<<-Read the intro <– read the previous review

Read the next review –>

Depending on what you list, how you list, when you list and where you list, listing fees can vary wildly. One item can cost as little as $.03 or as much (est.) as $3. Personally, I think it’s far too confusing. I grant that there is a fee calculator and a lot of 3^rd party services that offer to lower listing fees and make listing easier, but still, ebay, by itself, is convoluted and hard to navigate as a seller.

When you’re through with the listing, you’re not through paying. There’s the Final Value Fees which hover, I think, around 12%. Combine the two, and your fees will run in the 18% range. Add in a storefront and you can be up to more than 25%.

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to selling on ebay including, again, a plethora of third party listing tools and a general sense of well-being and conformity knowing that you’re selling where most everyone else shops.

On the other hand, this is also where everyone else is looking for bargains and the quality of merchandise can vary wildly as can the prices – from low cost to high dollar to high quality to absolute garbage to the occasional real treasure. Hey, where else can you sell (or buy) a piece of toast with Elvis’ face for a couple grand? After all, this is not Christie’s.

Then there’s the Feedback system. Here there are some rather ridiculous protections for buyers (and I understand some of the necessity), but precious little protection for sellers. Feedback is all but useless anymore as all a person needs to get a positive feedback as a buyer is pay… when they want, how they want as long as they pay. Meanwhile, if the seller isn’t Johnny-On-The-Spot in every regard there are dozens of ways to get dinged. Seriously! I’ve received a ‘neutral’ feedback when I did everything right… right product, right price, speedy shipping, no additional shipping or handling charges (and buyers really don’t understand, unless they’ve been to the post office to send more than a letter or postcard, just how expensive shipping has become) – a textbook perfect transaction.  But the buyer claimed that it wasn’t what was expected – a purely subjective response – and requested a refund. I refunded the money and the shipping charges and never received the product back. Yet I was required to accept a neutral feedback while required to give the buyer a positive feedback.

Ebay has a fine Facebook presence including feeds and apps. The also have a large following on Twitter. Facebook, Twitter and advertising has led ebay to be #4 on the internet. Pretty impressive! In fact, Quantcast estimates that the get more than 96 million visitors per month. TrafficEstimate claims they only got around 54 million in the past 30 days. Pick a number, any number, they still beat the competition pretty much hands down.

I note now in day 6 of this series that I did not include a column in the chart for feedback system.  Oversight? Perhaps. Ebay’s feedback system is broken, yet a lot of other services allow the import of ebay’s feedback to prove worth on their service. Broken, yes, but it’s what we gots… Knowing this, and knowing that I am very disappointed in ebay’s feedback system and that it’s personal, I left feedback off the chart…

By the way, our feedback on ebay is more than 1700, 100% positive and features a near perfect detailed seller rating, too. My disappointment with the feedback system is not sour grapes, but a matter of principle and a single bad experience.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 8% [?]

<<- Read the introduction <– Read the previous review

This is the kind of article you’d expect to find at the end of a series such as this… the catch all just before the conclusion. When I’m reading a piece such as this, though, I find it annoys me to get to the second to last line to find that the information I was looking for all along wasn’t even considered. Wasn’t covered, wasn’t research, wasn’t written.

Before I give you the list, let me tell you the primary reasons I chose not to review the following sites. If the site was for a designer – someone who came up with a clever piece of furniture and made one to be shipped off and mass produced – it wasn’t for me. If the site was specific to a region, it wasn’t for me (note that I am reviewing Dawanda which is based in Germany, I think… I was able to list there). If a site was gender specific, I decided not to review it. If a service was media, method or market specific, it was excluded.

Without further ado, then, here’s a list of sites I looked at and decided not to put in the series, along with the reason they were excluded

• HandmadeMarket.com
  • It’s been “undergoing maintenance and will be back next week” since I began researching this article. I might have waited and reviewed them, but I have no way of knowing – since the message includes no date – whether they’ve been undergoing maintenance for a day, wekk, month or year. I may still review them at a later date.
• Trunkt
  • Relaunching April 2010
• Twolia
  • For women only. Bummer, cause some of the prices and policies looked rather nice. Free setup, .20 per item listed, multiplies with inventory (4 of the same item = .80), 3.5% commission. However, I’m not gonna lie about my gender or have my wife list items in her name. In fact, this kind of annoys me… I don’t recall seeing a man only site… Maybe there’s a market there?
• Shopify
  • $25 to $700 per month. This is more of a website design service than a selling service. And at these prices, probably not a good fit for the handcrafter.
• Imagekind
  • Appears to be 2D only. Kind of an interesting fee structure… worth looking into, but not a fit for my crafts.
• SupermarketHQ
  • More for designers that have products mass produced.
• Yessy
  • Describes itself as an escrow company that seems to be focused on 2D art. $59 setup and 10% commission.
• Elsewares
  • More for designers that have products mass produced.
• Folksy
  • UK. Might be a fit otherwise, and may be reviewed later.
• Erayo
  • More for designers that have products mass produced.
• Coriandr
  • UK. Might be a fit otherwise, and may be reviewed later.
• SmashingDarling
  • Fashion only with an 18% commission and a wee bit of a snide attitude.
• MISI
  • UK. Might be a fit otherwise, and may be reviewed later.

