One of the most common questions we have been asked for this year is for sales strategies and marketplace advice. Over the last five years, there have been many new marketplaces launched. Each of these marketplaces appeal to different types of buyers and sellers. We are starting a new feature called the Marketplace Report by Handmade Seller. Our goal with this new feature is to share options on different types of marketplaces that are available. We want to provide supporting information on options available so that you can make the choice that is right for your business. We have this information provided in two formats- the interview below as well as a YouTube interview with a representative from the marketplace. Our interview below is a summary of the information covered in your interview. Our first interview is with My Community Handmade- we interviewed co-founder Edward Fisher JR.
Out interview below is a summary of the conversation you can find on our YouTube channel.
Here is the interview on our YouTube channel:
Can you share the origin story behind the marketplace?
I am a web developer and internet marketer from Wales, Massachusetts, a tiny little town. I’ve been helping small businesses with their marketing for the last five years.
My wife is actually a potter, so she’s been a professional potter for a long time, and she was selling on Etsy. So around the time that COVID happened, I learned a little bit about how handmade selling online works, and I found it kind of interesting, specifically the parts related to the transaction fees, the listing fees.Â
So as she was telling me about it, you know I thought I could probably build a website that does a lot of these same processes for no cost, really. You know we could really reduce the price and we could help out local businesses. So right around the time that COVID happened, I started working on the platform and we came up with some ground rules right away. So we knew that no matter what we did, we wanted no transaction fees, no shipping fees. We wanted a really bare bones fee structure. And that kind of is how we started the site. So eventually we launched in 2022. We worked really hard to sort of build up our initial customer base and that’s how we started.
What countries/locations/categories are eligible to be sold on your marketplace?
So we’re 100% focused on the handmade and vintage categories. All products on the site have to be designed by the person selling them. So we can’t have any products that are resold from a different company. We don’t allow any trademark infringement of any kind. So the products have to be completely unique to the person selling them.
And all products have to be made in the US. So we actually are limited to only the US, no seller from outside the US, no customers outside the US.
Are you focused on specific niches or is it a general marketplace?
Our biggest categories right now are mostly fine art, handmade jewelry, candles, and soap. We really allow pretty much all types of handmade products, but those are our best sellers.
The only restrictions we really have are on products that are like subscription boxes or anything where it’s not super clear what the user is getting. right So we want to make sure that it’s a tangible product that is physical, that we’ll go through the mail, or a digital product, or there’s a download.
We need to know that the user’s gotten the product and that it makes it clear if a return request is made, whether or not the product that was sold matches with what the customer purchased. But outside of that, we’re really happy to have any type of product listed on the site as long as it follows those rules.
Can you share more of how the marketplace worked when it first launched, and how it has been evolving?
Yeah, so when we started, we had a very complex product listing system. That was probably the number one complaint. I set up a sellers group for sellers to kind of tell me what they were having problems with the site. And pretty much the number one complaint was that there were way too many fields that they had to fill out.Â
Part of the reason for that is you can control the SEO on our sites. We have the metadata, we have tags, we have a ranking system that will tell you how well you’re doing with your SEO. We have analytics. And all of that data was shown in kind of a confusing way. So the number one change that’s anyone who’s worked with us over the last two years will notice is that now when you’re listing a product, we’ve cut those fields pretty much in half. Only a single description field. Instead of filling out individual shipping settings, you just put the weight of the product and you decide if you want free shipping or if you want calculated shipping at checkout. If you choose that calculated shipping at checkout, we have USPS ground advantage rates auto calculated for you. No more confusion anymore with figuring out your shipping.Â
So that’s the biggest change. Other than that, there’s the changes we made to the platform stylistically. you know We’ve improved the search quite a bit. It used to have kind of, um I don’t want to say an outdated design, but it’s come a long way. I’ll say that. A lot of improvements.
How do your fee structures work?
Yeah, so the fees are my favorite part. We offer a free tier with limited listings (5) and paid tiers with increased listing capacity ($5 per month for 50 listings, $10 per month for 100 listings). The platform doesn’t charge any fees besides Stripe payment processing, which goes to the payment processor, not My Community Made.Â
What do you do to attract both sellers and buyers to your marketplace?
How we find sellers is very straightforward. We are trying to grow through word of mouth. We wanna limit the amount we spend on ads for attracting new sellers. So we provide the best customer service we can. We try to increase the amount of sales that vendors are getting as much as we can. And we make it really easy for sellers to link their socials and sort of grow their reach through our platform. And we hope that through that other sellers will just naturally find us. Because hopefully people will be praising how much they love selling in My Community Made, and that will be our growth engine.
For finding buyers, some of the things that we do that’s a little unique compared to other platforms is we sync with Google Merchant, Facebook, Pinterest, as many different platforms as we can, and then we bulk advertise those products using our ad spend. So we will put some money behind products that are inside that product sync so that we can get new sellers coming into the platform. We also have a newsletter that we run every week that shows the new products that have been listed on the platform.
We are always posting about our vendors’ products on as many social platforms as we can. And part of our strategy too is we provide those SEO tools for our sellers, right? So we’re really trying to benefit from organic search traffic as well. So we talk to our sellers through the sellers group that we have. We let them know how to improve their SEO so they can increase their traffic through that.
From your perspective, what makes a good product listing for your site?
The number one thing is your images. High-resolution product images are essential for showcasing craftsmanship.Â
Clear and concise titles that are human-readable are important, with SEO keywords included in the metadata but not the title. You don’t need to throw every keyword into the title. It doesn’t benefit anyone, right?Â
What advice would you give artisans when looking at a marketplace to know if it might be right for them?
My thought process is to always look at the incentives of that marketplace. The fee structure will tell you a lot about how you can expect to be treated. With a high transaction volume and you know low cost to entry, that tells me that the platform is going to optimize towards transaction volume, right?
If you look at a marketplace that is geared towards a monthly cost from vendors rather than a transaction fee, well, that platform in order to survive has to have a low churn. So their job is really to support vendors, you know, to make sure that you don’t cancel your subscription, because at the end of the day, that’s how their business operates. So I like to think about, if I’m deciding to start a new handmade business, which platform would I choose, I’m going to be looking at the fee structure and sort of trying to figure out Which one is optimized for my growth rather than you know something that might hurt my type of business?
How do people get started on your site?
Applying is simple – visit our website, create an account with a valid US address. Then you just subscribe to whichever tier you’re interested in using, whether that be the free tier or the paid tier.Â
