If you're already looking at ways to sell crafts on the internet you've probably come across more different choices than you thought possible. The inevitable question is which method of selling your crafts online is best.
Oh how I wish there was an easy answer to that! Anyone finding it would probably make a fortune. The reason there's no definitive best way to sell your crafts on the internet is probably in large part due to the variety of crafts and the vast number of different ways people want to sell them!
Doesn't make it any easier to choose though, does it? So lets break down the choices a bit. While there are hordes of sites, there are in practice only three actual methods that I can see.
The first is to run your own blog and have some sort of shopping cart system attached to it. Until quite recently this hadn't been done particularly well or particularly cheaply but now there's at least one system that is free - at least to start with.
If you want to sell crafts on the internet then a blog isn't a bad choice. They're relatively easy to set up and if you host it yourself under your own domain name you retain control. If all that sounds gobbeldy-gook, don't worry, it's easy enough to get the details and the technology is remarkably user (novice) friendly.
Blogs also tend to do well in the search engine, an important factor when selling anything online.
Next there's running your own website. It may seem a daunting proposition at first, but again the technology exists to make building a site little more than "point and click". If you're going to have more than a couple of dozen products then choosing to sell crafts on the internet via your own site might well be your best choice both for control and cost-effectiveness.
Finally there are what I call the gallery sites. Basically you pay someone else to advertise your crafts for you. The amount of control you have varies but invariably you get to add a photo, description and price, in some format or another. Some sites charge you a listing fee and a commission (similar to Ebay), some just charge you a commission on what you sell.
My difficulty with this choice for selling your crafts online is that someone else has control. Whilst some of these sites are very attractive and well run, others aren't and in the last six months at least two well-known sites have disappeared leaving the people who had crafts for sale there in the lurch.
I don't know if any crafts people lost money but at the very least they had to find a new place to sell their crafts. It wouldn't have happened if they'd had their own site.
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