This is actually probably a result of Etsy's last round of bad PR, where one of the sellers they were promoting (Ecologica Malibu) was actually a reseller. Etsy has rampant problems with resellers.
I don't see how they would not, or how they'd adequately deal with resellers. It'd be like github trying to ensure all people pushing code up to github have the proper rights to that code.
Nevertheless, they have to try to deal with it. Their brand is homemade and vintage. That's why people come to Etsy instead of eBay or Amazon. If their users feel like they have to slog through mass-produced stuff to get to what they want, or worse, if they feel like they are being scammed into buying fake homemade items, they will stop using Etsy.
Huh. I don't remember seeing any other blog posts from anyone dissatisfied with Etsy previously — is this their first negative publicity?
It'll be interesting to see how they respond. I am reminded of the smashed antique Paypal violin story ( http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27 ), where PayPal adopted the standard PR strategy of "saying nothing at all so that the story will go away."
>Huh. I don't remember seeing any other blog posts from anyone dissatisfied with Etsy previously — is this their first negative publicity?
Not exactly [0].
I had no idea "handmade" was such a big deal at Etsy.
Regardless, the way they've handled this case seems pretty terrible, right down to the aggravatingly detached language used to correspond with him. Something really irks me about humans seemingly trying to be robotic, particularly in the process of performing a subjective review.
I don't get why it would be so horrible for someone to not hand-assemble something they sell on Etsy, can someone please explain? (Yes, I know it's against the point of the site, but is it really worth terminating a product? Why not just post a notice?)
The products sold on etsy are valuable because they are hand crafted. That is their value-add, if any mass-production products make it in, their brand is diluted.
That is - they are really selling the hand-craftedness of the items, rather than the items themselves.
Etsy should open up a new site that handles businesses that outgrow Etsy. Seems silly to try and squeeze everyone into the same mold and then not have an option to make money on those who are "too" successful to hand make everything.
It's not about "outgrowing" Etsy. Their entire model is based around avoiding commodity items and towards "boutique", handcrafted, or vintage. In theory, at least. In reality they're selective about the non-handcrafted stuff they tolerate (bought in scale from AliBaba) and what they don't.
The thing is though, there are many steps in making most products, and where you draw the line seems pretty vague.
If you pushed hard enough, you could probably make a case for anything on Etsy as being "not handmade." Where did the yarn in that "handmade" sweater come from? Was it hand-spun? Who raised the sheep?! Is the dye from hand-raised and harvested vegetable sources or is it... INDUSTRIAL?!1?!
Given Etsy's touchy-feely narrative I'm betting they're just generally kind of suspicious of anything electronic and being disproportionately harsh in this case...
The market for unique/ handcrafted looking stuff would probably be even bigger than the market for actual handcrafted. Handcrafted takes a ton of time and adds a large premium to price.
Try sending Etsy a link to your YouTube channel. I don't know if any of those videos feature the device in the dispute, but they demonstrate you're capable of making some pretty cool digital audio equipment.
I sent Etsy a link to another device I'd built and it's build process thinking this would serve as a demonstration of my ability and position of assembler.
Wow. Contrast this with the front-page HN post about kickstarter not doing anything about a project that over funded 20x and went silent for a year and a half https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707827
The individual instances where policies fall down can be pretty nutty, but I honestly don't envy companies that have to solve this problem and figure out where to walk the line (at scale, no less).
I'm kind of siding with Etsy here, despite thinking he is being honest. The information provided is not enough to tell if he isn't just buying ready-made products and etching his logo on the back. It's a tough judgment, really, at what threshold does something qualify as hand-made?
But in that case, the art was an original design (supposedly). They don't need a sweatshop, it's just a run of prints.
What's happening here is more like he made a stencil from someone else's art and says it should count as hand made because he paints each canvas using the stencil and puts it in a generic frame he made.