If ever you catch me in an error, have a different opinion or want to add your voice, feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment in the field below.

Popularity: 5% [?]

<<-Read the intro  <– read the previous review

Read the next review –>

In all fairness, this site has the look and feel of a startup and it might be worth looking at again in a couple months… or years. At this point in time, though, and this is just an opinion, mind you, but I don’t think this is the pace for an artisan crafter.

We start with a dizzying series of listing fees and options and store fees and options… enough to make ebay look rather simple.

We add to that the nonexistent TrafficEstimate numbers and the Quantcast verified numbers indicating that there are between 4 and 126 people on the entire globe visiting the site on any given day. Quite honesty, I get better number staying at home.

They do have a respectable Twitter presence, though with more than 900 followers and they seem to follow back. I was unable to locate them on Facebook as either a person or page.

If their fee structure is any indication, listing on this service would require a PhD from MIT! There are too many options. However, I might be wrong…. it could be simple… however, I did not test it because I was not going to sign up and pay additional funds to get verified, plus the listing fee, plus the final value fee, plus the store fee. Note that I did spend a rather frustrating hour trying to figure out how to sell and that they do give you a $3 credit to get started. More good news? There are some freebies. According the website, they will submit your items to Google and Microsoft for free… however, at present the submissions were marked as “coming.”

Taking some additional pages out of ebay’s book, they offer both auction and flat rate listings and do not, in spite of the name, focus on artisans. The latest Tweet as of this writing promotes a digital camera and the second featured store on the front page was a discount electronics store.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 9% [?]

<<– Read the intro <– Read the last review

Read the next review –>

There are some serious benefits to keeping it all at home. There are also some serious drawbacks. After all, if it was easy and worked well, everyone would be doing it and services like Etsy and ebay would never have made it off the ground.

The primary benefit is, of course, the freedom. There’s no one besides law enforcement telling me what I can and can’t write about. Put an obvious link to another site that sells products – even if they are not products available on ebay – in an ebay message and see what that get’s you. Here, I can link to whomever I like. Likewise, I can sell items outside the list of categories allowed on other services. If I want to run a listing for a crochet hook, that fine. Right along side that, I can list an old lathe or a ball of lint. Doesn’t matter.

The primary drawback is the traffic. I’m small potatoes. I one person. I do not employ an SEO agency. Therefore, I have to rely on word of mouth and presence elsewhere to get traffic to my site. TrafficEstimate says I don’t exist and Quantcast shows me with a verified 300 people per month and that I’m ranked around 12 million. That’s at once pitiful and heartening… after all, that means I’ve beat out several billion other websites…

I am active on Facebook as both a page (in need of updating) and a person, and I use Twitter (though not very religiously), and I am an early adopter of Google Buzz. Using these services does draw some visitors for me, but as I am just the one person and most of the folks that follow me know me, it’s kinda like preachin’ to the choir.

The fees can vary wildly. My yearly budget for my website is around $280. I can recoup a great deal of that by assisting other people with hosting and design services. This number also includes a lot of secondary domain names that point to my website. Trilooms.com, for instance, takes you to the specific page for my TriLooms (which needs some serious work). Broombesom.com takes a visitor directly to my brooms page (which is in much better shape). Also included in that number are several domain names for friends and associations. If I were to strip it all down to the bare minimum, I could get away with spending around $84 per year. There are a lot of alternatives to that $84 per year and some of them are free, but as you look closer, some of the benefits are stripped away. This is by no means the best deal out there, but it’s what I got.

Meanwhile, I take a half dozen orders or more per month. If I were to break it down, I’d say my fees run in the neighborhood of 4% of the total sales. Pretty competitive overall!

Since it’s my site, there’s no question of fit! Of course it fits!

