Supporting small makers, in practice

The arithmetic, stated plainly

When you buy from a maker on Amazon Handmade, Amazon deducts a referral fee of 15% or $0.30, whichever is greater, on every unit shipped. That is the marketplace's published rate for Handmade, and it is the number that matters most to the person who made the thing.

The rest is theirs, minus materials and shipping and the hours. On a $58 board that is roughly $49 reaching the workshop before costs. On a $58 board bought from a big retailer, the maker is a line item in someone's cost of goods and the number is not knowable at all.

We are also paid. This site earns an affiliate commission from Amazon when you buy through our links, at no cost to you, and the Handmade rate is higher than the general one — which is a real incentive we would rather name than hide. It is why the affiliate disclosure is on every page and why how we pick exists as a separate document you can hold us to.

Find the maker, not the product

The single most useful habit on Amazon Handmade is to stop reading the listing and start reading the seller. Every Handmade listing carries a maker's storefront, and the storefront is where the actual information lives: how many products, how consistent the photography, whether there is a location and a name and a paragraph written by a person.

1. Open the storefront from the seller name on the listing. On Handmade this is a maker profile, not a generic brand page.
2. Count the catalog. A potter with forty pieces in a recognizable glaze is a working studio. A brand with four unrelated products across three crafts is a reseller.
3. Look for the second thing you want. If a storefront has two things you would happily give, buy both. One shipment, one maker, and the gift reads as chosen rather than found.
4. Save the storefront. Handmade sellers are hard to rediscover by search, because their listings do not rank the way category pages do. The storefront URL is the thing worth keeping.

What fair trade certification actually covers

Fair trade gifts is a common search and a slippery category, because the certifications behind it were designed for a specific problem: internationally traded commodities and the workers producing them at scale. Coffee, cocoa, cotton, bananas. They certify supply chains, and they are meaningful where they apply.

They mostly do not apply to a domestic maker. A potter in Ohio selling their own work is not a supply chain and will never carry a fair trade seal, which does not make the purchase worse — it makes the label the wrong instrument. Judge a domestic maker on whether they are identifiable and whether the work is theirs.

Where the seal is genuinely informative is imported handwork — the alpaca throws, the Guatemalan textiles, the kantha quilts. There, a supply chain does exist between you and the weaver, and a certification is evidence about it. See handwoven throws for how we treat that category.

Three things that help more than they look like they should

Leaving a review with a photograph

Handmade sellers live or die on a small number of reviews, and photographed reviews convert far better than text ones. It costs two minutes and is the only free thing on this list.

Buying consumables

Candles, soap, balm. A maker who sells you a board sees you once in a decade; a maker who sells you candles sees you every winter. Repeat purchase is what keeps a small studio solvent.

Buying in November, not December

A one-person workshop in the last two weeks before Christmas is triaging. Buying early gets you their better work and gets them a manageable month.

Where to start

If you want one place to begin, begin with a craft rather than a recipient: candles has the deepest genuine maker roster on Handmade, woodcraft has the widest quality spread and therefore the most to gain from picking carefully, and ceramics is where a single potter's hand is most obvious in the object.