Is Etsy the new eBay?

Gone are the days where I would sit, search, watch, bid and buy items from eBay in the hope of getting something special or perhaps a great bargain. I have now turned my attention to Etsy, a website for sellers of handmade items to showcase their wares. Etsy is a global web based craft fair and a fabulous place to discover new talent and buy affordable artwork as well as finding some great vintage items (strangely, no longer very obtainable on eBay).

To help with your searching, the developers at Etsy have come up with some excellent browsing tools.

- The ‘Geolocator’ shows a map of the world where you can click on any place in a country to find out what products are being sold by who.
- For the colour co-ordinated there is ‘Colors’, click on a colour and it simply returns items of that hue. Magic.
- There are also more visual and interactive ways of searching like ‘Connections’ and ‘Treasury’, which suggest items from members’ favourites as well as the more obvious and usual ways of searching through the categories.

Here are some of my bookmarked Etsy stores:

Knitwit - knitted gloves and accessories
FiFi Lapin -  fashion illustrations with a bunny twist
Fluffington - fabric buttons
Little Red Pear - retro fabric stuffed toys
Sugarloop - serigraph print illustrations
Simply Wood Rings - rings made from salvaged lumber