Another drawback to having your own site come in the form of the ease of use. There are a lot of software packages out there that will allow you to design and host a site, but they all will require a degree of competence with the computer and the internet to install and use. If they say they require no experience, chances are they’re lying or the end result will look like no experience was used. It’s no secret that I use and promote the use of WordPress. It’s easy (for me), free, and has as many options and designs as Carter has Liver Pills. It is possible to plug and play, but that’s not going to get  the best results. To get the best results, some digging around under the hood may be needed. All of that aside, I’ve finally settled on a plug-in to WordPress that allows me to put up a post and place a price on the item featured in the post. Simple.

Ladies and gentlemen, the table if you please…

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 12% [?]

<—- Didja miss the intro? It’s not too late to read it.

If you want to read the next one, you can do that here —->

In checking my site stats I saw that several people were looking for HandmadeCatalog.com reviews. That, I thought, gives me a place to start the Online Sales Showdown! Remember, I’m taking a look at Cost, Ease of use, Fit, Integration and Traffic.

And what a rough start it is…

From what I could find, this site has been around for a couple years. In that time frame, they’ve managed to attract only a very small segment of the market. Quantcast estimates that they receive about 2,200 visitors per month. TrafficEstimate claims the number is more like 6,300. Neither number is a verified number… just an estimate.

They appear to working on improving that number, but they are going about it oddly. Instead of having a Facebook Page, they are a Facebook person and in order to get updates, you have to friend them instead of fanning them. If they miss your friend request, you get no updates. Meanwhile, their Twitter persona had a total of 387 followers and appeared to be tweeting about 3 times per day during the writing and researching of this article.

I cannot write about the ease of listing because I couldn’t list anything. I did not want to enter into a contract with no guarantees and up-front costs simply for the purposes of researching this article.

You read right… contract and up-front costs.

The fees involved are high compared to other similar services:

• $4.95 per month (or $40 per year) and 15% commission for up to 50 items.
• $7.95 per month (or $60 per year) and 10% commission for up to 250 items and 3 featured on the front page per year.
• $12.95 per month (or $100 per year) and 5% commission for up to 1200 items and 5 featured on the front page per year.

A red flag went up when I read that payments would be made to the crafter by the service via check or PayPal after the sale and before shipping. Payments do not go directly to the crafter as they do with many other services. I much prefer services that connect me to the buyer directly. Although the service acknowledges the problem in a roundabout way, there can also be issues with shipping when business is conducted in this fashion.

Fees and pay structure aside, this does seem like a fair fit for my products. I found no brooms there, but there were some handmade broom covers I might consider buying. I found no knitting needles, crochet hooks, or drop spindles, but I did find a plethora of yarn related kit and crocheted items.

In conclusion, this service – which is not a true competitor to ebay or Etsy, but a crafts catalog – has some worrisome fees, contracts, and usage issues. There is no serious traffic to speak of and their social presence is small in spite ofd being on the web for a couple years. As a crafter on a limited budget, this is not a venue I would choose.

Ladies and gentlemen, the table if you please…

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 9% [?]

Pssst. Wanna skip the intro and dive right in? —->

For the past several years, we’ve been selling at local shows, on this website and on Ebay. However, I’ve always thought that there had to be an alternative. I had heard of Etsy, and there have been vague rumors about other sites and services starting with the intention of competing with ebay and Etsy.

It turns out that the rumors are true. There are more then 20 alternatives to Etsy and ebay. But I find that, short of signing up and trying them out one at a time, there’s precious little on the internet that compares the alternatives in an easy to read way. None of the reviews I have read compare them at all! That’s not to say that there aren’t reviews out there that compare… that’s just to say I haven’t found them.

To ease my mind and make my decisions easier I started researching them. Now, I want to share what I’ve learned with you.

The first thing I learned is that there’s no possible way I can compare and contrast all the services and sites in the course of a single blog post. I began this story about 2 weeks ago and after some 40 hours online, I had generated more than 3000 words, a dozen or so charts and tables, and I wasn’t close to being done. This is suited for a book (hello, publishers… contact me), or a series of magazine articles (again, hello publishers… you out there Crafts Report?), or a series of blog posts.

Until the publishers drop me a line, then, that’s what I’ll do… a series of blog posts.

