Etsy is one of the most popular eCommerce store builders among shoppers and sellers regarding custom, handmade, or vintage items. Over 5.3 million sellers were registered in the third quarter of 2022 alone!
However, after the recent change in the rulebook and the stringent policies via extra hefty fees, people started searching for more favorable business environments. So whether you want to tap into a local or global marketplace or build your own virtual store, here are the ten great alternatives to Etsy.
Amazon Handmade: Best Artisan-Only Platform
| Marketplace Name: | Amazon Handmade |
| Official Website: | amazon.com/handmade |
| Established: | 1994 |
| Number of Stores: | 88,822 |
| Complexity: | Complex |
| Free plan: | Yes |
| Paid plan: | From $29/mo |
Amazon Handmade – is a free platform to join and list your products. It features a more artisan seller community with an immense audience of shoppers since it firmly preserves its strict “handmade” philosophy. Amazon Handmade may not be better than Etsy, but it is definitely a worthy alternative.
Features
Amazon Handmade promises a massive potential reach since all products on the platform get integrated into the larger Amazon eCommerce platform, thus bringing the seller in front of a large global audience – larger than most others.
With its 12 product categories with accurate details to fit particular handmade products, Amazon Handmade features a more organized interface and workflow than Etsy. Furthermore, the platform offers shipping via Fulfillment by Amazon, listing with unmetered shelf life, Amazon-sponsored promotions, and pretty robust web analytics to track your store performance and boost your marketing strategy.
Design
After getting approval for Amazon Brand Registry, you can manage your brand story for your customers. Amazon offers two features – A+ Content and Stores, which both can help you set up a beautiful experience on this platform. A+ Content enhances the product detail page significantly since it allows adding texts (detailed product descriptions), comparison tables, banners with products in use to set up a consistent brand experience, high-resolution images, and fields for better SEO visibility, etc.
Amazon Handmade templates include adjustable tiles for texts, photos, videos, comparison tables, and any other content you wish to design your store with. The company introduces tens of elegant and sleek templates, each perfectly representing Amazon’s high style.
Pricing
The primary plans to understand the pricing systems are Individual and Professional. The first costs $0.99 per transaction or 15% of every sale, covering all shipping and customization fees. This plan is intended for those who sell not more than 40 units a month without advanced selling tools or ads. The Professional plan costs a fixed $39.99/mo and lets you sell above 40 products a month.
indieCart – Best Alternative on Budget
| Marketplace Name: | indieCart |
| Official Website: | indiecart.com |
| Established: | 2008 |
| Number of Stores: | - |
| Complexity: | Medium |
| Free plan: | - |
| Paid plan: | From $7.5/mo |
indieCart is represented as a community of independent shops that offer handcrafted items for homes and people. This is not a young player in the market and yet has not achieved much popularity. Primarily known as Hyena Cart, it became a handcraft-only platform and was renamed indieCart.
Features
Although indieCart can’t boast millions of active users like Etsy, it offers several features that make it a worthwhile alternative to consider. For instance, indieCart allows:
- choosing the sale type (such options are available as auctions, reserving with a deposit, regular sales, etc.);
- picking the currency to sell internationally (all major currencies like USD, GBP, and EUR are also included);
- blacklisting shoppers if you detect any suspicious activity from their side;
- integrating your indieCart store with your Facebook account to advertise products on both platforms simultaneously;
- scheduling products to be in stock at a definite date for customers to check the product availability and return later.
Design
indieCart provides complete control over the look and feel of the online store you build. You can customize it with CSS or HTML if you are tech-savvy. indieCart introduces plenty of built-in templates, all of which can be customized with fonts, images, videos, text, etc.
In your indieCart store, you can determine in what sequence the products must be demonstrated.
Additionally, the company suggests placing the indieCart widget on any website or blog you own to promote your store. Throughout the whole store setting process, you can follow the instructions on the pop-up page if everything here is new to you.
Pricing
indieCart payment system is monthly rather than based on price per listing. It costs $7.50 per month and allows the in-stock store to be visible for another two months (yet with no chance to add or edit items) in case the monthly payment lapses.
Aftcra – Best Sales Platform for American-Only Artisans
| Marketplace Name: | Aftcra |
| Official Website: | aftcra.com |
| Established: | 2010 |
| Number of Stores: | - |
| Complexity: | Complex |
| Free plan: | Yes |
| Paid plan: | 7% fee |
Aftcra is dedicated exclusively to American artisans since all the products on the platform must fairly bear the tag “Made in America.” This limited marketplace allows selling and buying goods only by Americans. However, unlike Etsy, you can’t sell vintage goods here, nor can you resell products.
Features
Aftcra maintains the strict standard of selling American-made items to sustain a boutique approach, thus, cutting down on the clutter typically seen in competitors’ stores. With this platform, you get a community feel.