I agree there's not enough information to determine how much he is contributing. I see some wood and a soldering iron, but I don't see evidence he is populating the boards himself, or his jig for making the finger joints. He might be but he doesn't show a set up sufficient to determine. I'm also skeptical of the claims that there are trade secrets involved in assembling known designs and boards made by others and putting together a rectangular case. The Bob Moog factory in Asheville has glass windows around their factory floor and customers are invited to watch their entire assembly process. Does Moog have more protection worthy trade secrets in their assembly methods than these designs? Probably.
If he is putting fully assembled boards into a premade box, is it hand made? In his post it sounds like he is saying he designs the front panel layout and has it cut and stenciled at a facility somewhere, and no doubt he screws in the potentiometers, attaches the knobs, and solders the leads. He says the boards come from China and are designed by someone else. He doesn't say if he populates the boards or if they come finished, ready for lead attachment. If lead attachment and the panel layout this is the extent of his work, perhaps etsy might not consider that truly handmade. Or perhaps they want more disclosure about how much is done. Maybe some consider that handmade, others not. It's kind of hard to say. Let's say I am a customer and someone is selling original "handmade" instrument designs in a wooden case. I very well may assume from this claim that it was their own design and they made the box. I probably would not be shocked if the board etching was done elsewhere. But then what if I find out that all the electronics were designed by another person and the boards are not just etched but populated in a large Chinese factory and arrive at the seller's house assembled. Was I ripped off by the claim it was handmade? Maybe.
To argue by analogy, are the (no doubt hundreds) of "clocks" listed on etsy that are no more than a cheap prebought movement mounted through a hole in a piece of wood in violation of the same policy? What about the driftwood lamps and such which are just prebought components fished through holes someone drilled?
To play devils advocate, the driftwood lamps are all unique pieces made with lighting parts that probably couldn't be made by an individual. A clockwork is outside the scope of individual construction as well.
The driftwood wasn't made by the person, but by nature.
You saying the clockwork is outside the scope of individual construction, but this guy is getting hammered for using a circuit board? Because yeah, those are so much easier to knock up compared to a clock mechanism...
Any Tom, Dick or Harry, can drill a whole for a light fitting in some driftwood.
I said I was playing devils advocate but I guess I will continue that role.
He's not getting hammered for using a circuit board, I highly doubt Etsy is concerned about that. What they are concerned about is whether or not the guy is doing the work on these. He hasn't shown enough for me to be able to say that he is putting them together. He has pictures of a workbench, some soldering equipment, some wood and other parts, and the finished product.
How does this differ from a driftwood lamp or a clock with a ready-built clockwork? It's not just semantics. Obviously there are things that Etsy allows and things they don't but it's also the craftiness (is that a word?) of the project. I'll be honest that this guy's project doesn't seem very crafty, whether or not he's putting everything together there's nothing really crafty or unique about it. This doesn't take anything away from what it is or the demand for it, it just might not fit in as an Etsy business.
Depends on how good he is. I built a circuit board with over a thousand solder joints; at the start, you could easily see it was soldered by hand. By the time I was done, it looked like it was dipped in solder.
>The Bob Moog factory in Asheville has glass windows around their factory floor and customers are invited to watch their entire assembly process.
That's because moog have been peddling the same circuits/sounds for decades, attaching massive markups to Bob Moog's name. Allowing people to see the process is just part of the marketing game.
Not that they don't sound good of course. But the world really doesn't really need any more 2osc monosynths with 24db/oct ladder filters and no interesting features. Especially when they cost $1000 and up.
To some extent I agree. Yes, I initially mistook the situation for some sort of intellectual property theft. But how could I not? No other answer seemed to make sense. Without exaggeration, I have created a dirt cheap technique for crafting beautiful cases using almost no manual labor or dexterity through the use of a laser cutter. Why would I assume Etsy only wishes to support my interests. That makes a whole lot less sense than the paranoid IP theft possibility.
