For those of you among our readers who create handmade products to sell, we're covering another website that offers this service. ArtisansMarket is an online listing and shopping gallery where visitors can buy art or hand-crafted items, and artists and crafters can sign up to sell art or hand-crafted items.
The site currently offers flat fees of $10 per month, and the commission on items sold is 10%. Artists and crafters can list any number of items for the flat fee.
We have compared this site to a number of other online sites selling crafted products and find that some of its strongest advantages are the large images that come up with first exposure to the product. Visual impression is most important when selling arts and crafts. Most buyers will not look further at your product if the image doesn't grab them within the first second or two of viewing. For this reason, we found the large images and visually pleasing pages of this site to be a very great potential advantage to sellers. The image shown at left is one of their category page for "Home and Entertaining," and links to "Home Accents."
The categories are nicely illustrated and encourage potential buyers to click on the category of their choice. At present, the categories are somewhat limited from the standpoint of a few certain craft categories (for example, if you sell premade scrapbook albums/pages or handmade Christmas decorations, there are no real categories for these). However, the majority of art and crafting categories are well represented, and in general are arranged by the buyer's need, which makes for a more practical listing from a buyer's point of view. This is beneficial to the seller, as buyers will be able to find your products when they are looking for them. In some cases, they may even search for things they would not otherwise have considered. We had to peek at "pet accessories," for example, while we were browsing under "Home and Entertaining."
Speaking of searching, that seems to be the biggest weakness of this site. The search function does not return some of the items we viewed when we tried searching for them using a description. This is most likely the fault of the sellers, however, who probably are not providing a good description of their items in the searchable fields. As always when listing an item for sale with an online auction or listing site, it is of the greatest importance to (1) place your item in the proper category, and (2) provide a good description, especially in searchable and initially viewable fields. Both of these things are the responsibility of the seller, and most listing sites will not oversee this process. However, having many sellers who don't reliably follow these basic rules will hurt the displayed results of both category and search results for the listing site, and can give a poor impression.
Overall, we really enjoyed visiting ArtisansMarket.com. As we first mentioned, the visual first impression of products is the most important factor in enticing customers to stay, browse, and buy, and ArtisansMarket has done a very fine job with their visual impact and in featuring products in a very flattering way. We hope this site climbs the ranks to become a widely used resource ... they certainly deserve to be!
The site currently offers flat fees of $10 per month, and the commission on items sold is 10%. Artists and crafters can list any number of items for the flat fee.
We have compared this site to a number of other online sites selling crafted products and find that some of its strongest advantages are the large images that come up with first exposure to the product. Visual impression is most important when selling arts and crafts. Most buyers will not look further at your product if the image doesn't grab them within the first second or two of viewing. For this reason, we found the large images and visually pleasing pages of this site to be a very great potential advantage to sellers. The image shown at left is one of their category page for "Home and Entertaining," and links to "Home Accents."The categories are nicely illustrated and encourage potential buyers to click on the category of their choice. At present, the categories are somewhat limited from the standpoint of a few certain craft categories (for example, if you sell premade scrapbook albums/pages or handmade Christmas decorations, there are no real categories for these). However, the majority of art and crafting categories are well represented, and in general are arranged by the buyer's need, which makes for a more practical listing from a buyer's point of view. This is beneficial to the seller, as buyers will be able to find your products when they are looking for them. In some cases, they may even search for things they would not otherwise have considered. We had to peek at "pet accessories," for example, while we were browsing under "Home and Entertaining."
Speaking of searching, that seems to be the biggest weakness of this site. The search function does not return some of the items we viewed when we tried searching for them using a description. This is most likely the fault of the sellers, however, who probably are not providing a good description of their items in the searchable fields. As always when listing an item for sale with an online auction or listing site, it is of the greatest importance to (1) place your item in the proper category, and (2) provide a good description, especially in searchable and initially viewable fields. Both of these things are the responsibility of the seller, and most listing sites will not oversee this process. However, having many sellers who don't reliably follow these basic rules will hurt the displayed results of both category and search results for the listing site, and can give a poor impression.
Overall, we really enjoyed visiting ArtisansMarket.com. As we first mentioned, the visual first impression of products is the most important factor in enticing customers to stay, browse, and buy, and ArtisansMarket has done a very fine job with their visual impact and in featuring products in a very flattering way. We hope this site climbs the ranks to become a widely used resource ... they certainly deserve to be!
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