Aftcra allows linking your online store with Google Analytics to monitor web traffic and social media pages to boost the store’s popularity. The company doesn’t limit the number of products displayed in the store, which will be active for six months only. After the expiry date, the user can relist the goods for another six months completely for free.
And if you are moving your store from Etsy to Aftcra, you will be pleased to find out you can do it in bulk through the Etsy Importer tool. This will save you a lot of time.
Design
Aftcra stores look neat and elegant. However, except for the profile and banner images, there’s nothing to decorate your store with. Meaning there are no templates to choose from.
Before designing your Aftcra store, you must register as a seller. It’s also requested to state your store details, such as the URL, PayPal email address, and Google Analytics Account.
Whether you will use your own photo or your brand’s logo as your profile image is up to you. Also, set up a store banner and write a motivating description. After you have uploaded your products, you can give them titles and detailed descriptions.
Pricing
Aftcra enables sellers to create a branded shop and list products at no cost. All the products listed will be visible for customers for six months (compared to Etsy’s four-month policy) and can be re-added again for free after the expiry date. There are no monthly fees or pricing plans. Instead, you should pay 7% of the total sale price, not counting the financial transaction fees from PayPal.
Handmade Artists’ Shop – Best Community of Artisans
| Marketplace Name: | Handmade Artists' Shop |
| Official Website: | handmadeartists.com |
| Established: | 2012 |
| Number of Stores: | - |
| Complexity: | Medium |
| Free plan: | - |
| Paid plan: | From $5/mo |
What started as a forum for artists and crafters grew into a small but fully functioning platform where you can sell items and products you made with your hands. Handmade Artists’ Shop still preserves its tight-knit community where you can get support and recommendations from like-minded artisans.
Features
Handmade Artists’ Shop features a long list of categories to classify your goods into, including bags and purses, candles, jewelry, pottery and ceramics, outdoor, woodworking, etc.
Handmade Artists’ Shop doesn’t limit how many wares you can sell per month and doesn’t charge for sales, making it ideal for those with large inventories to sell.
As for Handmade Artists’ Shop features, the platform:
- allows adding items automatically to Google Product Search;
- enables setting your own shipping, shop, and profile conditions that reflect your brand style;
- enables users to integrate coupons to have a shop-wide sale;
- allows set shipping profiles to give shipping discounts for numerous items and set prices for shipping worldwide;
- lets you post your Facebook, blog, and Twitter links on the shop page.
Design
Handmade Artists’ Shop allows setting up an online store page that perfectly represents the brand’s style. You can separate your items into different shop sections and name them to sort your wares. It allows you to design your storefront the way you wish while customers will find the necessary item much easier.
Pricing
The pricing system of Handmade Artists’ Shop is as simple as it gets. As a seller, you have only two options – to pick up the monthly plan and pay $5/mo or choose an annual subscription and pay $50 in advance, thus saving $10. The payments will proceed through PayPal, and no hidden fees will bother you. Nor will the company deduct any commissions on sales.
Cratejoy – Best Marketplace for Subscription Boxes
| Marketplace Name: | Cratejoy |
| Official Website: | cratejoy.com |
| Established: | 2013 |
| Number of Stores: | 1,500+ |
| Complexity: | Medium |
| Free plan: | Yes |
| Paid plan: | 1.25% + $0.10 per fee |
Cratejoy is a virtual marketplace for subscription box creators, whether those are health and wellness boxes or meal subscription ones. It’s the world’s first and only Marketplace fully committed to subscription boxes!
The company also cooperates with various food providers to deliver such products as desserts, bread, and meats to their customers.
Features
Cratejoy features plenty of product lines, which are not all handmade. With such features as an all-in-one dashboard, subscription box CRM, robust analytics tools, integrated subscription payment gateways, shipping, referral campaigns, customizable coupons, and impressive eCommerce features, Cratejoy can be a perfect Etsy alternative for any business, whether a startup or a multimillion-dollar one.
Cratejoy also features a number of built-in marketing options to provide its vendors with a flying start. The available tools involve referral programs, social media integration, email marketing, recurring discounts, etc. Additionally, the impressive subscriber management feature will significantly facilitate managing your customers’ subscriptions, their support issues and questions.
Design
Cratejoy is a fabulous marketplace designed professionally and with a unique, elegant style. By signing up at Cratejoy, you get a centralized dashboard that makes running your store page easy, managing logistics and fulfilment for your boxes, gaining insights on how your store page performs and collecting your payments.
There’s a rich library of commerce-customizable templates to pick up from. Get complete control over the look and feel of your storefront with CSS and HTML coding.
Pricing
The basic membership of Cratejoy is entirely free. You only pay a commission when you make a sale. The system deducts 1.25% plus $0.10 transaction fees from every sale you make.
