A New Selling Venue - 1000Markets

I've sold on a few different online venues in the past few years, but so far Etsy has outlasted them all.

There are other outlets though and so I thought I'd try a fairly recent one that looks super polished.

1000Markets is new but so far it looks great. It is for independent artisans to share and sell their work. I just set up my shop today and here are my first observations.

PROS

I love the listing process for each item. It's all on one page and completely intuitive. Adding photos is simple - and you can add four pictures at a time or one - as opposed to uploading one file at a time. They even provide a cropping tool within the listing page!

The look is much more sophisticated, in my humble opinion, than Etsy. The front page looks more fashionable and less cluttered. Etsy sometimes has *too* many choices, as fun as they are. I really like clean and simple designs.

Each shop comes with a blog. A very unique feature, though I don't know that it'll get much use from me, since I already write three blogs.

Your shop must be approved. I love this. While Etsy is wonderful and anyone and their dog can sign up to sell, sometimes those with really great talent get a little lost in the quantity of sellers. 1000Markets has some standards that you must meet before your shop will go live.

Free to join and start a shop.

Customers must pay before the order is complete. This is one huge complaint at Etsy. A customer can complete their order on Etsy, but that doesn't mean they are done - they have to complete one more step in order to submit payment. 1000Markets seems to have learned from this huge issue.

I really like the "Marketplaces" ... these seem to be user generated and organized. I was asked to join two marketplaces within five minutes of my shop going live, and there are dozens of different marketplaces. You can also ask to join a marketplace, though they all have different rules for membership.

Potential pro, but in my head a con right now, they use Amazon.com for payment. This actually may be a good thing as so many people have accounts as shoppers with Amazon.


CONS

It's pretty new and looks like it's still in a start up phase. I have no idea how sales have been for other shops.

Their fees are higher than Etsy - 5.5% for each item sold plus $0.50. But that is it - there are no hidden fees (according to their fee policy).

They don't use Paypal. All payments go through Amazon. Again, this seems like a con to me right now, but that could be because I'm just used to Paypal. It could be a huge pro. We'll see.

Browsing can be a bit confusing as there are no item categories. It is organized by "Market" or by Shop. There are 168 pages (right now) of shops so there is a lot to see.

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So far that's what I see. Have you joined yet? Do you plan to? Have you had any experience with them yet? I like that there is another option for selling and buying and it looks like a great new option.