Cottage Industry Market

In the past few years, a bunch of internet intermediaries popped up to make large cottage industry markets. Etsy and Uber are a couple of good examples. I had an Etsy account a few years ago and sold some products of my wood shop. I didn't make any money. In fact I probably lost a little money on "advertising". My experience was probably the common one, because over time, that site transformed from being an outlet for small artisans to being like a niche version of amazon where most sellers were just retailing stuff from China.

The funny thing about something like Etsy is the amount of skill and knowledge that goes into making a thing like a wood box or a knitted scarf is about on par with the skill and knowledge that go into making the website. They're really not much more sophisticated than the local newspapers that just list a bunch of ads for local service businesses and individuals selling their stuff, and they provide roughly the same level of service and infrastructure, that is, not much at all.

Craigslist provides even less service and infrastructure but also extracts less money from all the transactions. Most of the sellers list items for free. Weirdly, over the years it's become less and less popular, probably because it offers no intermediary clearing house service for credit payments, plus there's quite a bit of spam and scammer listings. Consequently auto listings have been drying up in the past few years.

My neighborhood has a lot of cottage agriculture, and even a couple of family owned retail produce and farm product businesses. The small time farmer/gardener has a really hard time establishing a market, though. A co-op market for small time food producers could probably work, but it would provide such a marginal value that it would not last long.

Historically, the market provider becomes a dominant participant in transactions even though they're just the intermediary. The market provider then becomes a creditor, and financier via their intermediary position. It's a good question how that relationship could be changed.