Well, hello Etsy.

You might recall in a post just a few days ago we’d said we were going to maintain an Etsy storefront mainly for the social networking aspect. We’d thought that we’d have the main shop for now, and then work on Etsy later on.

Well, it only took a few days of discussing the merits of Etsy itself to realize that we should probably set it up concurrently with the main shop instead of waiting. So that’s what we did tonight. Hey, that’s what Saturday nights are for, right? Well, that and laundry. =)

Originally, the idea was to use both Etsy and Ebay for some of the other items that didn’t seem to fit in the shop. In particular, we were planning on using Etsy for some of the “cuter” vintage items. This isn’t to say that we were only going to reserve serious items for the main shop. It’s just that we have a ton of things to sell, and we thought that some of them might be a better fit with Etsy’s main demographic.

We decided that we’ll follow that general rule of having the cuter things like those shown above on Etsy – for now. I think in the future we might use a mix on both Etsy and the main A La Modern shop for ALL items. But only time will tell.

One thing we’re definitely discouraged about is how difficult Ebay has made it for the “small seller” to exist in the online auction world. That’s one reason we decided to kick off our Etsy usage immediately; we might want to use it for some of the items we were originally going to try and put through the auction process on Ebay. We’ve sold on Ebay since 1997(?) and have generally had a good experience – very difficult to beat the exposure it brings from a worldwide audience. However, from the point of view of the small seller, Ebay has just gone REALLY downhill the last 5 years or so.

But let’s not get into all of that. We’re just going to focus on what seems to be the best places to sell our vintage items. In addition to listing items in our main shop, we’ll try to list at least a few things on Etsy every week. Hope you’ll come back and have a look around in both our shops!