Was Etsy too good to be true?
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Ironically, check out mine! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-cracker/po...
They never failed at this. Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move.
FTA
> But the growth — and yet another round of VC funding — put even more pressure on Etsy. Chief technology officer Chad Dickerson had taken over as CEO after Kalin was voted out by the board in July 2011, and in October 2013, in an infamous town hall meeting at Etsy HQ, he announced that the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team.
Much of the community was aghast, fearing the change would ruin the culture of the site forever.
> the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team.
I think your interpretation is a wee bit wide of the mark. The spirit of being able to contract outside manufacturers to help make their products is somewhat different from a2tech's observation of sellers buying a bunch of cheap mass-produced crap and dumping it on Etsy.
There's a world of difference between a seller designing, for example, a nixie clock and outsourcing the PCB and perhaps some chassis/case fabrication, perhaps to China (based on your own design) and another seller dumping a bunch of imported cheap crap on the market.
There are a lot of artisans who make cufflinks based on parts they buy, but the item on sale is really the artisan's.
There are also a lot of cufflinks on sale that aren't really artisanal, just two parts glued together with no taste or imagination, and I have to wade through these while searching for the good ones. The share looks like 99%/1% sometimes.
But:
1. It's not reasonable to deny the artisans the use of that prefab building block, because many of the good ones are good for reasons that aren't related to the prefab block.
2. I can see that it's really difficult for Etsy to draw a line between the two types. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to sell 26×26 varieties of cufflinks with initials, for example?
I don't buy anything other than cufflinks, but it seems to me that the same problem may occur in other categories. Or not.
Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. That these things can fill the listing, so that the artisanal work that is the core to Etsy's business model is in the fringes of its search results.
Some of those look pretty nice.
I agree, this is kinda the point I was trying to make (probably very badly).
I like cufflinks as well so I appreciate your appreciation of them. Sadly I don't own any shirts :/
Either that rule has been dropped, or is simply not (adequately) enforced, in my limited experience of Etsy. Unless "I order it, it comes in a boat from China, I list it for sale" counts as a perfectly good explanation of a process.
There are still many "proper" makers on Etsy (I know people personally who use the site to sell artwork, corsets & other dressware, etc) that are genuinely hand-made, but they are often undercut by those selling similar but mass-produced alternatives (that are usually lower quality, but people often don't seem to care about that until after they receive the product, and they then judge all on Etsy by that standard).
There's a bit of a difference between that and something that looks like Amazon search results.
Lots of great artists have outsourced the commoditiziable components of their work.
If you look at craft people, the ones who try to toil alone making articles that are not thousand euro a piece luxury items you wish they would know how to leverage outsourcing so they could focus on what makes their product unique and not just a batch of labour.
Not only that, there's a debate in the arts communities exactly about this since many artists employ hand labor to do the heavy or dirty work, specially those who make large sculptures or installations, still the vision is the artist's merit.
brand promise that appeals to consumer
+
communication of brand promise
+
delivery of brand promise
Stores that are thriving or surviving such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target, Dollar General, succeed at all three.
Stores that are going out of business at the mall are failing those.
Etsy delivered on those things when it was an exclusive hand-made marketplace. You could buy a magic wand that looked like it would work.
If they see themselves competing with Amazon they'll need to make a TV Network, a cloud computing service, ...
If they want me to go there instead of Amazon, however, it would be to get something I could not get on Amazon, like that magic wand.
It all boils down to inability to scale. These companies have internal narratives that they will scale completely horizontally and that they can automate everything. But at the end of the day I don't think anybody has eliminated the need to perform due diligence on their supply chain. What's strange is that Etsy and Amazon would rather their brands be damaged than hire more people to police what goes on their platforms
amazon has been running into this issue for decades. it's a constant ebb & flow. this is not new information.
https://qz.com/1592802/jeff-bezos-third-party-sellers-on-ama...
Amazon could never ever compete with Etsy in this category. The twist is Etsy can't advertise that they are the font of dreams for whatever IP you'd like to violate the commercial rights of.
I updated my original comment to remove the confusing analogy
As was mentioned, you can find a great deal of that at the Artist Alley of any sizeable fan convention.
The current system of "don't get on the copyright holder's bad side" is silly.
Or we should stop letting companies monopolize markets and become insanely rich off of that thing they came up with 30 years ago. Plug it? Tear it wide fucking open.
I agree the current system is silly but I don't think going more restrictive is the answer.
