First and foremost, you have total control over everything - from how your products are displayed to how and where you market your website or e-store. The latter is particularly important if you have niche products and not general products. For example, if you specialize in baby related products, you'll want to be seen and found on baby related sites and in baby related directories (or at least baby related categories in various directories) so that your marketing efforts are targeted directly towards your specific audience.

You get to keep all the revenue from your sales - no commissions or fees to pay, except of course for your annual website hosting.

Sidenote: When choosing a hosting company, again research thoroughly to make sure you're getting the best deal. You shouldn't have to pay more than $300 a year for your hosting, domain name, and a bunch of other tools and resources to help ensure your success. I highly recommend Site Sell as offering by far the most for your money, you don't have to have all the technical know-how to get started, and they guarantee your success.

Another benefit is that you could offer to host individual pages on your website for other crafters wanting to sell their crafts online. You could generate a revenue for yourself from this in a number of ways - you could charge a flat fee per month, or a percentage of the sales of their products, or you could place paid advertising (like Google AdSense) on their pages. They will benefit from the fact that you've already marketed and are driving targeted traffic to your site and their sales pages. Apart from this idea, another way to expand the products you offer is to buy from wholesalers or to consider dropshipping. And, of course, you can monetize your site in a number of other ways when it's your own, for example by selling advertising space, or by selling other related products and services that you know will be of interest to your customers.

One of the problems with starting off having your sales page on someone else's site is that when you're ready to go on your own, you have to start from scratch again. If you've had your virtual store up for some time and things are going well, you're going to lose all that traffic when you move it to your own website, so if you can, start off by yourself and maximize your future potential right from the beginning.

I'll end off by re-iterating that it's so very important to do your due diligence when researching how and where to sell your crafts online. You really can build a thriving, profitable online business when you have the right tools and information available. Best of success to you!