IMHO it's not an advantage for the buyer: buying two items results would now result in you implicitly paying the shipping cost twice (I'm unfamiliar on if it was calculated like that etsy, but from my experience it's standard business practice in other e-shops to make you pay shipping only once for all items, if they can fit in the box).
In theory, it may not be. In practice, lots of sites that split out shipping make it hard to find out just what shipping will cost until you’re very deep in the checkout process, and then charge insane rates.
A long time ago I wrote a warehouse management system for a fishing gear manufacturer that shipped enough packages every day that they had a contract with a courier for a fixed price on their deliveries. Regardless of how many there were and where they were doing a lorry turned up at the warehouse at 4pm every day, all the outgoing packages got loaded on it, and off they went. It cost a lot but it was far cheaper than pricing the packages individually, especially as fishing rods are quite an unusual shape. It meant shipping was a fixed business cost, so the price was only part of the product price in the same way that the office rent was a part of the product cost, or the CEO's salary. I imagine quite a lot of B2C product businesses work the same way.
Employee salaries would also come out as a significant cost per order. The point is that it might not make any more sense to pull out explicit shipping prices as it would to include an employee-salary fee on all products.
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.
Just wanted to add that I work with a large ecommerce company and they have exactly the same arrangement. They do charge customers a token (small) amount for shipping but depending on the size/weight of the order some customers are paying over the odds and some under.
Customers also have the option to upgrade to faster shipping if they so wish.
Yeah, but it works great for Amazon but not as in the example in the article where someone sells maybe 10 products a month.
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.
I wish Etsy would hang on to being the "alternative" seller so that i can still satisfy my well-paid hipster sensibilities by going "Oh, they add shipping costs but that's ok because i'm supporting independent makers", but can see why they have to do this.
Hard to say, but with the US set to withdraw from the UPU, it may become much harder for those cheap items with free shipping from China to compete in the same way.
It won't, they'll just drop-ship bulk to some guy in the US who answered a 'make money from home' ad, who will receive a weekly 'box' of packages to send out with bulk-rate prepaid USPS envelopes. A lot of places already have this workaround going on.
The looming scepter of Amazon seems to cast a very long shadow nowadays. It is beginning to feel like the bogeyman on which every company blames their current struggles.
Well, Amazon did go out and create a new seller venue, "Handmade", specifically to compete with Etsy in this area. So it's not like some random retailer complaint, Etsy legitimately has a new struggle as a result. It's honest competition though. And plenty of Etsy sellers (me, for example) checked out Amazon Handmade, hated it, and still just sell on Etsy. So Amazon can compete on prices and a larger captive audience, Etsy is still competing on quality, unique marketplace (though more generic than it used to be) and a better seller experience.
> “Right now, customers add things to their cart and balk at shipping costs, then bounce from the site for good.“
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)...
You see a item on the page and think “I’m willing to pay that to have it.” Then you add it to your cart and see a large fee added and you are given a moments pause “Is this item really worth it?” and close the tab.
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.
> 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.
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.
Well, presumably they have the data on sell-through rates for people that add items to their carts & get free shipping compared to those that do not get free shipping.
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.
I looked at selling stuff on Etsy recently and was completely turned off, basically you are competing against cheap knockoff or mass produced products from sweatshops. Despite what management says, its nothing more now than an Amazon with a better looking website. What Etsy was, was a valuable place for small craftspeople, what Etsy is today is just another money machine.
I sell on Etsy. It's harder, yes, since the explosion of clearly mass-produced knockoffs. However, with quality products (and especially a focus on producing quality photos of those products) sellers can still do well, and plenty of buyers recognize the difference. In fact plenty of buyers deliberately avoid those super low priced items because they are looking for legitimately handmade quality items. I actually raised my prices to help distinguish myself in that way and while I don't sell as many items, I still sell about the same $ amount.
I would pay good money for a Chrome extension that would intelligently remove opening vignettes and other human-interest crud that every writer feels compelled to insert in putative analysis.
I agree, but I'm kind of curious as to why it's so pervasive. There must be some sort of A/B test that writers have done that proves it improves engagement. But which people actually are more engaged by it?
