Thinking about MavenFair - Canadian handmade marketplace

I don't normally read unsolicited emails advertising ... actually, if we want to be accurate, we could rewrite that sentence to say I don't normally read emails.  But for some reason, this caught my eye.  Probably because when I was last selling at the local fibre arts events, I went in with another seller and we combined our names.  Her name started with MA and mine ended with VEN to create Fibre Mavens.  

Anyway.

The website they are promoting is called MavenFair and the email went

Hello Canadian Maker,

We hope that this finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy as Canada slowly re-opens in the wake of the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis. It is definitely not back to business as usual for many of us. With the cancellation of the spring and summer craft shows and the limited reopening of smaller retail shops Canadian Makers are seeking alternative ways to sell their creations.

MavenFair offers a simple, affordable and reliable solution to setting up and selling your Canadian handmade creations online. We are a 100% Canadian-owned online marketplace explicitly created to offer Canadian Makers an inclusive and professional environment where you can sell your handmade creations to Canada and the rest of the world. We offer you the opportunity to open your own online shop along side other amazing Canadian Makers. We are all Canadian and all handmade.
...

It looks like it's a bit like a Canadian specific Etsy style service, which is like a virtual mall.  You open your own 'shop' and sell things direct to the customers, only the 'mall' provides a way to process the payments and settle disputes.  

In a way, I really like this idea.  Promoting local is important - even if local means nearly the other side of the world (Canada is HUGE).  I'm loathed to go shopping and would love more ways to buy online (and maybe pickup at the storefront to save on shipping - oh, that reminds me, I need to order more beer). What's more, international shipping has been a nightmare these last few months and I've had to do the drastic steps of requesting refunds when an item didn't arrive in 4+ months.  So I'm very much restricting my online shopping to Canada and the left side of the US.  As a buyer, I'm very curious about MavenFair.

As a seller, I'm not so sure.  

Finding out how to search for items was a bit of a pain.  I clicked what I thought, but I was just searching shop names, so I clicked about some more before I found a search box.  I would EXPECT this to be the most obvious item on the front page so that buyers can find what they need immediately, but as it is at the time of writing, it's hidden in grey at a corner of the screen.  

I worry about restricting my customer base.  The FAQ says that you don't have to be Canadian to buy, but it's not easy to find this.  The front page is very Canadian focused.  Yes, Canada has over 35million people*, but the world has over 7 billion and at least 3 billion of them are thought to have access to the internet.  35 million seems like a lot less than 3 billion, but I'm not good at math.

Then again, I like the targeted audience base as shipping within Canada is so much easier than shipping internationally.  Canada post - although expensive - is a gem!  Great service!

Something about the aesthetic of the logo really bugs me.  Don't know why.  Maybe it's the tiny TM thing?  Maybe the colours or the fonts.

When I search for "handspun yarn" "yarn" "loom" "woven" "scarf" it returns zero results.  This could tell me that what I have to sell isn't the right sort of thing for this site, or it could mean the search is broken.  "wool" returns results, but the thumbnail quality is horrid - not consistent (but it's also really hard to make it consistent if you don't know what you are doing)

It looks like they have integrated PayPal as their payment processing.  This has issues, but PayPal adds an additional level of buyer protection which I'm a huge fan of.  The buyer needs to feel that they can trust the transaction.  

There are more issues, but I think they are just getting started and working through the bugs.  I haven't done any research about it outside the site to see how old it is.  

The thing I like least is it's based on a subscription model.  I don't know if they have the customer base to be worth me paying X dollars a month to host my shop there.  With Etsy, the feels are on-demand.  I pay when I list something and I pay more when I sell something.  But I only pay as much or as little as I use.  I really like that.  The fees I pay Etsy not only let me host my shop there, but they also offer payment processing, advertising, access to their customer base, and they sort out the complexities of international taxation.  I've thought about going on my own, but each and every time I research building my own shop, I understand just how much Etsy gives me for the relatively low fee structure.  

But back to the MavenFair.  It might be amazing.  I could take advantage of their free trial and sell lots of stuff and get in on the ground floor as they say.    

Then again, unsolicited email... I really hate those.  

But I also hate all email, so... I don't know what to do here.  I suspect time is going to be my biggest deciding factor.  I just have too many obligations right now.  Otherwise, I would jump at this as at its core, the values match many of my own.  But I need to whittle down my obligations and focus on the things that I know bring in some income as I have a very big expense arriving this winter.  


I don't really know why I wrote all this down.  Mostly writing helps me work through and organize my thoughts.  Partly, I'm curious if anyone has bought or sold through this service and what your experience is.  

---

*I recently read a survey that 100% of the population of Canada uses the internet, which was impressive since I know so many people who do not!  Then I read that this was an internet survey...  I suspect that given the size of the country and blablabla long list of reasons, it's probably about 75% of the population between 20 and 80 who use the internet regularly.  But that's just a random guess based on my unscientific sample size of people I know.  