What if anything should be permissible? Would say for instance - you can commission a Master Sword copy or make one and sell it but manufacturing them enmasse be verbotten?
The current system is kinda stupid. Copyright holders have no incentive to license because reserving the right to sue but not suing is used instead. This is the problem that needs to be addressed.
I want to live in the universe where the resolution is that fan-art is not considered infringement and doesn’t need licensing compared to the universe where the resolution is that all not explicitly licensed art disappears.
Well, yes. That's how laws like copyright work; it's an agreement that we've made to try to achieve some result, with bonuses and tradeoffs. If we decide some part of it isn't working out, then we tweak it to alter the outcomes.
No, there are lots more.
Fair use is the first of over a dozen limitations and exclusions to the otherwise exclusive rights under copyright in Chapter 1 of Title 17 [0]; fair use and home audio recording aren't the only two exceptions.
That being said, complete dumpster fire on the lower-priced items like this article is getting at. I really enjoy Etsy when it can deliver on its promise of opening up a marketplace of skilled artisans who otherwise would've have had a hard time getting started. Hope it can get back to that.
I'm not entirely sure what happened but they ended up refocusing on strictly custom jewelry instead of custom whatever you want that someone else can make. It's really unfortunate because it was an excellent service with very talented makers and I haven't been able to find anything similar to replace it.
Sorry if you're from outside of these markets; we're working on building out to more. Feel free to put in a vote for a particular one :)
Etsy's movement as a site and company drove me away as a frequent buyer of goods - they don't listen to real user feedback (well, mine :)), they're definitely trying to engage the mass market buyer now with quantity not quality and craftsmanship even in search results. Recently. I wanted a silver ring; it took a _lot_ of work to find actual, real handcrafters who bang out the silver bar, solder it into a ring and polish it (I did find two great ones though, a guy in Greece and a gal in Thailand - beautiful rings, bought one from each). But it took me a lot of time and effort just to locate these two actual crafters buried amongst an overwhelming number of pretend crafters selling pressed rings they probably bought in bulk and are just reselling.
Wait. That's not how this works. This is not a price, it's a proportion.
Anyway, it sounds like Etsy has decided to become a more general online retailer, which does open it to a much larger market. It also removes any barriers protecting Etsy from being marginalized by larger retailers. I hope the management really is smarter than everyone else in the field.
It’s not very clear English either way.
Not only that, it's really not Etsy that is forcing this change, it's consumer behavior that has been changed by access to free, fast shipping by both Amazon and others. Etsy has little choice but to ride that wave. If they didn't make this change, sellers on Etsy would be pushed out in the long term anyway.
Not only that, but it's clear that sellers on Amazon often price their shipping costs into the product price, which is the exact option that Etsy built explicitly into this switch: When turning on free shipping, sellers had the ability to say "change my product prices to be [current price] + [shipping cost].
Finally, I sell on Etsy. I switched to free shipping mid July. My sales have improved by about 30% over where I'd expect them to be for this time period. More people are buying more items to get to that $35 threshold. It more than covers the difference in shipping.
Sure, that positive scenario may not play out for all sellers. But then the long term picture wouldn't have been any better as Amazon's own "handmade" venue and cheap mass-produced alternatives eat their sales.
It's the sellers who would eat the cost of increased shipping fees, reducing their operating margins. Etsy is basically telling them to implement price controls or risk lower exposure in search results, and not doing anything to meet them halfway.
>My sales have improved by about 30% over where I'd expect them to be for this time period.
Are you confident that this will be a permanent boost, or do you, like Etsy, feel you'll need to continue riding the waves so as not to be pushed out altogether?
As for whether it will be a permanent boost, I don't know. But it seems that Amazon has long offered free shipping only when you reach a floor of $25/$35, which indicates it might be because it spurred people to spend enough to reach that limit. But I can't say if it will hold for Etsy. But if riding the wave stops from being pushed out all together, then it still results in more profit than the alternative. And if I or other sellers are eventually pushed out anyway, then it was going to happen regardless of Etsy. Which sucks, but it's not Etsy's fault.
There was no consideration for their sellers, a large number of which cannot do free shipping. Etsy want to be "Etsy" not a platform and service for sellers.
Sure some stores won't be affected but plenty had already tried free shipping and reported it did not work, Etsy didn't care. Anyone shipping heavy items or internationally can't do free shipping properly. I know UK stores who have been told to just offer a code and discount back some of the value to their UK customers so that these stores can sell with free shipping in the US. It doesn't make sense. This is a pure revenue driver, it does not benefit stores.