Etsy fell apart when they failed to police non-handmade goods. For example I was looking for a picture frame and any permutation of search terms I used returned thousands of results from a handful of sellers that are obviously just Chinese junk I could buy at Wal-Mart (all mislabeled of course--I was searching for 'walnut 18x24 picture frame' and the results contained frames of all colors, shapes, and wood types). Then to make things even worse when I waded through the results I DID find someone selling a frame like I wanted, but then I looked a bit further down the page and found the EXACT same frame from another seller. They're located geographically near to each other (separate cities though) and they used the same pictures. And the prices were quite different. Some sort of scam is going on there but I'm not sure what--either people are buying from a local craftsman and reselling on Etsy, or the local craftsman is selling his products online at slightly different prices for a reason I couldn't quite grasp.
For every comment like yours there is an other saying Etsy fell apart when they started making legitimate sellers jump thorough a bunch of hoops proving they are really hand-making their things. And a story about someone who got wrongly thrown out. I'm not sure it's possible to solve both problems.
It’s possible to solve both problems if you are content not to be the only provider of this service in the world.
I realise the forces dictate that direction, but that’s also why everything turns to crap in the end.
It's a love-hate relationship.
Kickstarter also used to be about the little guy. Now you need thousand dollar videos, and pay to market your own project!
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.
> Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move.
> 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.
I like cufflinks and wear them all winter. So I buy some, and I don't mean "one pair per decade". This comment is specific to cufflinks, or maybe it just uses cufflinks as an example?
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.
That's the second category. One end is the same, the joining bar is the same, and the other end is decorated. Once you have a few pairs, you may come to grow tired of that sameness. Here's the more artisan pair I wore yesterday. Steel wire and four well-selected pebbles from a stream:
> willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team
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).
The rule was placed so the community could swallow the pill. Once factory built products make it into the marketplace, it is a lot easier to gradually decrease rule enforcement over time, until you are effectively a niche alibaba, allowing factories to sell directly to consumers (they probably sold the board on that exact term)
The last thing I bought from Etsy was a crewel embroidery kit. It wasn't handmade; the pattern was printed on the fabric commercially. But the person selling it was the designer b there's literally no one else in the world doing that.
There's a bit of a difference between that and something that looks like Amazon search results.
Allowing outsourcing was the morally only correct thing to do. Otherwise the craftsmen would have been doomed to eternal servitude to their art. An artists signature on a work is not a guarantee the artist vouches for working on it only themselves. It's a guarantee the artists vouches for the quality of the product. So an artist signature is more of a form of branding than a signed proof of n units of work by person x.
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.
>Lots of great artists have outsourced the commoditiziable components of their work.
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.
I've had good luck with Etsy when buying things you can't find at Walmart. There's plenty of knitters and crocheters on Etsy who use the site to avoid accumulating finished objects. They're usually willing to do custom things, too. And Etsy is home to the only person in the world (that I know of) who is doing modern reproductions of cuneiform tablets.
Etsy became a platform for private label sellers, similar to Amazon's marketplace, but with a slightly different audience that focuses more on whimsical and feminine aesthetics.
Amazon is running into similar issues too with counterfeit items and other scammers. In fact I think this happens with any sufficiently large ecommerce platform
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
I'd say the primary similarity is the marketplace of third party sellers. For products where Amazon.com is the seller, it has about as many problems as anywhere else. Where Amazon.com is not the seller, it is like etsy or ebay, where the product listings themselves are completely unreliable. The #1 thing I hate about Amazon is how they mix third party items with items where they are the seller. However, third party has grown from 3% to 58% of sales on the site, so I don't see how they can get rid of it or fix it.
They can’t beat Amazon but they’re trying to become it.
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.
Is there an alternative to Etsy for actual hand-crafted 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 was thinking of social verification ala PGP web of trust, but this can be gamed a bit by rivals. No, so-and-so isn’t legit. But maybe have nominally compensated inspectors, upstanding members of the community that others in that community trust. So kinda like what you were saying but vetted themselves for trust and getting compensated.
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.
I would rather a 2.0 be curated sellers and not open to everyone. It wouldn't be able to scale to some giant size but it would be nice to shop a selection of quality items. Handmade or factory-made doesn't really factor in for me. I just feel browsing Etsy right now is like looking at a Teespring for crafts.
