Over 40 million visitors per month
Etsy.com is an e-commerce site launched in 2005 as an online marketplace for hand crafted or vintage items, which has grown to include art in various mediums from photography to jewelry, food, toys, and even supplies for craft creation. Etsy is much like an online craft fair wherein sellers list their goods for a fee of $0.20 to list, and pay 3.5 percent of every sale. Retailers of all types should know about the site for competitive reasons, as well as a potential destination for their own goods, as consumers spent $525 million on the site in 2011 alone.
The site is popular for items that are unique and not mass-produced, with a strong niche for recycled and upcycled materials. The average sale is between $15 and $20, and most sellers are college educated women in their twenties and thirties. The community ranges from sellers who are hobbyists, to people opening an Etsy storefront as a side gig to people that are professional artists making a living from their sales.
Etsy has raised $91.7 million since they launched eight years ago, and their offices are headquartered in Brooklyn where they feature open craft nights in the “Etsy Labs” on Mondays for the community. The Etsy Labs not only houses Etsy employees but has a workspace that provides equipment and donated materials where members come together to make items, teach and attend workshops, along with other special events.
Etsy is well established
Many think Etsy is a new service, but it is a well established storefront that has a tight knit and very close community, as the company promotes sellers through their blog, special events, and social media, and continues to attempt to enrich the physical community as well as the virtual community.
Most fascinating is how much money flows through the site, especially at the average price point sitting below $20. Below is a slideshow about Etsy, rich in fascinating statistics:
