First, regarding Etsy. Etsy has gone through a lot of changes in the past few months. For someone who loves the social interaction, their changes with the team structure is probably one important change. From a purely business perspective here are some of the changes I noticed. Benefits I see on Etsy:
1) Relevancy search: At last the relisting game is not the only way to be seen. Thank goodness.
2) Better organization within the seller portal: The listing process has been simplified, and so have many of the more mundane aspects of keeping your shop updated. (Maybe a result of hiring the greasemonkey dude? Although I believe he was hired on the QA side and not the SW Dev. Maybe the CEO change? Maybe Jupiter transits conjunct Sun while square Neptune?)
The site still places more importance on the seller profile, real names, circles, hearts etc. than on the actual ecommerce aspects, so nothing much has changed there. The message seems to be more about connecting with like minded people, oohing and aahing over the same things, sharing experiences, and maybe, just maybe, buying or selling too. Which, like all things, works very well for some people, and not all that well for others.
Now for ArtFire. ArtFire has been continuing its focus on search engine optimization. This, coupled with the fact that anyone can buy on ArtFire without having to join the site, make it much more of a mainstream shopping channel. Two important changes ArtFire made recently, were to eliminate the free accounts and to separate out all commercial items into their own section. Both seem to have helped with greater visibility for the site.
Benefits I see on ArtFire:
1) Tools, tools, tools: The tools are terrific. I tend to be rather prolific, so I always have lots of items in my shop. With just a few strokes I can make changes to the entire shop, or a few sections, or a handful of items across many sections... if you can dream it up, you can do it with just a few keystrokes. I can add tags, promotions, change prices or shipping, add or remove sales, apply coupons etc. etc. with abandon. Taking about coupons, I know E allows coupons too, but nothing like what ArtFire has. You can take percentages or dollars off, specify the minimums, the caps, add a free gift with purchase, free shipping and a myriad of other things, again with just a couple of keystrokes.
2) Complete customization: You get to choose colors, fonts, layouts and all sorts of cool stuff, in addition to your banner, which you can choose to either display on the product pages or not. If you are more ambitious, you can add widgets to do pretty much whatever you want on the pages.
3) Much better listing experience: This is one of my favorites. You can have up to 10 pics for each listing. You can specify any promos in a variety of ways. If you choose to submit to google shopping, you know whether something did go thro or not, and if not, why not. You can even include any google forbidden words like "free" in a special section of the listing which is not submitted to google shopping. I love how easy it is to write copy that brings in buyers from search engines.
The bottomline for me is this:
If your products are cheaper, or more unusual, or edgy or hip etc. etc. and are targeted towards younger people, or for people with specific interests, and you want to only list a handful of items once in a while, don't want too much commitment, or just do this for fun, go for Etsy. You can just list for 20 cents a pop, never renew, and leave them up for 4 months. If they sell, you pay Etsy 3.5% of the price as their commission.
If your products are a bit more high end, or if your products are more mainstream, or if you have lots of products, targeted towards people with money ;-), go for ArtFire. You can list as many items as you want for one low monthly fee, and that is it, you don't pay ArtFire any other commission. This is also a great option for people who want to know exactly how much they will spend, so that they can budget for it, because you pay the same fee to ArtFire month over month. If your time is valuable you should consider ArtFire, because of all the great tools which really cut down on your shop maintenance time and give you time for what you *really* want to do - CREATE!!
The most important thing to keep in mind is that ArtFire and Etsy are totally different. What will work on one does NOT work on the other. Once you treat each of them as totally unique venues, and you will do fine :-).