> "Is there an alternative to Etsy for actual hand-crafted goods?"
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.
Etsy is my go-to for counterfeit licensed merchandise. Need some video game themed dish towels? Cuff links inspired by your favorite book series? It's all there. Etsy is the genie lamp you get when you cross image search with artists' alley.
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 understood you the first time around; I was under the impression that it was Chinese manufacturers who ripped IP. Is it really Americans handcrafting your fandom products or is it just Chinese bulk export?
I've bought a bunch of such (videogame-related merchandise mostly) items off Etsy and its a bit hit or miss. Some stuff seems to be legitimately hand made (you can often tell because they have a link to their instagram/whatever or even often include a handwritten note with your order), but it does seem like a lot of stuff is just dropshipped from China too.
Selling fan-art should honestly just be allowed at this point. There are a lot of rules that should be in place like not being able to directly use the official assets or labeling that it's 3rd-party and not endorsed but these kinds of things should be able to operate above board.
The current system of "don't get on the copyright holder's bad side" is silly.
> Selling fan-art is just a copyright loophole that should honestly just be plugged at this point.
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 don't disagree with you but I think perfect is the enemy of good in this case. Changing copyright a little bit to allow fan-art is a much smaller problem than dismantling copyright in it's entirety and we can work on both.
Serious question - what is the purpose served in closing that loophole? What damages are averted or gains realized to society?
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?
There is no loophole. Infringement is infringement even if you're small potatoes and haven't been sued yet. This isn't a fair use issue when you're engaged in commercial sale of appropriated works.
Okay sure, maybe loophole was poor wording but my point is that this really shouldn't be considered infringement and that you should be able to sell fan-art.
It shouldn't be infringement... because you don't want it to? There is nothing special about fan art that lets you break the law even if some copyright/trademark holders have a benevolent attitude toward it.
Yeah, I mean that pretty much the gist of how most laws work. The market for fan-art is absolutely massive which operates in a weird limbo of being de facto licensed as long as the copyright holder likes it or if there would be public outcry if it was taken down.
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.
> It shouldn't be infringement... because you don't want it to?
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.
That's not how copyright works. All unauthorized copies are infringing. In the US the only exceptions are "fair use" and home audio recordings. Neither of which apply when selling things owned by another party.
> In the US the only exceptions are "fair use" and home audio recordings.
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.
a) Etsy doesn't want that since they want to maximize their own revenue b) Preventing people from seeing a path to this being a full time job makes Etsy less appealing even to small time sellers
I don't see the logic in removing what made them unique and worth visiting for the sake of increasing revenue. To me, this seems like just one more example of how relentless pursuit of growth destroys good things. IMHO they should have let Etsy stay as small as it needed to to maintain it's charm, and focused on building on other things, even another market place site, if they wanted more revenue.
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.
Leadership. I don't know if it was Etsy executives, hired strategists, or shareholders that prioritized growth of their marketplace over its quality, but it was, in retrospect, not a good way to handle the brand. The other possible ways they could have grown their company are innumerable even if they aren't obvious.
You may be right it's the VCs that are to blame.
It would make Etsy less money, so they wouldn't do it, but there are also plenty of sellers that are legitimately making handmade items and have ~1000 listings. They play the long tail game, and also list similar items multiple times, like in different colors, because it allows them to show options without making someone click through to a listing.
Drop-ship vendors would just create multiple profiles to get around that. Given they aren't managing to police that sort of thing as well as people want already, inviting more of it would be unhelpful.
My wife and I have been slowly buying furniture for our house, and Etsy is our go-to. I don't know where else I can search for such a wide array of styles for things like desks and coffee tables, find exactly the style I want, and THEN get it custom-made to the dimensions I want. I really like the way it opens up smaller shops like that for higher-end purchases like furniture, and I've never had a bad experience despite buying items in the 4-digit range.
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.
There used to be a site for exactly this called custommade.com. Aside from a list of items that others have already made for you to browse, you could also put up a description of the project and let craftsmen contact you with questions or bids for the project.
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.