Folksy – Best Handcrafted Goods Marketplace for UK Artisans
| Marketplace Name: | Folksy |
| Official Website: | folksy.com |
| Established: | 2008 |
| Number of Stores: | - |
| Complexity: | Complex |
| Free plan: | Yes |
| Paid plan: | From £0.15 per item |
Established in 2008, Folksy is a UK-based platform for selling crafts only – no reselling or selling of vintage goods is possible! The company welcomes UK artisans only and has gathered a good following recently. It has around 250K visitors a month.
Features
Folksy is a worthy Etsy alternative with an immense loyal community and an array of useful tools. It features an easy set-up with no advanced coding knowledge required. Like in the case with Aftcra, Folksy allows importing your products listed on Etsy.
Folksy provides robust and, at the same time, simple-to-use shop analytics to track your store views and see particularly which products perform better than others. All these analytics can be viewed and managed from your dashboard.
Folksy has a fully-functioning app, Sell on Folksy that allows listing and managing items in the shop straight from the phone.
Design
Folksy suggests building an online store with your handcrafted wares that will look as professional and attractive as you plan it to be. You can personalize your storefront with your brand banner or pick up an appropriate template from the suggested options. All listings are automatically SEO-optimized.
Pricing
Whenever you make a sale on Folksy, you get the money immediately on your Stripe or PayPal account. The company offers two plans – Basic and Plus. The former is appropriate for those with only a few item listings; the first three items are free to list. After this, you are charged £0.15 plus VAT per every product sold.
Meanwhile, the second plan is intended for high stock volumes. It allows unlimited listings and costs £5 per month.
GoImagine – US-Based Platform with a Charity Mission-Based Business Model
| Marketplace Name: | GoImagine |
| Official Website: | goimagine.com |
| Established: | 2020 |
| Number of Stores: | - |
| Complexity: | Medium |
| Free plan: | - |
| Paid plan: | From $2.5/mo |
GoImagine was founded in 2020 and is one of the best alternatives to Etsy. It’s perhaps the only marketplace of handmade items that donates 100% of its profits to charity. However, Golmagine is available only for US residents – all handmade products must be sold in the States.
Features
GoImagine introduces a Maker Circle app – a social network that connects makers and artists throughout the US and enables them to learn, grow, collaborate, and socialize in a welcoming space. Both Android and iOS versions of the app are available.
Depending on the chosen plan, GoImagine offers various tools. The overall functionality of the platform involves up to 1,000 products in the catalogue, Etsy import capability, which is fantastic if you already have a store on Etsy yet want to move it to another platform, State sales tax remittance, free SSL certificate, as well as a possibility to establish a branded eCommerce website and integrate a custom domain.
Design
GoImagine provides an expansive room for website customization. You can add your brand’s logo either as a banner or a small piece, complete the About Me section with sincere and heart-warming information about how passionate you are to create beauty with your own hands and help GoImagine to increase its charity fund and add links to your social media accounts (indeed, if those are crafting or business-related).
Pricing
GoImagine functionality is introduced through three plans – Starter, Growth, and All Star- priced at $2.5, $5, and $10 per month. The introductory Starter plan allows advertising only up to 25 products in your catalog and requires a 5% transaction fee for every sale.
The Growth plan allows listing up to 100 products and deducts only a 4.5% transaction fee from every sale. And the All Star plan is the most richly-packed one and allows listing up to 1,000 products in your catalog while the transaction fee is 3.5%.
Bonanza – Great Marketplace and Online Store Builder
| Marketplace Name: | Bonanza |
| Official Website: | bonanza.com |
| Established: | 2008 |
| Number of Stores: | ~50,000 |
| Complexity: | Complex |
| Free plan: | Yes |
| Paid plan: | From 3.5% per fee |
Bonanza differs from all other reviewed platforms in that it can serve both as a marketplace and an online webstore builder. The overall array of features and functionality is much like that of Etsy. And yet, it has a more significant emphasis on unique products. This online resell marketplace sees roughly four million visitors in one month – a great reason to choose this alternative.
Features
Since Bonanza is both a marketplace and a standalone eCommerce solution, its users are provided with a broad array of features to expand their brand and get more sales.
Selling your handmade products on Bonanza, you can classify them into diverse categories, from Glass 7 Mosaics to Leatehrcrafts, from Scrapbooking & Paper Crafts to Beads & Jewelry Making, and everything in between.
Bonanza collaborates with Google Shopping, and, as a result, its users have their products ahead of the competition. Furthermore, the company has such a useful tool as Product Sync. The latter automatically keeps the wares on display in sync with other places the user may sell them. And this is provided with no extra cost or effort on the user’s end.
Design
Bonanza enables its users to set up and run fantastic online stores with no bells and whistles. And this is primarily done through customizable themes. All the themes demonstrated are mobile responsive and provide easy customization.
