Handmade Artist’s Shop: First Impressions

Yesterday I was at the doorstep of Artfire getting ready to open an account with them when I realized I cannot find a button for the basic (free) account anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty good at locating tiny-wrong-color buttons, reading small text or finding disguised links. It simply is not there any longer! So, naturally, I stepped back and went to see what google knows about this. Was hoping to find a secret entrance but… Artfire has made a decision to get rid of the free accounts.. Surprise?

Not a pleasant one anyway, but it pushed me to go looking for new marketplaces to sell my handmade jewelry. From the many options I especially loved a new discovery – the Handmade Artist’s Shop. A reason for this love at first sight was very simple – they do not allow resellers of mass produced items and Chinese junk on their boat. At least for now the Handmade Artist’s Shop is strictly and exclusively “handmade”. Lovely!

Our primary mission for the Handmade Artists’ Shop is to support handmade. There are so many mass produced items out there that it often feels that the world has lost the respect for the small, independent merchant. <...> Our goal is when you visit The Handmade Artists’ Shop you will feel the passion and understand that we truly love and support handmade.

Traffic is overrated

Many would argue that Etsy and Artfire are so much better places to sell simply because they get more traffic. But as a well experienced hitch-hiker I can assure you that standing on a high traffic road or a highway is far from equal to getting a ride quickly. On the contrary! You are far more likely to get noticed and picked up on a quiet road in the middle of nowhere where the traffic is moderate or so slow you can almost take a nap between the cars passing. So don’t count too much on the traffic of the marketplace or site ranks alone. Create, do your best at photographing your art, work on SEO.. and they will come

Usability could be improved

As much as I like the The Handmade Artist’s Shop and its mission, there are some things that leave me confused and make me think when browsing the shops. But it’s still a very young site and hopefully many of the improvements are still ahead.

Let’s take a look at one of the shops, BooJay Knits, selling wire knitted jewelry.

Nice, isn’t it?
On the shop page everything’s quite clear and I can get the feeling I’m inside the small shop – I see item categories (“shelves”) on the left, shop owner, etc.

Now click on a product – can you locate you way back to the shop?

Too many distractions

Large and prominent (actually, the most prominent thing here) “categories” title on green background is fighting for attention and overpowers the relatively smaller “add to cart” – a conflict of priorities on this page now. I’m instantly distracted. I see the looong list of the marketplace categories on the left reminding me of tens of other things I might need instead (a dog collar? a new notebook? a new pot for my bonsai tree?), huge social network icons reminding me to go check what my friends had for dinner.. And that’s it, I’m lost. And I probably already forgot I was going to read about that nice wire bracelet.
This is a product page, aka “call to action” page – please remove the distractions and let the customer focus!

Where am I?

As soon as I click on the product, I get the feeling that I’m kicked off from the shop – its menu is replaced by the the general categories list, shop owner information “jumps” to the right sidebar. And there’s no clearly visible way back to the shop I was seconds ago. Panic. The backspace button on my keyboard is no good enough, it’s an emergency exit for those who know it. The breadcrumbs are there (nice!) but they lead you to another place. The menu on the left suggest you should click there somewhere.. Moments of confusion, but if you persist and look hard enough you’ll see a “Shop” link in tiny print next to the artist’s avatar… among other links.

A quick fix

I believe, removing the left sidebar from the product page completely would not only help to get rid of unnecessary distractions, but also allow for more whitespace and free up some pixels for the larger product images – 420px is a bit too small, especially for the larger and/or more detailed items.

The bottomline

The Handmade Artist’s Shop looks very promising. If the site team sticks to it’s mission to support and promote handmade only, pay more attention to usability, and keep their flat rate membership fees at a reasonable level, they should soon stand next to the “big ones” (if not above them). Especially with Etsy getting closer to becoming Ebaytsy with every passing day and Artfire charging discriminatingly high monthly fees now.

Looking for a new place to start your handmade business? Then I suggest you put the Handmade Artists’ Shop on your shortlist too At the very least – keep a close eye on them and, while you’re still thinking, you can join their friendly forum, investigate the place yourself, or spread the word about this exclusively handmade marketplace, and participate in their competition to win a Free HAFshop for life.

[This short review is inspired by the HAS blogging competition and is based on my own opinions and first impressions only. I’m not affiliated with the Handmade Artist's Shop (or any other names mentioned here) in any way other than as a user looking for a right place to open an online shop.]