I have a shop on Etsy... a very neglected shop. I used to really work at it and for a while was making a decent chunk of change each month, but nothing I could live off of.
Etsy is THE marketplace for handmade items and gets lots of traffic from people who want recycled or green products. That said, you have to wade through a lot of garbage on Etsy to get to the gems.
If you want to sell on Etsy you have to list often (or relist items you already have listed) so that your items stay at the top of the queue. ($.20 per list/relist) Searches are returned in order of most recently listed first. And it's amazing how fast you'll find an item moving to the 3rd, 4th, 5th or 35th page of a search. Often only minutes.
You also have to take excellent, attractive, well lit photos.
Until I started doing both of those, I didn't sell ANYTHING. It also helps to become very visible in the forums and chat rooms. I found it all to be very time consuming and have kind of reverted to only listing certain best selling items at the holidays for a couple hundred extra bucks.
OTOH, I found it MUCH more user friendly than ebay, and there are far fewer fees.
Anyway, that's just my $.02.