Half of this argument is rejecting Etsy's unfair demands for more documentation while my shop remains close and my ability to sell if frozen on non-existent grounds. Guilty until proven innocent policy drove me mad.
Moog is an international company. In a way, I'm not exaggerating when I say all other synths are just derivatives of what they do and they have the priviledge to not give a hoot about people looking into their windows. They know they own the synth world. As a small scale assembler you can understand that we cherish our procedures a bit more as it can make or break us. But to be honest, I make everything as open-source as I can, because I imagine it going to kids like me just trying to make weird noises. When I imagine a big company using it, it drives me mad. Something I'll have to reconcile.
The "hand made" issue is almost null to me at this point. I've made a unique enclosure for a device in a batch of three. They're made by hand.
You are absolutely not "paranoid" or somehow "wrong" for assuming that people in this world would not do something like this to get their dirty dickbeaters on your ideas. The whole world is full of shitheads and thieves, and it is absolutely right of you to assume the worst, because the worst is often the case when it comes to business.
I guess he should have should the laser etch in process - or maybe mail them a special "Hello Etsy!" laser etched bit of wood.
He could have described his process a lot more clearly. He could have said which bits were bought in, and then which bits he did more work to, and then what gets assembled to what.
In an age of 3D printed firearms how can one doubt what it takes to build such electronics?
I especially like the wood casework.
I used to work for a guy who built his own hardwood cabinets to house his computers because his wife wanted things to be "pretty."
The cabinets were oversize and easy to work on besides being beautiful.
Judging by Regretsy, the moment Elmer's Glue gets into the mix.
He should have called it a "found electronic objects sculpture", and also glued a uterus to the bottom of it.
When his project is inevitably accepted back onto Etsy, he should make some marketing hay out of this, because his project is so ambitious and well-finished that Etsy thinks it must be a large-scale commercial project.
...probably didn't build actual clock himself, he's just cutting a base for it and applying a photograph. So, that's interesting w/r/t the article. (Edit: Oh, someone below me said that already.)
At any rate, thank you for showing me Regretsy. I didn't want to work today, and this is a good start.
The last time I checked my ethics and fundamental laws, the burden of the proof was on the accuser, and the doubt was with the defendant.
That said, US business customs are hard to grasp for me. The only thing that is certain nowadays is that for everything promised in the advertisement material there is a mangled TOS clause for the company to avoid delivering it.
That is because while it is easy to get your money back for most transactions if there is a disagreement, wide range legal battles are a much bigger threat.
Heck if you don't have the right TOS you could get sued by someone who never purchased from you in a court on the other side of the country.
> The last time I checked my ethics and fundamental laws, the burden of the proof was on the accuser, and the doubt was with the defendant
That is the case when there is punishment available, and both parties are acting in good faith. When the defendant is a "spammer" then there isn't really any punishment available: eg suing them would be extremely expensive and unlikely to succeed for logistical reasons. And a spammer isn't acting in good faith - they are poisoning the well. If you tell them exactly how your "poison" detector found what they were doing, then you've just told them how to work around it so the arms race escalates with the spammer getting a head start.
This is close to the "terrorist argument", the idea that some kind of actions warrant the suspension of due process.
Holding strongly to your values is holding due process in the face of exceptional circumstances. Otherwise you're just getting down to your enemy's level, hence not doing better that spammers.
Spammers clog the pipes, drown relevant information under irrelevant one and hinder the free-flowing business of innocents, so we are creating procedures that clog the pipes, suck people's focus away and hinder the free-flowing business of innocents. And that get people used to arbitrary decisions and based on no due process.
these are general principles, it's not mandatory to apply them. But not applying them prevents you from claiming to belong to some categories, like "ethical" (or "democratic" if you are a country). But it's perfectly legal to be a business douche, just don't claim otherwise. In that case, I'm not sure being a business douche when trying to appeal to hipsters is a consistent position.
Well, I know that going on an internet stranger's word alone isn't much--but hear me out.