Etsy do not know how to run small businesses and they are forcing people who do to make bad decisions.
You could have offered free shipping anyway if you had wanted to.
And yes, technically it is Etsy that is implementing this change. In that sense they are "forcing" it. But a failure to do this would also have resulted in the slow demise of many of their sellers. In that sense, the market, in order to keep pace with competitors, forced this change. Etsy, acting in its own best interest, also acted in the best interests of a majority of its sellers. A failure to act might have been in the best interest of a minority of its sellers. So it was a choice of doing what's best for Etsy and most sellers or nothing, which would slowly kill Etsy and all of its sellers. Not much of a choice.
In the end, the only reason you use Etsy is to bank on the brand and people's expectations that Etsy is still hand made.
However, even that reputation is losing ground, and soon it will be a store front with limited tools and even more limited features.
We moved off Etsy, and it was the best thing we did for our business.
Edit: I want to add, in hindsight, we didn't need Etsy to be able to move. We could have started on Shopify and been just as successful.
We (mostly my wife) have three Etsy shops, all paying Etsy+ customers. Each shop does probably 30-50 orders a month, so we're not tiny potatoes. We received two low ratings (one three star and one one star) across 6 months in one of our shops. The one star was because Etsy didn't wait until the order was mark delivered by USPS to solicit feedback from the user, so they said "we haven't gotten it yet so I don't know." The other was an issue that the buyer didn't read the listing at all (they complained about the item being smaller than expected, but the measurements on the listing were actually a good bit smaller than what they got so it should have been too big...?). Either way, two somewhat off feedbacks in like 200 sales.
Etsy sends an email that basically says we've fallen below their standards for customer satisfaction and we need to get back on track. When we asked what they were talking about, they said they'd gotten a "significant number" of customer dissatisfaction reports. When pressed, it was those two reviews. When we pushed back that those were kind of unfair negative feedbacks, they just brushed it off and, basically, said we need to get our act together. What the heck?
The kicker? That shop went from 2-3 sales a day on average to zero. For like, weeks. It's finally back and selling things, but I think we were being removed from search results or at least ranked much lower as punishment or something. They've really pumped up this gatekeeping behavior lately, and it's really starting to chafe me. :/ I'm 99% sure because we're paying Etsy+ customers that we get preference in search rankings. I know they definitely prioritize shops that offer free shipping even if the price is higher because they've said so (which is a really annoying way to squeeze your sellers for more money while inciting them to raise prices and thus increasing your percentage take on the final value fees...). I wish they'd stop trying to influence people's discovery so much, but I'm guessing they have to have their data scientists working on something to make money?
But like I said, without the community (which is great) and discoverability of their marketplace, our sales are junk (we've tried). I know we could invest in marketing this or sales that or promoting locally, but frankly we're very small and don't make enough to invest in that sort of stuff to get an equal return. It just sucks that it at least feels like Etsy has become a lot more seller hostile in the past year. :(
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/craft-ideas/how-to/g21...
I wonder what other small-batch custom manufacturing can be found on Etsy at a good price and under what search terms.
More generally, is there a list of "where to get it made" based on manufacturing methods, materials, (small) quantity, size, etc.?
In particular, some things that would be useful for me:
- product enclosures (plastic, metal, wood even?)
- fabric products (backpack? tent? blanket?)
- small metal items
Second, they’re not getting their sellers to ensure they’re not drop shipping or acting as a front to sweatshop manufacturers.
It’s unsure whether they could have grown to their size remaining a craftsperson’s and artisan’s marketplace, but it’d be nice to have a store dedicated to people who are small time producers of craft and artisanal goods.
For a version 2.0, I'm thinking each seller would be required to post a 5-minute video on their production, showing where they do the work, and showing actual people working in a non-factory, non-assembly line environment.
I'd also require on-site visits by an agent to ensure veracity of that.
Yes, this would be enormously invasive / intrusive and a high burden for sellers. And it doesn't scale well. Maybe the sellers could police each other? Have the person in Wilmington who makes HO-scale vintage sports cars also check in on the Wilmington resident who quilts superhero-themed stuff.
I don't know.
I think the video proof is a good step. It probably can be gamed and would need follow up verification to ensure it wasn’t just a prop.
There are a few, none nearly so larger with such a large audience though. I think people that sell on them are often using them as a second option, Etsy as the first. One is aftcra.com. There's also a few services geared toward making it very easy for hand-crafted sellers to make their own shop-- Big Cartel and IndieMade come to mind.
