Etsy.com - buy and sell handmade!

If you know me in person, you know that I've been looking for a way to turn my talents (or my secondhand SCA stuff) into cash. I tried both Windows LiveExpo and eBay, with minimal success. eBay is just too expensive, and LiveExpo, well, if this is the first time you've heard of it, I wouldn't be surprised.

Enter Etsy.com. I've just joined, and I am amazed at the talented artists who use it. Granted, like any free service, there are those who are uploading junk (like plastic earrings for $99?) in the hopes that some fool will buy it. But the great thing about Etsy is that if you want to sell your own handmade items, each listing only costs you 20 cents. For four months.

Here's a more detailed description from Etsy's help page:

When you list an item there is a $0.20 (US) fee per quantity of one. This covers an item listing period of four months. For example, if I list a scarf (and there's only 1 in stock) it'll cost 20 cents for 4 months. If I gave the listing a quantity of 3, it would cost 60 cents. When an item sells, there's a flat 3.5% fee on the final sale price. All fees are in US dollars. There are no other fees on Etsy. All listings are created equal, with 5 images included in the price.

If you browse the site, you'll see that all items are listed in reverse chronological order, newest first. Try it with the word 'medieval', and select "items:tags, titles, descriptions" from the dropdown search menu for the greatest haul. There are some mighty cool things on the first few pages, but you'll see as you page back, the ratio of junk to cool goes up pretty quick. That's because the good stuff sells fast.

It appears that there are a couple of SCA'ers on Etsy already, but I'd like to see more!! Check out The Gift of Garb, Procyonidae, or just take a look at my favorite items for some real quality goods. All handmade.