That sounds (sounded) awesome! As I was typing up my previous comment I was wondering if there are any other services out there that does this same sort of thing. Fingers crossed.
Looks like a great service. Sadly none of your current markets are near me and the closest city I could vote for is an eight hour drive away. I'll check back periodically and see if you've expanded to anywhere within driving range. Thanks for letting me know about the service!
> “The house was burning and nobody was paying attention,” Etsy board member and Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson told the New York Times.)
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.
Anecdotal comment: I've been a buyer of Etsy sourced things since around 2011 (roughly 160 purchases? hard to tell without manually counting, 16 pages of about 10 per page) - I have watched the features of the site degrade over time around the community aspects, usability features and whatnot - the way making and sharing interest lists was drastically changed, for example, and is now frustrating and non-intuitive. Certain other features were introduced with no way to edit or disable them, such as their Notifications fiasco. I rarely visit the site anymore - even Instagram has better handcrafted makers who are easier to find than Etsy. (contrary to many popular memes, IG has a lot of healthy small communities for collectors and aficionados)
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.
This story is framed all wrong. It even admits that this change will improve sales, but still comes down hard on Etsy for making a change. A change that improves sales for its sellers.
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?
Eating the shipping costs is more than made up for in increased sales. So my margin per item is smaller, but my volume is higher and overall profit is up.
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.
It is 100% Etsy forcing this change. Josh Silverman is there to increase revenue and this is how they are doing it.
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.
Your right, I could have offered free shipping. But it wasn't until Etsy made it nearly a requirement that I did so. I wasn't happy, but it actually turned out to be better for me. Maybe there are some small minority of sellers that truly can't offer free shipping, but I don't see how most can't offer it and simply add the cost to their items, or as it was in my case, result in more sales that more than make up for the difference.
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.
So, we were an Etsy seller. At first it was nice, but then slowly we saw the problems, the issues, and Etsy started adding "features" that were insulting at best. Etsy might be fine for the home hobbiest, but the reality is, at this point, anyone doing serious business on Etsy is looking for alternatives. Shopify is a probably the most popular choice. But Etsy hasn't done anything to support sellers for a long time.
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.
I guess maybe it depends on what you're selling, but we found we badly needed the discoverability of the Etsy marketplace. Which sucks, because as of late they've been doing a lot of things to annoy sellers.
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. :(
Opportunities abound in this space for someone to do things better for consumers. The e-com retail space is soooo fragmented. Take furniture for example, a maker/dealer has all of the following online retail options (and probably more): Etsy, eBay, ApartmentTherapy, 1stDibs, Chairish -- and those are just the marketplaces. They can also chose a more roll their own such as an ecom site from SquareSpace, Shopify, Wix etc. The same is true, but even more fragmented, in the area of fashion. Add to the above PoshMark, theRealReal and many others.
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.
My one Etsy experience was great, I paid an order of magnitude less than "regular" businesses were asking for a small piece of brass acid-etched with my own .svg design. I turned to Etsy because I imagined that such an item could be manufactured at home with low overhead cost. Still, many Etsy sellers were asking more than I expected and it was only when I searched based on a common use for such an item (not my use) that I found a great price. My use: boat plaque. Common use: pet tag.
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.?
"It doesn’t help that Etsy changed its transaction fee from 3.5 percent to 5 percent last June — fair enough, it had been flat for 13 years, but still, the timing."
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.
Usually if you say you're raising prices because they've been flat for years the implied justification is that it's to match inflation. But that doesn't apply to a percentage fee.
I tried selling some blacksmithed items I created on etsy and found it really hard to even get views. I was able to sell a few steel ladles I forged to a local craft store, but I failed big on the internet. Ah well.
There is no such thing as "free shipping". On a site where people rarely make any bulk purchases, adding shipping into the base price is the right thing to do. It's just behavioral economics.
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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadBut 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.
This free shipping thing seems like it'll make that worse.
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.
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.
https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/cufflinks.jpg
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...
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?
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.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-1
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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. :(
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.
Not sure if this is it because it's from 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/business/etsy-josh-silver...
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
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.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/craft-ideas/how-to/g21...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/regretsy-closure
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.