Amazon Handmade takes on Etsy with homemade crafts marketplace

Joining Handmade as a seller if invite-based, and partners started being invited back in May to gain access to Amazon’s more than 285 million shoppers.

The platform, dubbed “Handmade at Amazon”, is a new store that features “genuinely handmade items” that are crafted and “sold directly from artisans”. To qualify, all products must be factory-free and made by hand.

What’s more, over 30% of these items can be personalised by the sellers so customers can enjoy bespoke creations. In September, Etsy said it was creating a new Etsy manufacturing marketplace to make it easier for its sellers to find “responsible production assistance”.

CEO Chad Dickerson rejected the notion that Amazon’s new product posed a threat, telling Reuters that Etsy’s sellers want to be in an environment where their creativity is respected.

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. This approach is slightly different from Etsy, which charges users 20 cents to list a single item for four months and takes a 3.5 percent cut of all sales. Since then, however, Etsy has lost over half of that value (53 percent) while reporting two quarters of losses. Now the retail giant is adding another string to its bow: handmade, artisan products.

“This is going to be a very challenging time for Etsy”. “I went from being a big fish in a handmade ecosystem to being a little fish in a saturated market”, said Stacy Mecklenburg, a merchant of handmade swimsuits when she had to compete with cheaper manufactured goods to cater to the masses. “For the last 10 years they’ve been the main destination for people looking to buy unique, mostly handmade gifts”, Gil Luria, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, told USA Today.

The goods can be filtered so shoppers can search by country-of-origin, while each artisan profile details how the products were made.