Great job! I like the simple site design. It gives it almost a craigslist feel (in a good way).<p>* Drilling down into categories was a little confusing at first. It might be better if the columns were clearly defined (maybe different backgrounds or vertical borders or something). Initially when drilling down into Vintage -> Men's Clothing I completely missed the "Handmade" category, so when I got down to "Pants & Trousers" I suddenly noticed "Handmade" on the left, at which point it wasn't clear whether it was a separate top-level category (as it is) or whether it was a strange word-wrapping problem (like "Pants & Trousers Handmade").<p>* Related to this, once I arrived at "Pants & Trousers", it wasn't immediately apparent that there were no items in the category. (Until I actually read "Be the first to post...", I thought maybe I hadn't yet arrived at the leaf-level category, so I ended up clicking "Handmade" thinking it was maybe the word-wrap thing.) Three suggestions that might help: 1) Make the category selector variable-height so that it collapses into a single-line breadcrumb trail once I arrive at the bottom-level category; 2) Show the number of items in each category in parenthesis after the name, e.g. "Pants & Trousers (0)"; 3) Clearly mark the items for sale (maybe "Items for Sale in Pants & Trousers:" or something).<p>* One question that immediately popped into my mind as a hypothetical vendor with a large dose of cynicism was: How do you guys make any money? After digging (and of course your post here) I found a statement that "This website was made with love to provide a free venue for artists and vendors to sell their wares", but maybe you want to consider proactively answering the question "If you don't take any fees, how do you make money?" Else I'm left wondering whether there's some kind of hidden scheme going on, or whether your venue is going to survive (and thus make it worthwhile for me to set up a store). Maybe that's just my over-healthy cynicism talking, though. :)<p>Keep up the good work!
Competing with etsy is awesome, but two things:<p>1. How will you drive traffic to the vendors? If they don't get any sales, they won't stay.<p>2. You have to make it look prettier. These artsy types care about looks :)<p>Hope you can get this going, good luck!
Basically my sister uses Etsy.com a lot and wanted something that was free. I started building this in Mid April 2010 in Zope/Python. I know, I know. Dated technology.<p>Anyway if you see some ideas to make this site better, let me know.