Then I ran across this for Adobe Acrobat XI Pro:
http://www.aftcra.com/fullstop/listing/308980/adobe-acrobat-...
WTF?
The fragmentation is a disservice to consumers. If this move by Etsy leads for vendors to further disperse across some of the other options, then it adds even more barriers for consumers who want to see the full breadth of offerings in a particular vertical. It's unclear Google is really interested in or up to the task of resolving this.
(Shameless plug time.) So we built ATTIC, a hyperlocal search and discovery engine for a limited set of product verticals (furniture, decor, fashion). Etsy makes up a fair share of the product you'll find, but we do it in a curated manner, namely by location. Even more important though, we also index products from hundreds of other stores, dealers and makers that are on other platforms. We're quickly approaching 1000 stores, currently across 11 cities and several more to come. See https://attic.city.
In the end, I'm not sure consumers really care where they get their product from. They're not that loyal. They care about the product and the ease of getting the product. If vendors flee Etsy, the customers will follow. We're hoping we can eliminate the worry about or need to figure out where those dealers went.
This feels like asking the wolf what happened after he bought access to the hen house.
An accounting we will never get, but I would love to see is just how much dysfunction and detriment venture capitalists caused their portfolio companies over the past 15 years.
Fred Wilson gets my attention because unfortunate for him, the book, Hatching Twitter shows just how much discord he sowed at Twitter [0]. He is also on record saying he doesn't regret any of it.[1]
Yes, Etsy exists within the VC system, which demands an acquisition or going public, but how many of the bad decisions throughout its hypergrowth were pushed or enabled by Wilson/USV and Etsy's other VC's?
I think it's important to understand these stories, especially in a world where venture capitalists have positioned themselves and their industry as thought leaders in the startup and growth arenas. VCs' actions are almost always behind the scenes, opaque at best, but when actually brought to light can drastically differ from their public opining.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18656827-hatching-twitte... [1] https://www.quora.com/What-does-Fred-Wilson-think-about-Hatc...
But still, depending on the cost and the average number of packages, it could come out as a significant cost per order.
The core reason why shipping costs were pulled out separately is that it allowed the customer to choose between various options freely, if they needed it tomorrow vs. whenever. If there's no choice, there's much less incentive to do that.
However, there's still at least a little something I can think of; shipping is generally not part of the sales tax. Rolling it into the price means you're also making your customers pay sales tax on it. That depends on whether you've got to pay tax on the item in question, of course, which varies every which way.
Customers also have the option to upgrade to faster shipping if they so wish.
What worries me is the greed in human society, you have a company with profit but the leaders or shareholders want more and more each year, so when there is no more room for growing then someone needs to be milked harder and harder.
Back then, if you wanted to get some great traction, you got into the chats with the 'Moms' -- basically a small group that could easily get a lot of traffic to your shop. Sadly, that aspect of the site died out, they brought back the vintage, and ultimately accepted the non-handmade stuff.
For me, I left Etsy when they dropped / changed the chat part.
Etsy kind of followed the trend of my local indie craft scene. At first it was a small, tight-knit group of actual crafters -- then over time folks who used to visit the shows would blatantly copy another product and start selling... then came the vintage sellers... and then the sellers who sell other sellers, often when they're at the same show as those sellers... and ultimately people selling items that were made overseas that they either designed the pattern for or just purchased and glued something.
It's weird. But overall, as the local craft scenes became more popular, they also became more diluted and generic. There were more people selling, but roughly the same categories of products.
That being said, if you get into the right shows, you can still make bank... but, like Etsy, the maker spirit has died off.
Case in point, I prefer "free shipping" despite being fully aware that it's not a real thing. Just because you're aware that's it bullshit doesn't mean it doesn't work on you.
Not sure if this is it because it's from 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/business/etsy-josh-silver...
This free shipping thing seems like it'll make that worse.
"The New York Times called it (the IPO) a test of whether Wall Street will embrace a company that puts doing social and environmental good on the same pedestal with, if not ahead of, maximizing profits."
A test for which the answer sheet has been available for decades. A company like Etsy had no chance of retaining their original culture once their operations had to fit into Wall Street analysts' "competitor metrics" decks.
Now it'll be measured on the same metrics as Walmart and Amazon, like it or not, and management will be incentivized to continue to push for free shipping and other seller-unfriendly policies to keep that revenue growth up, regardless of whether it's sustainable or not.
