Etsy Connects To The High Street As Sales Smash $1 billion

Design and crafts web site Etsy expects to 'significantly pass' $1 billion sales this year as it pushes its suppliers into traditional retail stores.

In April the site launched the Etsy Wholesale initiative to connect its manufacturers with buyers working for stores and retail chains. Even without the initiative gross sales hit $895.1 million last year.

Despite testing its own shops with a pop-up in New York before Christmas which attracted 20,000 people, chief executive Chad Dickerson said: 'We really believe that helping our sellers become successful in offline retail is a lot more important than our own shops.'

'If we help our sellers sell into offline retail, we can do that in thousands of places, as opposed to doing our own shop, which we can only do in a handful of places,' he told last week's LeWeb conference in London.

'People see us as an online handmade market place, but we really see ourselves as reinventing the whole retail supply chain,' said Dickerson, as reported in the Guardian.

Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and takes a 3.5 per cent cut of every sale. Dickerson said the low barrier to entry encourages people to recognise they get a good deal from the site and encourages word-of-mouth recommendations among sellers.