I know the man. Known him for years; lived with him. I watched him teach himself how to build electronics simply from books he checked out from our college's library. I've been in his workshop and watched him build his devices. He's legit, and this is fucking unfair. He's unemployed and this is one of his few sources of income right now.
I don't think he has done anything wrong, maybe I shouldn't have said "I'm siding" with Etsy; I just can see their point of view. It doesn't really justify the less-than-friendly communication and shutting down his sales without notice.
He should definitely set up sales in multiple sites like Tindie or Gumroad.
I see a ton of moleskine cashier notebooks on etsy with nothing more a rubber stamp inked on the front. I know it's different than etching a logo on the back.
What's the criteria for modification. How much must you change an object before it passes. Maybe if he covered it in fake rhinestones he would have been OK.
> What's the criteria for modification. How much must you change an object before it passes. Maybe if he covered it in fake rhinestones he would have been OK.
I think this would be something that Etsy should clarify. I imagine that if each case was hand painted with a different design it would have been OK.
But what if instead of a real painting, it was just splashes of color? Or a stamp print of your logo?
Sadly, I'm guessing your rhinestone comments dead on.
Please. There's plenty of evidence in those photos that more than convinces me. And for Etsy to do this while just about everything else on their site is mass-produced sweatshop crap is total bullshit.
I'm always hazardous when building something on someone else's infrastructure. If they can shut down your entire income stream "just because", that probably isn't a good situation to be in.
Everyone's in that situation. If you're selling online, your host can shut you down. Your payment processor can shut you down. Your supplier can shut you down. If you sell offline, your landlord can shut you down. Your bank can shut you down. You can set up a table in front of your house and try to sell from there with cash only, and your city/township can come shut you down.
Until some of that happens, it probably makes sense to avail yourself of the most profitable venue and marketing channels available to you; if Etsy brings you exposure you wouldn't have operating elsewhere, use it until you have a problem. Most people probably aren't capable of replicating the entire commercial ecosystem just to avoid being reliant on any of it, and even when they are, focusing on that instead of getting their product/service in front of customers probably isn't the most profitable path. It's better to have contingency plans for unlikely events than to act like they've already happened.
The key is to be able to swap out as much as your set up as possible with something roughly interchangeable. You have to ask yourself, every time you rely on somebody else, "If these people drop the hammer on me, what will I do?"
For example, if you develop an iOS app and Apple decides (for whatever reason) not to accept it, you will have a bunch of useless Objective-C code, which can basically be ported to another language and platform, or thrown in the trash.
Conversely, if you develop a web app on a cloud PaaS, and the provider treats you wrong or isn't reliable, you can swap out with another service, or host it yourself. You may have to do some work to get everything situated in the new environment (how much work that is depends on the service, from what I understand), but you do have a backup plan in case things go south.
Hosting providers' terms of service are usually pretty straightforward: unless you engage in illegal activities or interfere with their operations, they won't shut you down. In any case, it's easy to find another hosting provider if you need one.
Landlords can't easily throw you out before your lease expires. They usually have to give you notice in advance that they won't be renewing your lease. Commercial leases are frequently long-term, since no company wants to have to deal with relocating every year. A lease is a contract enforceable in court.
Dealing with Etsy's somewhat arbitrary rules seems quite a bit more precarious. I don't think that anyone who invested a significant amount of capital in their business would want to put up with that kind of uncertainty.
> Everyone's in that situation. If you're selling online, your host can shut you down. Your payment processor can shut you down. Your supplier can shut you down. If you sell offline, your landlord can shut you down. Your bank can shut you down. You can set up a table in front of your house and try to sell from there with cash only, and your city/township can come shut you down.
