New marketplaces struggle to attract enough vendors to create a vibrant marketplace with good product options for customers, and enough customers to make sufficient sales for all the vendors. And when they failed a year or so later, we had nothing to show for our efforts: no sales, no reviews, no new customers for our email list. They even relied on our high quality photography for their homepage.īut in the end we had basically volunteered to build up their website for free. Our products fleshed out their marketplace and made them look like they had a good selection. Our labor was spent populating their site with our products. Like so many dropshipping sites, this new marketplace was another “dead end” for our business. So we signed up: we invested several hours of time uploading product listings and copying our product photos to their online forms, filled out a company profile, and waited for the sales to roll in. It had reasonable fees, an appropriate niche for our business, and nice branding. A new company reached out to us about their great new marketplace they were building. The first alternative marketplace we tried was a new, niche marketplace. Niche marketplaces focus on a particular product angle, such as city-made goods, American-made goods, or handmade. In this post, we’ll talk about experience working with other marketplaces as alternatives to Etsy, both big and small. But unlike dropshipping sites, we thought that if we tried other marketplaces the time investment would really be worth it, because we would be in control of the orders and the customer relationships. We learned that you have to consider the likelihood of the site’s success before you sink your labor time into their business.īoth dropshipping sites and marketplaces promise to bring customer traffic and sales in exchange for a commission. Picking up where we left off: in the 2010’s we learned an important lesson by listing our products on dropshipping sites. This article is a guest post for our Skill Share series from artisan Walnut Studiolo, a husband-and-wife leathercrafting business based in Oregon. This is the last in a five-post series. What Happened When We Tried Listing our Handmade Products on Other Marketplaces
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