Success Story of Online Marketplace Etsy

An Online marketplace is a web portal where selling and purchasing is performed over internet. There are number of online marketplaces but an online marketplace which created difference from others is Etsy.

Etsy is an online marketplace which allows people to sell their handcrafted and vintage items. It was founded by Robert Kalin, Jared Tarbell, Chris Maguire and Haim Schoppik in year 2005. Now it’s a billion dollar company. Behind their success, business model of the company worked, though they faced many challenges. So let’s talk about their business model.

Partners: Etsy have partnership with community and business alliances, local organizations and businesses, third-party developers and e-commerce apps like West Elm.

Key Activities: Founders build an Etsy community. Company also provides seller education in which they tell sellers how to use the portal and how can they make profit from website. Company has created tools to streamline the sales process.

Value Proposition: It’s free to register on Etsy and simple to set e-commerce accounts of sellers. Etsy provides high-quality products by artisans and small merchants. Today Etsy has covered almost 200 countries in the world. Thus it’s been a largest online community of handmade products.

Customer: Sellers of all handcrafted items, in which fashion, art and jewelry is among most popular segments. Etsy has young demographic of 67% females. All global customers who want to buy high quality handmade items from local or small producer.

Meanwhile, Etsy has faced lots of challenges. In February 2008, many Etsy sellers were not satisfied with handling of complaints about stores. In July 2008, Rob Kalin left his position of CEO and appointed Maria Thomas for the position. After this, in August 2008, some longtime employees left the company. in Sept 2008, they hired Chad Dickerson for CTO position and in 2011 became CEO. After that Etsy never looked back.

It’s not the end of the story, there are lot more things to know about Etsy. You can go through the infographic which contains more interesting information about Etsy.