Sell Handmade at MakerPlace

[BadBob]

I get this or a similar email from Michaels occasionally. Are any of you selling on this platform?

Greetings from MakerPlace!

My name is Latasia and I'm a Seller Experience Specialist at MakerPlace by Michaels. Yes, that Michaels! I love your products and I think your store would be a great fit for MakerPlace, our new online marketplace that's made exclusively for handmade.

I would like to personally invite you to join MakerPlace as one of our VIP sellers. As a VIP seller, you'll get exclusive benefits that are not available to other sellers: 

• FREE professional membership: a $110 value!
• More money per transaction: with our lower fee schedule, earn up to $15 more per $100 in sales vs. other marketplaces. That means more money in your pocket because MakerPlace only has a 2-4% referral fee AND no listing fees!
• Millions of shoppers: gain access to tens of millions of loyal Michaels customers looking for that special something
• Rewards galore: automatically earn up to 6% on every eligible purchase in the Michaels Rewards Program
• FREE promotion: we never charge for marketing when we feature your products on our website, emails, social media and paid ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram!
• In-Store pop-ups: inside local Michaels stores lets you showcase and sell your products

There’s never been a better time to join: we saw a 47% growth in Toys & Entertainment since the start of this year.

To get started, you can sign up here or visit www.michaels.com/makerplace. Upon sign-up, be sure to select 'expert seller' (page 1) and the 'professional plan' (page 4) and we'll ensure this is free for your first year!

If you have questions, just reach out. Unlike at other marketplaces, I promise I’m a real person!

Sincerely,
Latasia

Seller Experience Specialist | MakerPlace by Michaels

[kmmcrafts]

I don't have any personal experience with their marketplace but I do know of people who sell ( or try too ) on there.. word has been it's very slow and even for a big company the customer support is poor and things on the site aren't getting fixed in a timely manor.  Maybe this has changed in the last year or so since I've seen anyone talking about it.. 

Unfortunately as bad as Etsy is with things they are really the "go to for both shoppers and sellers alike" so no matter where you try online selling.. nothings probably going to be easier or better sales than etsy.. New sites take forever to take off and get established.. I signed up with Amazon handmade years ago and never really got much business the first few years.. The thing with them is it's all free.. no monthly or listing fee.. however there is 15% transaction fees on the sales you get.. But this actually ends up about the same cost for me as selling anywhere else when you take "ALL" selling expenses in account. For instance I was on GoImagine for a year or so but only had 3-4 sales.. I lost money there and half the time the site was being worked on or not working etc.. While it only cost me $10 a month with only limited sales it worked out to cost way more than the $30 a month I was paying at Shopify.. Shopify was getting me quite a lot of business but at the time Etsy sales were down and I needed to cut some cost.. so in order to keep a stand alone .com site I moved to GI.. Like the layout and I think it "could be" a great site.. but they got a long way to go.. I've been with many new startup sites over the years and most of them fail.. It's pretty hard to get people to move away from the big places where they actually get business like Etsy, Amazon and even Ebay.. Michael's site has been out there for 3-4 years now I think.. and many people didn't / don't even know selling crafts on there is a thing.. It's a tough balance of getting sellers and shoppers alike for these start up places.. 

I tell my return customers that if they shop my website they'll get a discounted price.. yet they still go to Etsy or Amazon anyway.. as that is where they're comfortable shopping at.. so these new startup places have to tackle both the seller and the shopper.. tough market to get into with so many established big companies..  

[BadBob]

Etsy and Goimagine are about all I can handle right now. I'm not losing money on Goimagine. If it were not for the custom orders I get from Etsy, I would have lost money on Etsy this year.

[kmmcrafts]

 

7 hours ago, BadBob said:

Etsy and Goimagine are about all I can handle right now. I'm not losing money on Goimagine. If it were not for the custom orders I get from Etsy, I would have lost money on Etsy this year.

Yeah Etsy was slow this year.. I did do better than I thought I would but they really messed up by changing the Algorithm at the beginning of the 4th quarter.. most everyone on there didn't do great. Usually Etsy does better than Amazon for me but this year flipped and Amazon was quite busy for me. Each year Amazon has picked up more business. I've never promoted or ran ads etc for Amazon so that is probably why Etsy always did better. I only got on Amazon to have my presents there in case something ever happen to Etsy I could easily slide right into business on there without much trouble getting going... I've never really liked the way Amazon listings work and it's not very user friendly for getting stats etc.. I have no idea of page views or any of that stuff.. just list it and forget about it. They have been reworking the process to create listings and it's getting much better now.. started out as doing a lot of HTML coding etc.. Now it's more user friendly.. Still a lot of non-user friendly parts of it that they could improve and I think they're working on some of those things.