Also from their email

Why open a shop on mavenfair.ca?

All Canadian. All Handmade.
Handmade. It Matters. All of our Makers are living and creating in Canada and offer only handmade goods.

Affordable Monthly Fees
No Listing Fees. All transactions in Canadian dollars. The first 3 Months are Free right now! You choose the MavenFair Shop Level that suits you. No contracts. You can easily change your shop level at anytime.

Marketing & Promotion
You Focus On Making. MavenFair focuses on marketing and promoting your Canadian Maker Shop worldwide.

Secure Payments
PayPal & Secure Servers. We use PayPal and secure servers to manage all payment and personal data.

Your Brand Your Way
Branded Storefronts. Personalize your Shop page which is located at your very own MavenFair Shop URL. Promote your physical studio to bring local shoppers to you.

Open for Business 24-7
Sell Day & Night. Your Shop is always open for business and customers can shop when it is the best time for them.

I do like the idea of a Canadian Etsy like marketplace, in principle. But I have a feeling, since this thread has been out there since July with no responses that none of us have ever heard of MavenFair. That doesn't bode well for attracting buyers until the platform becomes better publicized.

Also a comment on your footnote questioning that result on internet use in Canada. If you use an internet survey to determine internet use, stands to reason it'll be 100 percent. Just sayin'. :)

I love the idea of this!  Practically speaking, I'm not seeing any motivation to sign up.

I get an email from them about once a month still.  But I haven't figured out how I got on their list.  It's not an email address I use to subscribe to things, so I'm guessing they farmed it off one of the websites where that email is published.

There are a few things that really bug me like having a watermark on photos used in an email or front page.  

The links in the email are blocked by my anti-virus checker for being suspicious and then blocked by Chrome for being suspicious.  

There's nothing in the section where I would be selling - which makes me worry that they don't have the customer base yet.

The subscription-based fee seems quite high from my point of view - and I still have to pay the percentage on every sale and the payment processing fees for paypal.  I would have to sell a lot more here than on Etsy.  Which... I'm not sure the site is big enough yet to do the trick.  

But I do look at the site every now and again and cheer it on.  I hope I can find something worth buying and support them that way.  

I Signed up to sell on Mavenfair, and found it very cumbersome, time consuming to set up a listing! There are way too many tabs to add descriptions, attributes, options etc... (should be all on one page) it is not self explanatory, and attribute selections are limited for example: soap scent, soap scent#2, soap scent #3, colour, colour #2, Colour #3 there is no options for fabric material etc... I sell jewelry made from precious metals so soap scents and colour options are not helpful. On top of that the sectio/tab to add tags only has a bar to type in the tags with no explanation on how to whether its with an # or comma or just one at a time! NOT USER FRIENDLY! From Signing up to cancellation of membership took 30 minutes in total, I didn’t even finish setting up the first listing! I love the Idea of an all Canadian handmade site at the same time this site/marketplace really needs a lot of work. Mavenfair should consider revamping and relaunching!

Hey Team!

Wanted to follow-up with an alternative to MavenFair... I've been around the forums at Permies for a few years now, but about 8 months ago I connected with another Permie and we set out on our big adventure of creating an entire platform for Permies and regenerative, home-based producers.

We've recently released an Open Marketplace where small-scale producers can sell/trade any regenerative or sustainably sourced products. The best part is that it's totally free! We're a regenerative, 100% organic organization - currently funding everything from our own pockets. We do have about 140+ items in the marketplace already, mainly seeds at the moment, but are looking to help some sellers get their products out there.

Some features of the marketplace:
- Potential buyers/traders can search via a map
- Sellers get their own "profile" page for their marketplace/shop where they can easily share their listed products via a URL
- Full marketplace search
- Support for barter/trade/swap options
- Basic messaging system through private anonymous email (without payment processing) to connect buyers and sellers
- Supporting features - like interactive plant lists (to list for trade items
- Canadian and German operated

You can check it out here. And if you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to reach out. We are building this to facilitate localized, circular, regenerative economies - not for profit. We're also willing to assist in some marketing efforts (for free) if anyone would like to take the plunge and get their stuff out there.

A few years later.  
I'm spending more time on digital items than physical stock.  

But I have felt increasingly frustrated buying from etsy lately, so I thought I would check it out.  All the categories I was interested are empty.  The prices are in dollar signs, but nowhere on the page (at this time) can I see which of the dozen countries that use the dollar sign currencies this is and there's a lot less focus on this being a Canadian site.  Whereas before, they made the Canadian part a big element of their brand.

The idea was good but the execution was poor.  They put all the risk and expense on the makers/sellers and don't provide enough service for the costs of using the marketplace.  

It will be interesting to see where it goes next.  

