Tuppy's Vintage

Several people have been telling me about Etsy just lately - so I have decided to dabble my toes in the water of advertising some of my hand-crafted items on there.

Etsy is basically a sort of Ebay for selling hand made goods. Whether I'll have any success with selling things there is debateable at the moment. From my point of view it has some major disadvantages. It's not terrifically usable, or searchable if you are looking to buy products from it. It's primarily an American site - most users seem to be American, so if they want to buy my stuff postage costs are higher - I suspect this also makes my prices less competetive, I believe materials etc are more expensive here so mycosts are higher than many people's there. It's not terribly welcoming to UK users - prices are all displayed in dollars, there's no option to view items from the uk only. And also a lot of sellers only sell to the US, which is not very encouraging to British buyers. Plus, in general I think textile items are best seen and handled before purchase so the internet is not the ideal selling medium.

In many ways I would have preferred to list my hand made items in a section on this website, but I went with Etsy for two main reasons - 1/ because my payment processor on this site only allows me to accept UK credit cards and 2/ at this point in time - people are probably more likely to find my goods on a multiple site like Etsy.

So we'll see. If you want a look at what I'm listing, you can find it at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=96877