Etsy managed to grow by taking on VC money which comes with strings attached. It then went public, to satisfy the VCs, which also comes with strings attached. Moreover, if not for VC money then they probably wouldn't have taken over the market compared to a better funded competitor.
So, to me, the they here is the whole VC ecosystem.
I love that it is a prominent, top-level control. eBay has nothing like it except for "new/used" Condition, which doesn't work nearly as well.
I still think that the filter I want the most is some AI to determine if product photos are "real". Fake backgrounds and generated images are sure signs of a mass-produced item that I'm NOT searching for. Even shots in a light-box are a bad sign. This could be done in a browser extension and I think would produce great results.
“Etsy at its worst is still better than so many companies at their best,” she says now. “They try to live their values and help people succeed, and not every company can say that.”
Similarly a few years ago when the EU made it mandatory to have the full price listed for air fares I was really happy. Before you'd have a price then when it came time to checkout you'd have taxes, landing fees, handling charges all added and end up with a price 3 times what was originally quoted.
Since I can't get the item without shipping it should just be included in the price.
Shipping prices can vary widely for items of significant size.
It is easy for a giant like Amazon to negotiate shipping terms that they can amortize over a vast amount of sales, but that is not true for a small seller moving only double digit numbers of items.
lol... so the solution is to make customers balk much earlier in the funnel when they see unreasonable base prices? And put (craft item, low volume) sellers in a terrible position to give up extremely important marginal revenue by not raising prices to fully offset shipping costs? Or else lose sales with dropoff in search placement (even if you’re the more relevant search result to satisfy a certain customer query)...
Etsy just seems gassed for ideas.
For some goods cost hiding is good because there is a mental commitment that is made by getting to the check-out process and fees are an annoyance but not a deterrent.
For Etsy they believe that cost hiding is bad because the number of people who would pass up an item at a higher initial price is less than the number who would put the item back on the second evaluation once the ‘price to own’ is known. Etsy is cost anchoring against their own interests.
Good for the seller, maybe. I'll give up on sites that do this and look elsewhere on principle, no matter how deep I am in the checkout process.
I sell on Etsy, and in my case my sales have gone up about 30% since the change, and it more than covers the shipping costs.
1. Member-owned. There are so many details, but the idea is to align the company directly with the values of the members.
2. Grow by IRL social graph, with people inviting and vouching for new members. You can't sign up from the web, only from in-person contacts. Probably hardware-backed (Yubikey or whatever). Web-of-Trust... handwave!
3. Open business. Radical openness and honesty as in "Honest Business: A Superior Strategy for Starting and Managing Your Own Business" by Salli Rasberry & Michael Phillips https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22105625-honest-business
4. Minimum prices, high. Like a baseline of US$150. I'm seriously. The #1 problem most Etsy sellers have is they set their prices too low. The market should foster the idea in customers' heads that their purchases are deliberate economic decisions to support a given person IRL as an independent creative success. You also get a fantastic scarf or whatever.
5. Straight-up handmade. No compromises. This is a showcase and marketplace for artisans and creators.
6. Explicit focus on the growth and success of the members. Things like organizing free classes on running a business, maybe tied in with SCORE ( https://www.score.org/ ) or something. I think there should be an option for members to have public goals and meters for themselves like e.g. Kickstarter. I'd also like to have "plans" available to outline the paths to certain levels of success. Like, Plan A "Comfortable life in the country, plus good health insurance." to Plan O "Be the next Oprah".
7. Along those lines, there should be specific help for IP: developing it and protecting it, and paths to automated production. If there's a demand for your style or product the market should help you fulfill it, as opposed to having third parties rip off your designs and order imitations from rapid-turn-around factories. This has to be harmonized with the idea that the primary market is strictly handmade only. You shouldn't be punished for making something so popular it's pirated. The modern automatic economy should be a service, not a competitor.
8. There should be a kind of graduation when a member becomes successful enough on their own that they don't need the marketplace anymore. I'm not sure of the details here because I don't mean that they should be kicked out or anything like that, but rather that, once you've "made it", your role should shift a bit to where you're helping others reach their success.
9. All-in-all, double-down on the idea that we're really creating a viable new economy here. Emphasize tracking the supply chains and try to ground them in ecological sources. Have explicit ratings and discussions of the sources for raw materials. People who live off grid should have some sort of extra oomph, like badges to display or something. Promote sustainable, or better yet regenerative, economy.
VC capital and fast growth are toxic