Why I think too many craft sites is a good thing

There is a great deal of choice of online stores for people who sell their crafts at the moment. I am concentrating on Folksy and Etsy at the moment, but I also have a small store at MISI as well. Ontop of that there is also Artfire, Corindr, Dawanda, Zibbet, and probably more that I don’t know about. The one thing they have in common is they are all trying to be the next big ONE coping the success of another well know auction site….. You know the one…….

I so hope this doesn’t happen!

If you are trying to sell you’re old slippers or box of onions, or whatever else that is cluttering up your house, it seems there is only one internet auction site worth using. It’s a shame no other competitors from the early dotcom days survived, it could do with competition to keep it on it’s toes, and to give sellers and buyers more choice. I hear from so many sellers bemoaning the sudden rule changes, increases in fees, delisting of auctions for the strangest of reasons. I was speaking to one crafter a few months ago who said she was working from the moment she got up till midnight on her shop, and daren’t take a holiday else she would loose her powerseller status. To me it seems she had stopped working for herself, and was now working for them! Surely this should be working as a partnership between them and us, not a dictatorship telling us how we should run our affairs for their benefit.

I have been selling a few spare plants on ‘a well know auction site,’ and I’d thought they’d got it all sorted until this weekend when I ran into their craziness! Despite already having done half a dozen sales without any queries I was blocked by their automated system because they didn’t like one of my email addresses! It took over an hour to sort out, not helped by constantly having to re-log in on virtually every page change, and in the meantime has ‘frozen’ a sale that’s gone into my paypal account!!! GRRRR!!!!!!!

So please continue to support these smaller sites, even though some will always be small, some will be glitchy, some won’t do enough PR, at least they are helping to keep big sites like Etsy on their toes. Yes, it would be easier if we all sold in one place, but if we loose this healthy competition then I think we will all be poorer for it.