A great place for marketing your handmade goods is the online arts and crafts website, Etsy. While standing in the rain selling your wares at arts markets, like Nachalat Binyamin can be fun, it can also be extremely time-consuming and boring.
Take our word for it. We’ve been there. Enter Etsy:
The online trading fare, which resembles an Ebay for arts and crafts without the bidding element, has reached a critical mass, with over 100,000 virtual store-owners around the world. If you do a search for “Israel,” you’ll find a number of sellers already make and ship from Israel. The prices tend to be a little high for our tastes, but if you couldn’t find that perfect mezuza or chamsah while out at the market, consider ordering it online.
We think Etsy is a great place for Israel’s sustainable designers and craftspeople to set up shop. It looks like it can expand one’s clientele base greatly; Israel is a small country and it’s hard to live off the hand-knit hats and scarves, or homemade coffee mugs, when you sell them in shekels.
[…] Etsy, the online handmade and vintage shopping platform, has done amazing things to help people buy handmade, eco-friendly and local products. Artisans who are marketing their own products can easily set up online shops on the site, and on the buying end, Etsy has made it very easy to shop local by looking for products made and sold near you. Crafting and selling products alone from one’s home or (for the lucky ones) from a studio can be isolating, though, to some artisans. Which is why it’s great that Etsy Teams have started to develop, creating virtual collaborative studios for craftspeople of particular regions. Including, of course, the Middle East. […]
[…] Etsy, the global online store, has enjoyed great success due to the fact that it enables individuals to buy handmade, unique items from other individuals around the world with the click of a mouse. It has even spurred what some people are calling the “Handmade Revolution” by encouraging people to buy handmade (as opposed to energy-guzzling machine-made) products. Taking the site’s green message even further, eco-friendly vendors have emerged on Etsy and they sell upcycled, recycled, or otherwise resource-lite items. […]