I’ve ever come across 🙂
Author
They really do the team at Create are amazing 🙂
Hi there. Love your website. I make patchwork quilts, which I’d love to sell, but I want to make only, I’m not tech savvy enough to sell. I’m ok to pay agreed commission to the right person, but no idea how to find someone to market my work with me who understands my reluctance to get involved with the whole online marketplace. Any ideas? Thanks, Helen.
Author
Have you looked on gig sites such as Fiverr or People Per Hour?
I think with Etsy you can set up a template then you edit it as necessary for each product this might be worth a look at too.
Thank you so much for this useful article.
We would love to let you know about another online place to sell crafts online. it’s called Aviarto, he’s a UK based marketplace for Arts & Crafts which support the Artists and Crafters living in the United Kingdom by providing them a platform with no fees and zero commission, they have 2 membership plans (one paid, one free) and both of them with almost the same features. what I like about them the most is how easy and fast their platform is.
I think they deserve to be mentioned in this helpful article, because they really doing a great work out there in Supporting the small UK craft businesses.