How Will Handmade At Amazon Impact Etsy? ^Featured

Last Thursday, Handmade at Amazon went live featuring over 100,000 unique, handcrafted products from sellers across the globe. While this is exciting for the 5,000 or so artisans whose work will reach a vast new audience, much speculation has been made about how this will impact the established craft marketplace, Etsy.

For those unfamiliar, Etsy is a ten year old online community of artists, craftsmen, fashion designers, and more. Their purpose is to reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling world. From their mission statement:
"We are building a human, authentic and community-centric global and local marketplace. We are committed to using the power of business to create a better world through our platform, our members, our employees and the communities we serve.

As we grow, commitment to our mission remains at the core of our identity. It is woven into the decisions we make for the long-term health of our ecosystem, from the sourcing of our office supplies to our employee benefits to the items sold in our marketplace."

Etsy appears to truly want to build a community and help artists connect with one another, developing a framework of likeminded folks. And actually, so does Handmade at Amazon. Their current pool of sellers is reasonably sized, especially considering the amount of retailers on their parent site. But it's unclear exactly what Handmade at Amazon intends to do to connect their sellers. And while Etsy has expanded their definition of what qualifies for their marketplace based on the feedback of their sellers, Handmade at Amazon appears to have much stricter rules about which items will be allowed. For example, a large amount of the goods on Etsy are fan art using licensed material and reproductions--which is fine, and within Etsy policies. However, it doesn't seem like those types of goods will be allowed in Handmade at Amazon--will they have the bandwidth to actually monitor that?

Since Etsy's policies appear to be an organic evolution over a decade of trial and error, it raises the question of how much influence sellers will have with Amazon. Will they pay attention to the feedback of their customers? And will those voices be able to impact the future of the site? It also raises the question if Amazon will be able to modify their reputation as a retail titan. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the perception of Amazon's presence impacting other, smaller businesses (and frankly, even other large retailers.) Will they be able to rebrand as a company that cares about raising up the profiles of small businesses, attracting bespoke artisans? And will sellers be abandoning Etsy for the newer, shiner platform?

In the coming months as Handmade at Amazon fills out and grows into a robust marketplace, it will be fascinating to see the impact it has on Etsy and perhaps even eBay. As someone who has been a loyal Etsy shopper since the early days, I will definitely be keeping my eye on the changes to both sites, as well as how they impact the quality and variety of goods.