Anyone ever used this site? There is no info online about any success or people who use it but it keeps coming up on my Facebook feed.

I have still never heard of MavenFair outside of this thread! Certainly it is not popping up on any of my feeds.

I did set up an Etsy shop for the farm late in 2024 to sell seeds and dried herbs and eventually other things. Unfortunately two days later Canada Post went on strike and we had no other viable shipping options from our location.  So after receiving one order and having to refund it, I put the shop into vacation mode. It’s still in vacation mode after a string of family injuries (both my co-farmers are not fully ambulatory at the moment) and then being snowed in for two weeks. Planning to get it up and running again soon, I hope, just a tad too busy for the added task just now.  So with this very limited experience I can’t say much about Etsy at the moment from the perspective of a Canadian seller. What I can say is it can be set to only sell in Canada (which is what I had set up) and the communications I have been receiving from them are coming from Ireland.  

What I am in search of just now is a good online venue for used book sales in Canada. Etsy is one option but I don’t know how good; the farm Etsy store was meant to be testing the waters.  AbeBooks was at one time Canadian (Victoria BC) but unfortunately is now owned by Amazon.

Andrea Locke wrote:I have still never heard of MavenFair outside of this thread! Certainly it is not popping up on any of my feeds.

I did set up an Etsy shop for the farm late in 2024 to sell seeds and dried herbs and eventually other things. Unfortunately two days later Canada Post went on strike and we had no other viable shipping options from our location.  So after receiving one order and having to refund it, I put the shop into vacation mode. It’s still in vacation mode after a string of family injuries (both my co-farmers are not fully ambulatory at the moment) and then being snowed in for two weeks. Planning to get it up and running again soon, I hope, just a tad too busy for the added task just now.  So with this very limited experience I can’t say much about Etsy at the moment from the perspective of a Canadian seller. What I can say is it can be set to only sell in Canada (which is what I had set up) and the communications I have been receiving from them are coming from Ireland.  

What I am in search of just now is a good online venue for used book sales in Canada. Etsy is one option but I don’t know how good; the farm Etsy store was meant to be testing the waters.  AbeBooks was at one time Canadian (Victoria BC) but unfortunately is now owned by Amazon.

sorry, I don’t know if this is how you answer to someone so pardon my forum manners if not..

I used to sell on Etsy during the pandemic and it was fun as a side hobby. I would get several sales per week. But then around 2023, the only way I could get any visibility was by paying ads. And they raised the fee to 6.5% plus 3% transaction fee and I think it was 15% fee if someone bought through an ad. It became very discouraging. There’s also sooo many dropshipping and sellers selling things from aliexpress with prices so low it’s hard to compete. With all the fees, you have to add at least 15% more to whatever markup you make to make sure you make your profit or else you end up making pennies on an order. I haven’t checked it out since then so maybe it has changed but I’ve been looking for an alternative that is 100% handmade shops.

I think marketing your seeds MADE IN CANADA will help you get sales from fellow Canadians as I see a lot more Canadians wanting to encourage locally with the whole tariff thing. And for small orders you can probably just ship with stamps so that could be profitable. What kind of seeds to you sell?

Etsy works great if you bring in your own customers from outside etsy.

The ads only work well if there is already good seo, otherwise I found the ads aren't worth the expense.

After about 2010, I found etsy wasn't useful for bringing in customers via search or browse.

I had used etsy in the past, but fees are too high for a casual side business / hobby shop, especially given that listings expire and you need to pay again to relist even if you don't get sales.

For selling crafts online, I had much better experience with ko-fi. It was originally for digital goods, and that's still the majority of what you'll find there, but it's set up to work well for crafts as well. I sold candles, scarves and hats, and stuffed animals on ko-fi, and did pretty well with that. It's a very user-friendly site, and you only pay a 5% commission on what you actually sell.

Since it's more known for the digital stuff, you won't get as many people specifically going to ko-fi to search for crafts and craft supplies, so don't expect a lot of new customers to discover you that way, but if you have a blog with a decent number of visitors, you can add a link to your ko-fi, and that's a great way to start selling online. Would work well for things like hand-dyed yarn for sure, assuming you had something like a blog to make people aware of your shop.

For cheaper shipping, check if ChitChats or NetParcel have locations near you. If not, you can also consolidate your shipments into a single shipment that you send to them, and they will separate the individual packages and send them out. Could be worthwhile if you get enough orders per month to do consolidated shipments.

chitchats.com

netparcel.com

I used to have a monthly discount shipping date posted on my ko-fi page, for example, anything ordered during January gets mailed out on Feb 1, or get next-day shipping via Canada's Post.


I also recently got introduced to GLS and had a great experience with them as a buyer. Haven't tried it yet as a seller, but looks good and is well established. Don't know how prices compare, but I've been told it's better than Canada Post.

gls-canada.com