True, but in each of the situations, there's generally a lot of doable options. Hosting is a completely commoditized business with thousands of plausible options. For payment processing, there are many possible processors just for credit cards, 'show online pharmacies stay up, and many options to credit cards (including up-and-coming things like Bitcoin). 'Your supplier' is too generic to address, so maybe not there. There are many houses or buildings on the market to try out if you're able to make the rent in the first place, so that's not a huge issue. Countless banks to choose from, both online banks and mortar banks. And you may well be switching city/township in the first place when you're leaving your current landlord, so as long as you don't have to leave the country (which could be a big issue) you're not terribly badly off unless you're a local business which needs to be in a specific place.
In contrast, how many successful marketplaces for handmade goods are there besides Etsy?
This is a major problem for a lot of digital businesses.
Consider the following platforms that deliver vast quantities of consumer have alternatives which are tiny in market size or severely lacking:
-Google Adwords, Adcenter delivers a fraction of the traffic with continual quality issues
-Google's organic search traffic. Encyclopedias could be filled with stories of companies that built large businesses around Google's targeted free traffic, and flopped.
-Facebook, no meaningful alternatives in size and scope.
-eBay, any other giant auction market?
-Craigslist, I can't think of an alternative to this either.
-App Store, alternative being Cydia, not a great one since all of your customers have to "break" their phones.
-Google Play, a fractured market of disappointing alternatives such as Amazon's Appstore.
It is easy to say, just diversify your source of customers -- but that is very hard to do due to numerous reasons. In this particular case the platform (etsy) user discovered these pitfalls early on. Often companies don't discover this until they've borrowed or raised millions of dollars.
In some circumstances, the product itself is platform dependent (App Store or a Facebook social game.) Irregardless of the dependance, business owners and employees develop expert knowledge about the particular platform by necessity and shear time spent navigating potential and existing shortfalls. If they manage to succeed, that particular platform delivers huge amounts of users in a very addicting manner.
Investing time in an alternative is unlikely to result in the same volume and value users of users because the actual business model of the company was molded around that user platform's uniqueness! iOS users are different than Android users. A user that arrives through a Facebook ad is very different from a user that performed a search on Google. (By the way, that is usually the root of the stories that X platform/traffic/advertising is crap.)
I propose a new executive job title, Chief Platform Dependance Officer.
This is a very critical topic to every start up and internet business requiring a steady stream of mass market consumers (more market dependent for b2b.)
This is my thinking as well. I had my entire business shutdown on Amazon a couple of years ago. No amount of explaining did anything.
They have automated responses that are made to appear like real people responding to you. They also kept my remaining balance for 90 days. I was lucky that it wasn't my only income stream.
As a buyer, you get all the power on sites like this. I can see why they do this (they want Amazon to be a trustworthy marketplace), but it's unfair to legitimate sellers that get banned because an automated script somehow thinks they are doing something illegal or against the ToS.
So, the quickly building another while getting photos thing was a bad idea?
It seems to me that the OP probably has an assembled unit on hand. If so, disassembly followed by reassembly while getting some good photos shouldn't be too tough to do.
He's already built the device, so yes, pictures of him sanding and shaping, measuring and cutting, fitting and finishing, should be doable; even if not as fine as he would normally build them, it should be possible to demonstrate and photograph within the allotted time frame.
For one, Etsy is neither an arm of the US government nor a mega-corporation. It's got a few hundred employees.
Secondly, the issue is that they think he isn't making his stuff by hand. They're not somehow persecuting him because he's a handcraftsman. Selling stuff you make by hand is the entire point of Etsy, and they've built a successful business around it.
Politics is beside the point. You're just not making any sense.
meats? 7:20 And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that
defileth the man.
7:21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts,
adulteries, fornications, murders, 7:22 Thefts, covetousness,
wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride,
foolishness: 7:23 All these evil things come from within, and defile
the man.
7:24 And from thence he arose, and went into the borders of Tyre and
Sidon, and entered into an house, and would have no man know it: but
he could not be hid.
7:25 For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit,
heard of him, and came and fell at his feet: 7:26 The woman was a
Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would
cast forth the devil out of her daughter.
