Etsy is the website, which provides a marketplace for crafters, artists and collectors to sell their handmade creations. These items involve art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, bath & beauty products, quilts, nick-knacks and toys. Etsy collects unique people showing their creativity in design and craftsmenship. There are over 2,000,000 items for sale by 200,000 sellers from around the world.
I consider that the website is unique in their field.
Etsy is a marketplace, but it’s also a community made up of many different individuals with many different lives and points of view. I found this website very interesting in terms of information richness, ease of use, wide choice of products and comprehensive facilities of self-expression for each seller.
I consider that Etsy is not just a website for people who wants to sell their creative commodities, but also an interconnected and diverse artistic community.
Etsy offers their members lots of possibilities promoting, marketing and sharing skills and inspiration. Each person can create their own virtual lab space, join a forum, chat with other users or join the teams, which are groups of organized Etsy members who network, share skills, and promote their shops and Etsy together. Teams are Etsy’s biggest and most creative grassroots engine for support, networking and marketing – for each team member’s shop, for the Teams themselves, and for Etsy as a whole.
The website is quite easy-to-use. On the home page you can find the alphabetized category list which is an easy way to navigate the more than 100,000 sellers on the site. Under the listed categories there are the Explore tools, which offer shoppers fun and creative browsing options.
For shoppers looking for pieces that inject some originality into their wardrobe or home decor Esty.com is a perfect destionation to search out the desired item.
The site offers their shoppers to find items by their preferred colour, search the hottest items that have just sold and are still available from the same shop, sorts by items that have just been listed or are about to expire, and searches by shops in your area. For individual artists, it enables them to expand beyond the local craft fair and network with other, like-minded sellers. For buyers, it’s an easy way to purchase beautiful items. And for Etsy investors, it’s a user-generated business that still projects a green, anti-corporate image.
The matter of fact that the website is based on 2.0 platform is that the population of the site is growing every day and now it’s not just a point of sale, but also an extensive community. As we know, the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. These characteristics are a recipe for success for the big internet potal, as Etsy.
In my opinion, the website is very useful and I would definitely recommend it for the creative individuals, who want to sell their products, for the shoppers, who want to buy some creative and extraordinary items and also as an informative portal of creativity and art.
