Artist As Brand®

View Original

Handmade at Amazon

Handmade at Amazon is a new store on Amazon.com for artisans to sell their unique, handcrafted goods to hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. It just went live on Thursday with a lineup of over 80,000 items from about 5,000 sellers in 60 countries. “You can think of it as a factory-free zone, a mass-produced-free zone,” said Peter Faricy, the Amazon vice president who is overseeing Handmade.You set up a shop, create an Artisan Profile page to tell customers your story and set up pages for each of your products. Sounds like Etsy, right? It is a similar model but more robust and with options for shipping fulfillment. And Amazon is also offering logistical backing to its sellers, allowing them to ship products, in lots, to one of the company’s many fulfillment centers around the country. Amazon will then ship out those products as part of its Prime service, which offers members unlimited free shipping for an annual fee.Etsy charges a 20-cent fee for each item a seller lists on its site and takes a 3.5 percent cut of the sales. For now, Amazon will charge no listing fee but take 12 percent of sales.I am on the fence about signing up with this giant. May wait to see what shapes over the next few months and see what type of feedback the artisans are giving it.If you are jumping in let me know.