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Artisans Cooperative: An Etsy alternative, owned and run by artists and makers
(www.shareable.net)
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
149 points (98.1% liked)
Buy it for Life
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A place to share practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last, with an emphasis on upcycled and sustainable products!
Guidelines:
Things that are well-made and durable (even if they won't last a lifetime) are A-Okay!
Unlike that other BIFL place, Home-made and DIY items are encouraged here, as long as some form of instruction is included in the body of the post.
Videos links are not allowed as post titles, but you may use them in a text post.
A limited amount of self-promotion is accepted, IF the item you are selling aligns with this criteria:
- The item must be made with sustainable or recycled materials.
- If electronic in some way, the item must be open-source.
- The item must be user-serviceable (if applicable).
- You cannot be a large corporation.
- The post must be clearly marked with a [Self Promotion] tag in your title.
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They still have 9.5% commission(or this drops to 8.5% if you pay $1000 artisan fee!), compared to Etsy which works out to be around 11-12% on most of the items I sell.
It also doesn’t link with my inventory management software. Etsy does, eBay does, Woocommerce does, Facebook does. It also doesn’t integrate with my shipping software, so I need to manually generate labels.
The benefits seem very minimal for a lot of caveats. If you have 1 or 2 products then fine, but when you have 10’s or 100’s of products, the time to list these on a site that will have a lot less traffic is way too long. I have a 2% gain in my profit margin, but a tonne more hassle.
Looking into it; depending on how much time you contribute, you apparently would share in the profit of the store.
It also appears to be taking steps to prevent drop shippers from plaguing the platform like Etsy suffers from, and ensure everything is actually handmade. Personally I like what they're going for, but I'm not a seller.
The junk sold on Etsy completely killed that site for me. It's just shit from temu/wish now and very little is actually hand made.
It's an immature platform but with adoption it could be a viable alternative. Sure, it's a 2% increase in margin today with a lot of extra hassle so that's why it's probably going to attract more idealistic and smaller creators in the beginning to try and build a platform free of the Chinese dreck. In a year this could be great and we all know Etsy is not getting any better. So it's for people who have a certain vision for the future. It's much easier to follow trends than set them though, so I can see why it's not a great business proposition for established companies just looking to keep turning a profit.
Yeah but eventually it'll be sold and become Etsy. So whatever benefits it does have, it's temporary.
This has real "why should I shower I'm just gonna get dirty again" energy
If you don't mind me asking ... what inventory software do you use?
I use Nembol. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s cheap and does exactly what I need it to do.