7:27 But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it
is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the
dogs.
Etsy's a pretty great company, and you happen to be quite nearby in Brooklyn. How about visiting with some of your work to meet them in person? Etsy has a monthly open house too, so perhaps that's a good time.
I've met quite a few Etsy employees and they're all quite nice, smart, and want to do right by people. Good luck!
I don't doubt that they're smart and nice. I'd be shocked if they didn't want to do right by their customers. It seems like they have a pretty good track record of being good to their sellers and buyers. My friends who sell on Etsy have nothing but good things to say about them, and the few times I've bought from them the experience was surprisingly smooth for a user-run marketplace.
But Etsy's at a point where they're driving people's income that they depend on. The process for remediation and reconciliation shouldn't be unclear until they shut down your site.
I'd also like to see Etsy take on less of a shoot first and ask questions later approach. Especially when something is as grey-area as this. If he's using a factory, he clearly isn't pushing enough product to justify having a factory.
This sounds very unreasonable of them, hopefully if as some others have said they are a decent and considerate company they will resolve this issue as soon as they realise they have made a mistake, and I wish you the best of luck in this.
The seller BaliELF has a large range of shoes available in different colours and sizes and is based in Indonesia. They has a lot of feedback from the last 12 months suggesting that they have shipped a fair number of shoes. I don't know much about shoe making but I'm jumping to the conclusion that they are a small factory 'hand making' lovely shoes.
And yet the email to the OP states, 'Items Handmade by You' and wants him to document his workflow. The emails from Etsy seem quite buttheaded. I wouldn't think that a company with just 300 staff has to be so unwilling to engage with their partners.
They've sold 1022 items at about 100GBP a pop over the last two years. That's less than $80k USD per year. I'm not sure how much of a factory you can afford with that in Bali, or how much profit would be left over. (They claim to be 3 people, so before any overhead, that's less than $26k per person per year.)
I would suggest they are resellers but the amount of customization makes that seem very unlikely.
> That's less than $80k USD per year. I'm not sure how much of a factory you can afford with that in Bali
You could also sell through multiple channels (Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.) concurrently. Etsy would make up a small fraction compared to, for example, Alibaba.
The majority of Etsy sellers I see sell primarily through Etsy; those who sell elsewhere generally only do so through their own personal sites. Etsy (or at least the mainstream corners of it) is much more "boutique" than Alibaba et al, and sellers can demand much higher prices for the same goods. That's one reason there's such a big problem with resellers: people can simply buy things off Alibaba/Amazon/eBay at regular prices, pretend they are handmade, and sell them on Etsy at a much higher markup. So that's possible, but it doesn't really jibe with my experience as an Etsy user.
Per capita income in Bali is under $7700, so $26k/person/year is not too shabby. (COGS on shoes are low - the major costs in most apparel retail are marketing and distribution.)
And of course, they can spread their already low fixed cost over multiple distribution channels.
Making a shoe by hand is a damn lot of work: I know because I also sell handmade shoes in Etsy (and through our personal site, of course) We make custom designs for our clients, let them choose colours and style. Not counting the time spent drawing and exchanging emails and measurements, at fastest speed a pair of shoes takes a craftsman or craftswoman 7 days, with not many stops. Some corners could be cut and do it in 5. To allow for several orders at once and allow a correct mind cleanse between shoes (no-one wants to screw up at the very end!) we take 5 weeks to shipping
So given that half their items are bags (some of which look pretty simple http://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/95544563/minimo-shopper-bag-l...), would ~4 days per person per item sound reasonable? (They have sold 1022 items in 517 days, and have two people in their About Me listed as "makers".)
Indeed. A bag like this can be done in a day or half a day: with a shoe you have glue drying time to consider, and the sewing is complex because it is curved and has to be close to the edge. In this bag everything is straight lines: cut, position, sew
They'll build it how you like too, so if you want neat and tidy cables they'll lace them or spiral wrap them or cable tie them. And if you want untidy spaghetti mess they'll do that too.