All Bonanza stores and marketplace pages are fully mobile responsive. When you build a site on this platform, all components are automatically snapped into respective places with no need to set up a mobile store separately or use coding to customize the store for mobile access.
Pricing
Bonanza suggests starting selling your handmade products completely for free. Compared to other markets, it also features much smaller base fees – only 3.5%, not counting the extra fee for advertising your wares through Google Shopping ads (optional). Unlike Etsy, users don’t have to pay to list their stuff for sale here.
Madeit – Australia-Based Handmade Marketplace
| Marketplace Name: | Madeit |
| Official Website: | madeit.com |
| Established: | 2009 |
| Number of Stores: | - |
| Complexity: | Medium |
| Free plan: | - |
| Paid plan: | From $6,33/mo |
The online Australia-based platform for selling handmade goods, Madeit was launched in 2009. This great Etsy alternative is designed for only those artisans who live in Australia. It has registered around 80,000 unique visitors per month, which signifies its slowly but steadily growing popularity.
Features
Australia’s largest handmade marketplace is also a community of local craftspeople, artists, and simply lovers of Australian handmade. The default payment partner of Madeit is Stripe which ensures a smooth and consistent checkout experience. However, you can set payment gateways for your customers as Apple Pay, AfterPay, Google Wallet, and all major credit cards.
Madeit allows listing your wares in multiple categories, so customers find them easily. You can integrate a policy of gift credits, offer coupons and organize store sales, upload your Madeit store product line into your Facebook shop, etc.
Design
Building a page on Madeit differs little from other marketplaces. There aren’t any templates to base your store page on. Instead, you can upload your brand’s logo or your own photo and create a banner. Also, provide exhaustive information in the About Me sections and compose your product listing.
Pricing
Annual plans are the Micro Biz priced at $80/year (equal to $6.33/mo), Small Biz at the price of $176/year (equal to $13.83/mo), and Professional at the cost of $505/year (equivalent to $40/mo). With annual plans, you can save 20% on the price!
Meanwhile, Quarterly plans are Hobby, at the cost of $17/qrt (equal to $5.33/mo), Micro Biz at $25/qrt (equal to $8/mo), Small Biz at $55/qrt (equal to $17.33/mo), and Professional at $158/qrt (equal to $50/mo).
Shopify – Best Overall eCommerce Solution for a Standalone Virtual Store
| Marketplace Name: | Shopify |
| Official Website: | shopify.com |
| Established: | 2004 |
| Number of Stores: | 1,597,099 |
| Complexity: | Medium |
| Free plan: | No, free 14-day trial |
| Paid plan: | From $9/mo |
Shopify is a perfect Etsy alternative to scale and grow your virtual store. The platform is compatible with plenty of third-party apps and features a vast array of in-built eCommerce tools to help sellers. In fact, Shopify provides the quickest and simplest way of setting up an online store, filling it with inventory, tracking orders and customer requests, and managing the rest.
Features
Shopify comes packed with unique features that help it get ranked as one of the most effective eCommerce platforms in today’s market. Particularly, expect such out-of-the-box tools as abandoned cart recovery, automated shipping calculation, POS (land-based store owners will appreciate this tool highly), customer profiles to be constantly aware of who your customers are, discount codes to organize sales and discounts (“Bulk discounts” tool is also suggested), social media integration to increase your brand awareness, dropshipping solutions, etc.
If all these built-in features don’t suffice your requirements, Shopify can also offer you an extensive app store. Here you will face over 2,000 plugins and apps classified into different categories, such as social media, accounting, site optimization, etc. Choose from free and paid options and add new functionality to your online store.
Design
Shopify suggests building your eCommerce site with 114 templates, most of which are yet paid. The company boasts elegant and professional-looking themes that inspire shoppers with confidence in the store’s quality. All templates are fully customizable and come with broad functionality such as header slideshows, slide-out carts, dynamic product grids, sticky headers, a quick review tool, etc.
Pricing
Shopify offers three pricing plans – Basic, priced at $29/mo; Shopify, priced at $79/mo; and Advanced, at $299/mo, provided that you choose the annual version of the plan. Surely, Shopify costs much more than Etsy or any other marketplace. On the other hand, the suggested eCommerce features and great customization options are incomparable, either.
Final Words
Shopify is the best alternative to Etsy; yet, here, you get your own online store rather than a page in a marketplace. If you have nothing against driving your traffic instead of selling on an established marketplace with a vast customer base, you should definitely go for Shopify.
However, beginners may wish to start with a marketplace where they will easily attract customers. In such a case, Amazon Handmade is the best Etsy alternative. Surely, all other described platforms are robust and reliable, too. And yet, some of them have a restricted market, and none gets nearly as much traffic as Amazon!
