Handmade At Amazon Puts Etsy On Notice

The Seattle online giant today is launching a new section of the site, called Handmade, aimed squarely at Etsy.

An Amazon statement stipulates that all listed products “must be made by hand”. Over 80,000 handcrafted items from around the world are available on the store, and over 30% of these can be personalised by artisans, it added.

Amazon said in the press release that every page in Handmade at Amazon will contain a location icon that will identify where the artisan is from and a link to the artisan’s profile.

The move heats up competition for e-commerce site Etsy, the 10-year-old marketplace for homemade goods that went public in April and has 1.5 million sellers and 21.7 million buyers.

Etsy did the work in demonstrating to the world that carefully constructed handmade goods have wide appeal, and now Amazon appears to be poised to beat them at their own game. The experience of shopping at the marketplace is similar to shopping regularly on Amazon, which makes it very approachable. Handmade gives users a platform to buy unique, tailor-made and specially hand crafted items from around the world.

Amazon has been courting Etsy sellers since May, when it invited them to sign up for Handmade.

Thanks in large part to Etsy, there’s now a sizable demand for handmade products sold over the Internet.

The launch could be a hard hit for Etsy, which created an online market for handmade items a decade ago.

“This is a great opportunity to maybe reach new customers”, said Ms. Owens of Placerville, Calif., who is calling her Handmade store Owens Acres.

Over 600 handmade products will be eligible for shipping under Amazon’s Prime shipping service. Amazon says the higher fee covers all costs, including payment processing and fraud protection.

We’ve known Amazon had an Etsy competitor in the pipeline for a while, and now it has launched the service. The new site will put them in direct competition with Etsy, who was criticized in 2014 when they changed their policy to allow vendors to use third-party manufacturers.