Auctionbytes Etsy Article Comment

Auctionbytes recently ran a blog article focusing on Etsy and the problems trying to integrate vintage item into their "handmade" product base. That post can be found here:

• Etsy, Where Handmade and Vintage Collide - Saturday, April 04, 2009

Since I was currently working on an Etsy vs Bonanzle article, I added the comment shown below. - Seller Karma

Etsy has succeeded at something that no other alternative site has - it has it's own traffic. I believe this traffic has come specifically because Etsy doesn't have the same junk that's filling all the other sites. Most buyers come to Etsy for the handmade and art stuff - not for old comic books.

Unlike Bonanzle, who makes the "find everything but the ordinary" claim - but it's only a slogan since the site is filling up with thousands of ebay-migrated items (that, let's face it, isn't selling on ebay). These items never expire, so like an enormous trash bin of unsellable, often over-priced, waste products, they just fill the site like some binary landfill. With no actual customer base of their own, at least outside of their own desperate sellers, they depend soley on Goggle traffic. Sorry, but I want buyers, not bored people looking for a place to chat all day.

What Etsy has are actual buyers - and they are not coming in from Google. Nothing wrong with Google traffic, but anyone can get Google traffic. It's free and only marginally effective - but all the alt sites offer it - and anyone with a webstore can get it too. It's the least-common-denominator of web traffic.

Like Ebay, Etsy generates it's own traffic. What this means to the online seller is that when you pay .20 for a 4 month listing, you are buying real traffic that you might not otherwise get in any other way. That's the kind added value sellers need - not just another website with freebie googler's.

It's no wonder that those selling non-homemade stuff want a piece of the action. Etsy had over 400 million visits in February and sold over 600,000 items - in February alone. Wannabes like Bonanzle had just 1% of that traffic - and won't even tell us their meager sales figures. That's the difference between hype and real business.

A lot of people say that Ebay's single biggest mistake was forgetting what made them successful to begin with - the small time auction seller. I'd suggest that Etsy learn by Ebay's mistakes. It's handmade items that have made you what you are - stay focused! You do not want to be "just another ebay alternative".