Craft Shopping the Web 2.0 Way at Etsy

[mandy]

The Web is full of great online shops. eBay is the garage sale of the universe. Amazon is a giant department store. And there are tons of focused shopping sites, selling everything from underwear to auto parts. But for the most part, they're all old-school.

If you want a more contemporary shopping experience, try Etsy, a marketplace for handmade goods. Like many of the items that Etsy artists sell on the site, Etsy itself has been crafted with care, love, and a whacked-out esthetic. Heavily Flash-based, it has unique and fun views into the goods available. For example, there's a "shop by color" function that does just what you'd think (although not all that accurately)...

full article: http://news.com.com/2061-12572_3-6081184.html

[amy]

Shopping is all I'll ever be doing at Etsy since I don't "make" anything.    Etsy is one of the very few real "alternatives" to open in the past few years.  All of the new sites that proclaim themselves to be "eBay Alternatives" (like Wagglepoof) could learn a lot from studying Etsy--eBay itself could learn a lot and should have looked at everything Etsy is doing right before it launched the mess known as Ebay Express.