What I want to do in this series of blog posts is tell you about a single specific service at a time, and then use a table or chart to compare it to all the other offerings. To that end, I’ve chosen a fairly broad range of elements to look at and review:

• Fees – how much to list, what percentage of sales in commission, how else does the service provide for itself (advertising, etc.) – What does it cost?
• Fit – I make crochet hooks and knitting needles, looms and brooms, a fairly eclectic mix of items. I do not think my products will sell well opposite a gaggle of Made in China products or a huge list of used computer components – Do I fit here?
• Ease – Some services make it easy to list, some seem to require a post graduate education. Personally, I don’t want to think – How easy is it to list an item.
• Traffic – I could have the most wonderful product on the planet and if I set up shop in Antarctica, I’ll probably have very very few customers. Likewise, a service that offers low fees and easy listing and a perfect fit, but gets few visitors isn’t going to help me. – How many people visit the site.
• Marketing and Integration – People are already starting to call Web 2.0 old hat and turning to the social web, calling it Web 3.0. This trend came about with the widespread adoption of MySpace (which I did not check as I do not use), Twitter, and Facebook. Google Buzz was debuted as I was writing this and is not included. This segment might well be the hardest to justify, but I feel it’s important to have a social presence as that can potentially drive more visitors to the site. – Are they working for you?

Without further ado, I give you the table… soon to be filled with all kinds of interesting and useful information… click on the title of the service on the score card below to view a complete review.

Note that this is all based on my experiences and opinion and needs. Your needs and experiences may be different from mine…

Finally, if you have any information or opinions regarding these sites, feel free to share now or at any time via email or comments right here…

Popularity: 17% [?]

As you may have read earlier, we’re planning a broom-makers get together in April at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, AR. The response has been much larger than I had ever imagined! To streamline things, I’ve put together an information packet and a registration form. You can download it here:

MS Word .DOC File

or

Acrobat Reader .PDF File

If I missed something or you have an additional question, please feel free to email me.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Jeanette came to me this morning and said “If you’re going to be on the computer, could you research some business cards for me?”

She’s got a gallery reception coming up at the Arkansas Craft Guild’s Gallery in Mountain View, AR and she doesn’t want to use her work business cards for fear that it would mislead people. OK… I can understand that… a couple hundred quick and dirty business cards coming right up…

So, I turn to my friend, Google, and type in the words “business card.”

Oh my schnitzel and kraut! Free business cards, cheap business cards, business card design services, business card collection programs, business card designs to download, business card scanners, business card cases… more than 216 million links. I shouldn’t be surprised… I’m really not surprised. However, one item caught my eye – the number of people offering free business cards (for the cost of some really expensive shipping) intrigues me.

Let’s check it out!

Start on your search results page by reading the fine print… about half the links offered FREE UV coating or FREE shipping or FREE design service or FREE templates and not FREE business cards. Several had FREE in the listing although nothing was, indeed, FREE. Instead, these service providers included a line such as “FREE is not always better.”

Of those that actually offered no cost business cards (except for the shipping), several pointed back to one printing service: VistaPrint. This narrowed the search down to a small number of vendors: VistaPrint, BizCard, DCP-Prints, and OvernightPrints. There are others like Snapio and PrintPelican (which offers 500 cards as opposed to the typical 100 to 250), but, hey, I ain’t getting paid here…

VistaPrint

Vista print offered around 45 designs for the free cards, and the designs were basically nice. Nothing to shout about, but nothing truly hideous, either. The editing went smoothly. It is possible to customize the card a wee little bit by rearranging the content that goes into the fields. For instance, I wanted Jeanette’s name to come first rather than a company name, so that’s where I put it. The content I put in the fields stayed put as I switched through cards – a nice touch. Unfortunately, all the cards have the fields placed differently necessitating rearranging the content as you view different designs. It is not possible to change the font, style or size used. It is possible, in some instances, to trick the card into adding extra lines. Also noteworthy is the single line of type on the back identifying the cards as being free and being from VistaPrint. I guess I don’t mind the “from VistaPrint” part, but did they have to put free?

The bill? $13.26 for 500 cards

BizCard

There are nearly, it would appear, 300 designs to choose from here when you select the free card offer. That’s great, right? Of the 300 designs, I would say that a bare dozen of them were usable. The remainder looked like they were stolen from a vintage 1990 copy of PrintShop Deluxe, although they might not have been quite that nice. That said, they did offer some advanced editing options and font choices. However, getting to the editor and making changes was a convoluted process, and, in the end, not worth doing. Gone were some of the finer touches offered by VistaPrint – there’s no way I could find to change designs without having to apply all the copy all over again.

