Amazon Muscles Into Etsy Territory With ‘Handmade’ Marketplace

In recent years, Etsy hasn't just become a popular marketplace for people to sell their homemade goods; it's become the leader. While anyone could use other marketplaces, such as eBay, to pawn their wares, they don't feel quite as personable, and are certainly not as well designed around such a space. So it's interesting to learn that Etsy has existed for ten years, but only in recent years has become so de facto.

This is something that it seems Amazon has finally caught onto. In its latest announcement, it's debuting Homemade at Amazon, a new marketplace that will let consumers browse handmade items from sellers in over 60 countries. That's some impressive reach, and likewise, Amazon offers some impressive filtering to make sure you can whittle the selection down to things that perfectly suit your taste.

Amazon Handmade - Just in time for Halloween

At the homepage, you're able to quickly check out a few common categories like jewelry, artwork, home decor, dining, and even furniture. If you want to support artisans from a specific location, you're able to do that. At the current time, nearly 9,000 items are available from California, 4,300 from Texas, and 2,000 from New Jersey. Worldwide, the selections are still quite impressive: over 200 items are available from the Netherlands, 300 from Slovenia, 200 from Turkey, and some 4,000 from the exotic country of Canada.

One thing to bear in mind is that since Amazon itself is not selling these products, Prime shipping is not available for the majority of what's being purchased. There are some exceptions, though, as the company says 600 products are currently Prime eligible, and that more are being added every day.

What's not clear at this point is how someone new can join this marketplace; the press release makes no mention of it, and the site itself doesn't seem to have any additional information. If you're an artisan that would like to be featured, contacting customer service might be your best bet.

It's also worth noting that despite the fact that so many countries are involved in selling product on this service, it's only available in the US at the moment. Neither the Canadian or UK versions of Amazon have a handmade section, which is a little unfortunate. Hopefully it will not take too long for this roll out to become global.