Shopping on the web has never been cooler. This site – Etsy – is appealing in a way that I haven’t seen in a long time. They’ve combined many of the latest “Web 2.0” trends into the store and amalgamated thousands of sellers into an online marketplace that is still usable, despite being trendy.
The store has:
- A Geo-Location system using GG Maps so you can find sellers with products close to you
- Links & Bios on each of their sellers
- A “Find by Color” option that’s immensely clever
- A Sampler of Top Selling, Random or Recently Sold Items
- A Tagging system that allows you to find items that are “glass”, “cotton”, “knit”, “vintage”, etc.
- A killer blog – check out this tapestry of products (so cool).
- And a dozen other features that I haven’t looked at yet.
What’s brilliant about this site is how well thought out and planned it is. Clearly, the creators have not only locked in a good community of folks, centered around the idea of “handmade” items, they’ve given themselves the content, design and tools neccessary to become popular with the technorati (not the site, the people). The technically literate folks are the ones you need to appeal to right now, because they’re the ones who can link to you (since they control so many editorial links on the web).
I’m excited to see how this site can fare. They carry no fees to sell until Nov. 2005 according to this, which is a brilliant move unto itself. It’s supposedly still in beta, but from their about page, it appears they’ve only been around for a few months (since June). I wonder if they’re sandboxed…
UPDATE: Well, they’re a little boxed – for “buy handmade” they rank #1 @ MSN, #7 @ Yahoo! and #52 @ Google, but they do have some session ID issues.
