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 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. The month’s interview interview is with mastress Tara of Artisans Cooperative
See below for answers to all the basics about Artisans Cooperative, and check out the interview on YouTube for even more gems and nuggets of wisdom as part of our interview.
Here is the interview on our YouTube channel:
Can you share the origin story behind the marketplace?
Artisans Cooperative is a member owned, member operated marketplace for handmade goods. We’ve been incorporated for just about a year and a half.
Do you remember the Etsy strike of 2022? At that time, Etsy announced record earnings of $161 million dollars in net profits. And then they immediately turned around and charged a 30% increase to sellers fees. And that really blatantly kind of exposed the scale of exploitation at Etsy. And in many ways, it also drew attention to the level of exploitation on a lot of the marketplaces that are available through Big Tech.
At that time, 30,000 artisan businesses actually unified to take collective action and go on strike, closing their shops for a day over at Etsy.
Personally, we weren’t selling online at the time because the problems at Etsy seemed to apply everywhere. There wasn’t really anywhere we felt safe to essentially partner with to run our business that wasn’t going to turn around and exploit us or at a cost that affected our business’s bottom line.
So we went looking for others who were ready to take things a step further and try to harness the potential that $161 million dollars could have done for artisans and their businesses if it had been distributed or equitably amongst them.
So we started to organize a creation of a cooperative marketplace where both sellers and shoppers collectively own the business, where we control it democratically together.
What countries/locations/categories are eligible to be sold on your marketplace?
For our first year of the beta test, we have had our cooperative members selling on the platform. This has provided us the ability to go slow and work through the processes required to operate a marketplace.Â
In terms of the products,all goods that qualify is handmade can be sold. We have a human verification process for the creative practice. So, artisans who sell on our platform can sell handmade goods that are physical or digital. And as long as they can be legally sold, shipped or downloaded in the United States or Canada, they’re eligible to be sold on our cooperative marketplace. Our membership actually extends further than the marketplace can sell to at this time. We actually have members in 16 additional countries besides the USA and Canada.
But right now we only are able to sell and ship products to United States and Canada while we kind of work our way through the very many tax jurisdictions that our membership represents so that we can start selling to their local markets as well.
Are you focused on specific niches or is it a general marketplace?
We are really a general marketplace, with the ability to sell many different products.
If you don’t see your niche on our marketplace, then you should become a member because we want to build that out with you!
What matters to us is that in the process of this product being created, there is a chance that the artisan could have ruined it because that’s how intimately the artisan and the product are in relationship.
Can you share more of how the marketplace worked when it first launched, and how it has been evolving?
With this working as a cooperative project, its cadence is a little different, and we have been trying to be thoughtful each step of the way.Â
We’re really in an exciting phase actually of the beta test with our initial cohort of sellers. You know, it takes a long time to hand make art and really creating the marketplace of our dreams is really no different. It’s a big project and we’re still in the early stages of it. Our first year together really focused on our relationships. So we were developing our Discord community, and communicating our progress through our blog, and moving through the formation of our actual business. We have a pretty robust server now and a blog and are beginning to really deepen the relationship building capacities of our newsletters and our member emails.
In 2023, we pulled together the equity of our founding members. And after less than six months of being incorporated, we launched a members only phase of beta testing. And that’s the phase that we’re in right now. And we have been since last October. So we’re just over a year into it. At this point, we’re able to offer 4,000 products from about 20 categories and about 5% of those products, the artisans have chosen to put on sale at any given time.
Our interfaces for listing products and shipping and managing orders is not flashy yet. It’s very functional and kind of bare bones. Our features are really foundational.
And the experience of our sellers in that environment is already informing the design for the future evolutions of the marketplace. But at the moment, we’re really excited to be moving towards opening the marketplace to public sellers.
And so as part of that, we have a couple of hundred people on a wait list who chose not to join us as a member, but who were interested in selling on our marketplace. And we’ve just started sending out invitations to that wait list to invite non-members onto our platform to open up shop and to help us prepare to invite the general public to sell in the marketplace.
Another aspect that makes our marketplace different is that artisans can have more than one shop. Many artisans work in multiple disciplines. This makes it easier for them to have shops that follow each of their disciplines instead of having to put them all together.
How do your fee structures work?
What we have is a one-time membership buy-in that you can pay over time, and then we have non-cash equity options. um We split the cost of payment processing fees with everyone who sells in our marketplace so that when it comes to the real cost of doing small business, we’re in deep and material solidarity with our sellers. So we make sure it really pays to be a member. Anyone can get started with $10 just to join to start.
Artisan members pay a flat 8% commission fee, and they can receive profit dividends after $1,000 or hours of contributions to the co-op. And our supporters very generously pay a 9.5 commission fee when they choose to sell items, and they can receive profit dividends after $100 or hours of contributions to the co-op. And contributions could mean you sold products that counts towards your membership buy-in. It could be bought products that counts towards your membership buy-in. There are many options for this.
What do you do to attract both sellers and buyers to your marketplace?
One thing that is a little unique about our platform for buyers is our ability to find unique truly one-of-a-kind artisans and discover artisans whose maybe work you hadn’t seen before or wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. We do this through our one of a kind filtering options.
And we’re the only place that I know of that’s offering ownership of the place where you go shopping, influence over like what businesses and handmade goods are available, where you go shopping, and to have a say in what the shopping experience is is like, and the quality of life that surrounds the workmanship of the handmade creations that you’re purchasing.
For us, building our supporters into our membership structure as owners was really a core strategy to us to build meaningful buying and selling relationships between our buyers and our sellers long-term and to give us a collection of members to really inform what it is that shoppers are looking for so that we constantly are able to build out what we can offer to shoppers.
From your perspective, what makes a good product listing for your site?
Well, I would say any listing anywhere on the internet nowadays, you need high quality photographs with good lighting. That’s just standard and our marketplace is no different than that. Another thing is to talk about what makes your product unique. What kind of materials are you using to create it? How many of them do you make?
So listings that really talk about the craftsmanship and the materials and the creative processes behind the products really help give our shoppers an opportunity to look for whatever is important to them. If they’re looking for a certain material, if they’re excited about a certain kind of design. Being able to have that information available can really make it easier for those sellers to find you.
What advice would you give artisans when looking at a marketplace to know if it might be right for them?
I would say the best marketplace for any artisan is the one that’s going to compliment your lifestyle and the creative process that your business is built on. Because ultimately if you can’t sustain the process of creating the products, then it doesn’t matter how successful the marketplace as a thing is, it will not necessarily like serve your business long-term.
If a platform is too expensive or too complicated or is wanting you to be more competitive than you want or it’s too stressful for you to be able to even make art, then even the sales is gonna return you become less sustainable over time. You should make sure that the money you spend to sell is a reinvestment in your business outcome. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that when you are the business, it has to serve you as a worker, as a person living and feeding themselves, and as a creator as well.
We don’t want any artist to end up with like a very expensive hobby that can rob our art of its life. So we advise you to put eggs in the baskets that seem to work for you, really prioritize like your creative process and your livelihood. And we also advise you to put one of your eggs in the Artisan Co-op because, you know, that’s a place where over time as you figure out what does serve you, you can make a handmade marketplace that’s going to meet your needs long term.
How do people get started on your site?
Head on over to our website to apply (link below). You’ll see several options there to learn more about selling on our site and how to apply.