I don't think the issue is they believe it's mass-manufactured or something. The issue is whether it falls into the niche of what etsy wants to sell.
He's admitted that he doesn't actually design the circuits, and there's still some question about how much of the actual assembling he does.
It seems he's certainly doing some amount of work with his hands, the issue whether it's enough to count as "handmade" in the sense that etsy's customers expect.
I know as a musician if I purchased a "handmade" synth and later found out that it was basically just a kit that had been assembled for me, I'd be a little irked. Though if the store was up front about it, I would consider purchasing it to save myself the trouble of assembling it.
Personally I think it should be allowed as long as the seller is honest about it, though I could see why etsy might find it a bit dubious.
>>>I know as a musician if I purchased a "handmade" synth and later found out that it was basically just a kit that had been assembled for me, I'd be a little irked.
I don't know how long it takes for you to create a synth, but it may be worth making a time lapsed video of your process for two reasons:
1. It should satisfy etsy's requirements of displaying how it is handmade
2. You and your customers may appreciate the video (a little advertising)
I understand that etsy's request is unreasonable and the conversation with them, unpleasant, but I think this would be a solution. If the video is done well, you hopefully won't be giving away any secret sauce to your manufacturing process.
If all else fails, I suppose it would be time to find another community of craftsmen.
Although he did say he doesn't feel comfortable recording his own manufacturing process as he feels it's an intellectual property violation. A time-lapse wouldn't be as revealing, but there's a chance etsy might reject it, I guess.
Depends. These took me about 8 hours a piece. Not including the design process which was a bit more. Needless to say I'm not the faster solder or wire guy on the planet.
Appropriately and by sheer coincidence, I just got into time lapse photography. Here's my first vid. It's terrible!
Did I make this video to satisy Etsy's ridiculous expectations (that aren't documented anywhere)? NO! Did I make it because it's fun? YES!
The problem here is that Etsy isn't my boss or my manager. That's the whole reason I sell through them. I want to avoid someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm working all the time or working within their absurd guidelines.
This is the question I really want to discuss about Etsy. Obviously, I'm against the radical approach to just closing stores based solely on suspicion!
The real question seems to be "who solders the components to the PCB?" The OP says "The knobs, potentiometers, and jacks were all secured by me. I did all of the wiring as well. Ordered the parts and soldered them all to the board too." The problem is that he makes it sound like an afterthought and does not provide photographic proof of this step (soldering what looks like about 60-80 components to the board in the one picture).
But given that the finished board could be outsourced just as easily as the PCB, the Etsy emails seem to be inquiring about that--without really asking outright, which just adds to the confusion. OP's admission that he is preparing a lot more products without being able to provide photo proof further adds doubt to his case.
I don't know Etsy, their rules, their policies, or what they allow in their store, but they seem to want OP to prove he soldered his boards himself, and he hasn't. I don't know if that's fair or not, but it does seem evasive on OP's part. Also, going nukular and posting the whole thing online (thus knowingly reducing the chance of being reinstated to near-zero) strikes me as something that a dishonest person does when they get caught/called out.
I don't know about you, but I don't usually record myself while working just so I can prove it to my employer[1]. He's not being evasive, Etsy is asking for too much (it's not even in their ToS).
To expand on your analogy, if a programmer advertized his services on uml-coders.com, he would be expected to show an example of his UML diagrams.
I don't know if Etsy has fair policies or enforces those policies fairly. But the OP has a hole in his own story, right around a very significant detail. That raises a red flag in my book.
No, it's more like he offered to sell a UML diagram, and then after he had created it, the site came back and demanded a video of him having created it.
