Anyone have any experience with this market place?
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Without traffic it is really hard to justify the time to add an additional channel to sales. Etsy is still the massive 1000 lb gorilla.
I like the fact that it can do an import from Etsy, so maybe that helps reduce the effort.
Also, as I am UK based it is no good to me - US only.
So my general view is you should use all the channels you can - but, you must also ensure you are not just spending hours and hours on channels that generate you minimum Profit.
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They’re not super new (going on 5 years). I paid for an account there, set up shop with my best sellers, and as far as I can tell nobody ever saw my listings. They have no traffic, they have no viable plans to acquire traffic, so listing anything there is a waste of time. The site is also poorly built, it barely works and listing things for sale is a chore.
The nearest thing to an Etsy competitor is Michaels MakerPlace. Even with the benefit of being part of the Michaels website that gets tens of millions of monthly visits from crafters, it’s got nowhere near the sales volume of Etsy. I have made two sales from their marketplace ever, versus thousands from Etsy.
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I tried GoImagine, and was excited about the whole thing – the back end for listing is a mess. If you duplicate a listing and change the options, it changes the originals options too. The shipping settings are in multiple places, so you think you are setting free shipping, and it still ends up charging shipping. I’m pretty tech savvy (can pull API, handjam code for a website, etc) and I was still having issues with it.
Advice, don’t waste your time with GoImagine.
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When I saw this post I thought it was mine from 3 years ago.
Lol
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When I first purchased the Glowforge I imagined selling high-end keepsake boxes of exotic woods on Etsy. This hope was quickly dashed when I saw boxes sold for less than I could buy the wood.
Fifty-five years ago I could make something, walk two blocks away, and sell what I made to any of six or seven gift shops for half or a third of the decent retail price. In looking all over Tampa I have not found one such business.
“Handmade” is also an increasingly tricky concept. In the old days when I made wax models and cast them in gold, those who cut and soldered the metal insisted my stuff was not handmade while the design was done by hand and there was a lot of hand work needed to finish the piece (and I frequently carved the lapis, turquoise, etc I used in the design).
Now we are cutting the designs with a robot and sometimes little more. It is possible to use an unmodified AI for the look, or take a photo with a camera. If you take the photo of a design done a thousand years ago you own it (usually). If someone else takes the photo they own it and while you can sell the finished work you can’t sell the design for someone else to produce with their robot.
With AI you have the same base as the photo, it is unique, and there are no such hangups as when someone else took the photo. If you wildly change the work beyond their photo, it remains their photo. If you go through hundreds of tries with AI to get close to what you can modify, it is mostly yours even before modification, and from the beginning the very act of choice of one start over hundreds of others makes it a child of your mind. Just as a choice about the circumstances of the photograph puts the ownership in the hands of the photographer.
Try that with Go Imagine. You can sell the pattern they can run in their robot, but not even finished work assisted by AI, even if every other power accessory from band saw, to CNC, is ok.
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Call it bigotry (and it was), back in the day a beautiful hand-carved wood statue from Haiti, or another impoverished country, would sell for very little because of the source, but because it was the US a similar carving could sell for very much more. By not making those limits, Etsy made that competition equal footing and nobody in the US (or UK) could compete on an equal work basis (even with robot assist).
By selling US artists only, they avoid the problems of including the UK but not Haiti, India, Indonesia, etc. Another similar case that was UK or EU only could have a similar result. As for the difference from Etsy, someone could have a very much smaller visitor list overall and still have better sales than on Etsy.
I have a hundred designs in the Glowforge Catalog which means only Glowforge owners can buy them, but that market is doing very well for me especially lately.
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I know exactly what you mean, and that is why I never try to sell anything I make. I made my mom one of the Angular Wood Shell Lamp – Glowforge Shop. Using PG materials, the wood, alone, costs $122. I saw a slightly similarly designed lamp at a medium-high end local retailer for $59.99.
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I tried it, canceled, got an email they fixed everything and to come back for two months free. I tried it and canceled again.
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Yeah, I’m in the “won’t let some corporation profit from my efforts” camp, and looked at the terms for all these sites which reinforced my opinion. It is, though, just my opinion.
I’m about to sell something I’ve made for the first time, even though I’ve been “making” for a couple of decades.
I sure as heck won’t be using a “marketplace”.
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Most artists and makers I know do far better selling direct on instagram or tiktok! Congrats on your impending first sale. Feels good.
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