Amazon Handmade and the big marketplaces: what happens to your name when you sell there

When you sell on a big marketplace, the customer doesn't buy from you: they buy there. On Amazon Handmade and on generalist marketplaces the buyer remembers the platform's brand, not your workshop's name: they don't have your email, they don't know where you are, and next time they reopen the app, not your profile. What you get back is real traffic. The calculation is one: how much visibility you buy, and how much identity you leave behind.

Let me start with the honest part. The big marketplaces have a huge audience walking in every day with a card already saved: put a vase online tonight and someone who never searched for you might see it. That is a genuine advantage. The question is not whether they work, but what's left for you.

Visibility and identity are not the same thing

A large marketplace is designed to keep the customer feeling safe inside the marketplace: the design, the buy button and the order confirmation all belong to the platform, and your name sits small above the item title. It works beautifully, and that is the job it's built to do. The consequence is that the trust you earn doesn't accumulate on you: after thirty sales you have thirty fulfilled orders, not thirty people who know your name. In a trade where the piece is worth something partly because of who made it, that's a loss no statement will show you.

What comes out of the price: the fees

On Etsy, the usual benchmark for Italian makers, you pay a listing fee of around 0.20 US dollars per item, due whether or not it sells, a transaction fee of around 6.5% on the order total (shipping included, so on the part you hand over to the courier too) and, on top of that, payment processing fees. Rates change over time: check the official Etsy fees page before doing the math for real.

Amazon Handmade works on the same logic: a percentage on every sale, calculated on the price the customer pays, plus fulfilment costs if you use their warehouse. I won't quote the percentage from memory, because it's a number that gets updated without notice: read it on the official Amazon Handmade Italy page before you set your list price.

On Handsome, since 18 September 2026, products are open to every eligible Maker and the platform keeps nothing on the sale. Technically the payment is a direct charge on your own Stripe account: the money is yours and starts there, with no platform cut on top. The only cost is the standard fee Stripe applies to any card payment, on the Stripe pricing page. The conditions are on the page for Makers.

• Cost to put one piece online: Etsy around 0.20 US dollars per listing · Handsome zero
• Percentage kept by the platform: Etsy around 6.5% of the order total · Amazon Handmade a percentage of the price (read it on their page) · Handsome none
• Payment processing fees: present everywhere, charged by whoever processes the card
• Where the payment starts: on marketplaces inside their system · on Handsome on your own Stripe account
• Product limit: on Handsome 5 published pieces on the free plan, unlimited with Handsome Pro

The line-by-line comparison on a single object is in what it really costs to sell a 40-euro piece; the head-to-head with Etsy lives in Etsy or Handsome for selling your pieces.

Who owns the customer data

This is the part that weighs most two years down the line. On big marketplaces the customer signs up to the platform, not to you, and the seller rules limit what you may do with order contacts later on. It isn't malice: it's the model. The customer list is the asset, and that asset is not yours. What you may do with those contacts is written in the seller terms, and it differs from one marketplace to the next.

A hundred sales to people you can never contact again are worth a hundred sales. A hundred sales to people you actually know are worth every future time you can say "new batch out of the kiln" too: the second scenario keeps a workshop alive, the same argument I make in turning participants into repeat customers.

The reviews stay there

Reviews collected on a marketplace are the hardest asset to rebuild, and they are not portable. If you move, those stars don't follow you: they stay on a page you don't control, attached to an account that can be suspended. On Handsome, to be clear, there are no product reviews: they come from workshops, only someone who booked and showed up can leave one, and they sit on your profile next to the shelf. They are two different things, and one doesn't replace the other.

What's left when you close the shop

Run this thought experiment. Close your marketplace shop today: what stays? The photos and the descriptions, which are yours. And then? The Google ranking belonged to the marketplace page, the customers were registered over there, the reviews too. You restart from a folder of images.

Now run the same experiment on a profile that carries your name. What stays is a public address people can type, a profile that sits on Google alongside your workshop pages, verified reviews, your customer archive and the shelf, right underneath for whoever lands there. It's the difference between renting a space and building one: both legitimate, but only one compounds. If you're putting your online presence together now, getting found on Google without a website is where I'd start.

How to use the big marketplaces without disappearing into them

I'm not telling you to close anything. Use them for what they're good at, bringing in people who don't know you, without making them the only place where you exist:

1. Keep on the marketplace the most searched pieces, the ones least tied to your own story.
2. Put your name wherever you're allowed: shop name, workshop photo, description, a card in the parcel, without breaking the rules on diverting the buyer elsewhere.
3. Keep the full shelf, the one-off pieces and the higher prices on a profile with your name on it: a single address, to send in a chat or print on a card.
4. Use workshops as the front door: someone who spends a morning with you has already seen how you work, so when you put a piece in front of them they know what they're looking at. I write about that in workshops and products together.
5. Measure where the orders actually come from, not where you assume.