Does Amazon Handmade Offer a Compelling Alternative to Etsy?
All I wanted was to make and sell koozies with my friends’ faces on them. Is that too much to ask? Yes, inappropriate. But too much? I think not. Besides, consumers are willing to pay up to 17% more for handmade or personalized items. Opportunity abounds.
So I packed up all my belongings (namely my favorite photos of my friends’ faces) and set off to find a storefront to sell on. Eventually I reached a fork in the road: left to established artisan powerhouse Etsy or right to Amazon Handmade, which only allows handmade, small-scale products to be sold on the enormous Amazon platform.
Hmm…if you were in my shoes, which route would you take? You might say “well, it depends on your priorities.” Let’s take a look at the GPS, shall we?
- Traffic: Amazon’s customer base is 300M vs. Etsy’s 35M. While it’s not as well known for handcrafted items, Amazon certainly has more cars on the road.
- Gas prices: Etsy charges a fee per listing while Amazon allows you to list for free. But before you take advantage of the cheap gas, take a look at…
- Tolls: As soon as a customer makes a purchase on Etsy, the seller has access to the funds. On Amazon Handmade, funds are not released to sellers until items have been marked as shipped. Sort of a “shipment or the egg” situation. Plus, fees are greater on Amazon.
- Billboards: Amazon Handmade sellers can only advertise on Amazon, while Etsy allows sellers to post an ad on the side of any road they’d like.
- Make and Model: Etsy has over 160 product categories while Amazon Handmade has a limited 14. So for sellers with a pretty unique ride, you may not fit into the Amazon club just yet.
This analogy could go on for a while if I were to lay out every single similarity and difference. In reality, there’s a time and place for selling on each platform. It’s on you to decide if you want the fastest route, the scenic route, or something in between.
Etsy will allow you more flexibility to build out your brand (even for specific offerings like my friends’ faces on koozies) and customers are more understanding of longer ship times. But Amazon is Amazon, and it’s hard to compete with that amount of highway, I mean brand exposure.