The bill? $8.88 for 250 cards

OvernightPrints

Of the four printers that I selected, OvernightPrints’ design selection, while not the larges, is certainly the best. Like VistaPrint, your copy stays with you as you look at different cards. I found the process to be a bit confusing, though, and would recommend that they place a “buy this one” button somewhere on the page. As it is, there is a “back” and a “next” button which I believed were there to navigate through designs, not through the buying process. I almost dropped them from my list because I was getting frustrated trying to work my way through. I suppose that could be intentional and that they are trying to persuade people to buy more expensive options, but, if so, aggravating them is not the way to do it. They were nice enough to store what info I had entered and when I came back, after a frustrated earlier departure, the card was ready to edit.

The bill? $14.17 for 250 cards

DCP-Prints

These folks fall in between VistaPrint and OvernightPrints in their designs, but they make up for that with their easy-to-use advanced editor and lower shipping prices. Like most other online printers, the copy you enter in one card stays there as you view different designs.

The bill? $7.99 for 250 cards

The verdict

Although I liked the design I came up with over at Overnight Prints, I couldn’t justify the shipping and handling and I was frustrated with the back and forth the site required when creating the free cards. DCP-Prints designs just weren’t up to snuff even with the nifty advanced editor and low shipping and handling fees, s I had to pass them by. BizCard’s offerings would have been humorous if not so hard to use. A big NO there. By process of elimination, then, I chose Vista Print. Note that I started with 250 cards for about $9.99 and they threw in another 250 in the checkout process for around $4. I’ll let you know in a couple weeks how they look.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Broom and their old world cousins, besoms, have a wonderful, long and often humorous folklore filled history.

For instance, it’s said that if you leave a broom outside your door, uninvited evil visitors will have to stop and count all of the broomstraws and are thus prevented from entering. They also say that if you sweep a circle around someone, you’ll marry them. If you lean a broom in a corner while people are visiting, it’s supposed to be a hint that they’ve overstayed their welcome.

Of all the folklore and traditions out there, one of my favorite is the Wedding Broom.

It seems that brooms have always been a part of the wedding ceremony.

In the 14th century in northern European and Scandinavian countries, a broom was propped diagonally across the entrance to a new home. The bride and groom had to, one at a time, jump over the broom into the home without disturbing the broom in order to be considered married. If the broom was tipped over, the wedding was off.

They also allowed for divorce. All you had to do was jump out of the house over the broom without dislodging it – backwards!

Some will tell you that only peasants jumped the broom as a wedding ceremony because the broom was representative of the threshold – the entrance into a new life together.

Africans were often told these stories from the old world on their long, sad journey to the new world, and may have had some of their own history to add to it. When working the plantations as slaves, they were not allowed to have any religious ceremony and they, too, took to jumping the broom as a form of marriage.

The Church put an end to the broom jumping around the 16th century and made priests officiate the weddings. But that didn’t mean the broom was left out of the picture. It became a traditional wedding present! Not necessarily a nice thing either… it was kind of sneaky, truth be told. The mother of the groom would give the bride a broom. Then, at some point in the future, the mother-in-law would pay the young wife a visit and take a look at the broom – which was always hung with care in the kitchen or near the hearth. The mother-in-law would be able to tell how her son’s choice was working out: If the broom had even wear, it was being used right and the young lady knew how to clean house; If the broom had uneven wear or was starting to curl, she wasn’t using it right and needed some instruction; And, if the broom was unused or, heaven forbid, missing, all bets were off – this gal hadn’t a clue!

When families started to spread out a bit more the tradition of spying had to be dropped, but the broom remained. In the 18th century the bride would be given a broom and attached to the handle was a little saying. “In good weather, use the bushy end. In stormy, use the other.” I imagine a stout ash or hickory handle tamed many a husband during bouts of “stormy weather.”

To this very day, many weddings incorporate a broom dance into the festivities and some have even kept the jumping of the broom alive.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Back in late September or early October, I was in the broom shop at the Ozark Folk Center, chatting with visitors while between brooms when in comes a little bundle of smiles and energy and creativity accompanied by her mother. Seems the young gal, Julianna, had come up with an idea for a Halloween costume and I was just the guy to advise her in creating it.

Now, I know that everyone is thinking witch. And you’d be right… almost.

Julianna wanted her mother to be a witch and she wanted to be the broom!

Here’s what her Karen, her mother, had to say:

If you can recall…Julianna came up with this idea herself and knew I would be her witch. There wasn’t a soul, while trick or treating, that doubted who we were. She did not, however, win the costume contest.

Thank you again. This made the trip even more memorable!

I think the judges must’ve been bought off!

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story!

Taking measurements

The making of…

Trying things on.

Dressed and ready

Trick or Treating

Ready to ride

Popularity: 60% [?]