Do you knit, sew or practice some other form of craftsmanship? Wish you could sell your creations but don't want to go to the trouble of opening your own Web store or suffer with eBay auctions? Sell them on Etsy.com, a thriving marketplace for handmade items of all sorts, including clothing, jewelry and other personal items, home décor and house wares.

Etsy is a website which focuses primarily on providing the general public with a way to buy and sell handmade items. It makes money by charging a listing fee of 20 cents for each item and getting 3.5 percent of every sale, with the average around $15 USD or $20 USD and mostly sold by women.

Over 100,000 sellers from around the world have set up shops since the website opened in 2005, with approximately 650,000 registered users, 60,000 of whom are individual artists selling more than 950,000 of their handmade creations.

What's all about?

It is a P2P (Peer to Peer) ecommerce company (like eBay), an online marketplace for buying and selling all things handmade: clothing, music, furniture, software, jewelry, robots, you name it. There are lots of creative ideas to make your gift very personal and you can also contact people if you like their style, to see if they'll work with you to create something new and many sellers will take custom orders.

There are many advantages by selling here compared to eBay, namely:

• Compete with handmade products only
• You can upload 5 photos for each listing for free
• Easily customize your shop including banner, profile and feedback
• Payments through PayPal
• No confusing auction. Set and adjust your prices at your discretion
• Etsy submits your store to Google.

How to Start?

To register, you only need a valid email address, a unique username and a password. If you want to be a seller, it's also required that you have a valid credit card.

There are several different ways to shop: by category (crochet, ceramics, woodworking), by color, or visit a particular shop, which will be listed in the directory by the seller's username.

If you love to make things, then this site is a great place for you to make money online. It's where plenty of creative folks do business. And, from what satisfied users say, it's a really great place to buy and sell handmade stuff.

Check out some nifty articles fellow Hubbers have written about this cool website:

• My favorite Etsy Shops
• Making Money With Your Crafts
• Where to buy cool, really creative invitations
• Buy Handmade for Christmas -- Online!

Resources

Etsy as an online community, has available a series of resources for their members to interact. Blog, Forum, Chat Rooms, and specially the following:

The Storque

The Storque is Etsy's online magazine. It provides information and announcements for buyers and sellers about the site and the handmade lifestyle. Articles are written by staff and members of the community. It's updated several times daily with new content and readers can also leave comments on articles.

the Virtual Labs

The Virtual Labs are special multimedia chat rooms. Etsy staff and members can use the Virtual Labs to hold interactive workshops, like seminars on marketing or real-time shop critiques.