Sorry, that's just petty. There's nothing in your posts that has substance; it just reads as yet another guy on the internet who wants to be right about something so he nitpicks, nitpicks, nitpicks. OP doesn't have "a hole in his own story". As he stated: nowhere does Etsy say that sellers must have photographic documentation for each build process of each item, and to shut his shop down because he does not have that specific evidence is just BS. Stop looking for reasons to argue with people haha.
I don't think that getting attention reduces his chances of being reinstated at all. Makes it more likely they will just reinstate the account to make the negative story go away.
It doesn't do the site any good if it gets this sort of publicity, and clearly its doesn't do the user much good.
Not a day goes past with out some poor user being booted from a website for reasons which are either misunderstood, unknown or unreasonable. So many sites mean a lot to many many people, and to be arbitrarily booted is quite an awful experience, especially if it seems unreasonable or plain wrong. It seems unjust that the issues are decided at the whim of the site, and are often not reversed. Too often the people working for these sites wont back down for silly ego reasons, they make a simple mistake and don't want to admit it, and it is very hard to break past that. There is too often no way back either.
I would like to see some sort of independent arbitration process for this sort of thing. Quite how that would work, I dont know, but there has to be some fair and consistent way to resolve these issues. Right now, it seems the only way a user can solve a problem is to make as much noise as possible to almost bully the website in to taking them back. But in the end, that isn't a "happy" resolution.
This is why I will always make sure that I know (as others have suggested) what I'd do if I got booted off of a platform. This happened to me with Amazon: I was selling a few used books a month, when one day my email got hijacked. That meant I wasn't receiving the sales emails from them, and, because I obviously wasn't shipping them out, got banned from selling by robots with no process at all for being reviewed by a real human (let alone by one who could understand what happened and provide a satisfactory resolution). What am I going to do, sue them? Even arbitration would've been a waste of money, since I wasn't selling the books as a living (I was selling like one a month). Ever since then I've always made sure I have an alternative (Half.com now gets their cut of all my book sales).
I know some one who works at Etsy, so I forwarded this along to him, he has since passed it along to their support team in hopes of finding a better resolution; it's been reported that a lot of other engineers at Etsy have escalated this post throughout the day.
I think there is probably a bias against electronics as being handmade, and I appreciate your frustration. I think this is just a misunderstanding, but this:
Disregarding the fact that having my shop up gains me at least one follower a day, it just so happens I don’t want Etsy to know exactly how I go about constructing my electronics and especially the enclosures. I realized this was an intellectual property issue and that Etsy was making an unfair and undocumented demand of me.
seems like taking a principled stand where a pragmatic one would serve you better. There have to be parts of the process you can document without giving away secrets. Secrets that very very very very few people would even know how to take advantage of anyway.
Agreed: The process pictures are not for public consumption, so his competitors would (presumably) not have access to them. Perhaps he can get them to sign an NDA? :D
"Secrets that very very very very few people would even know how to take advantage of anyway."
You have to put effort into telling artists to shut up about their latest newly mastered technique, whereas industrial designers / factory owners / mass producers / operations analysts usually consider the smallest details of the production floor to be their sole secret sauce and source of profit. From the outside "we" may not realize that response is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, from Etsy's point of view. Its not helping his case that he's an artist selling on an artist site.
Its a wood box. If you think you can school Roy Underhill about handmade traditional wood jointery, you might theoretically be right, but you're almost certain to be wrong. AND you think you can also school the recently deceased Mr Bob Pease on analog electronics? Again, yeah in theory maybe, but not very likely. The relevance of those two guys is they are/were both incredibly skilled and also good teachers who I've learned from, and I'm a relative peon in both fields. Something identified as a secret is probably not a secret, but being mis-categorized.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIt'll be interesting to see how they respond. I am reminded of the smashed antique Paypal violin story ( http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27 ), where PayPal adopted the standard PR strategy of "saying nothing at all so that the story will go away."
Not exactly [0].
I had no idea "handmade" was such a big deal at Etsy.
Regardless, the way they've handled this case seems pretty terrible, right down to the aggravatingly detached language used to correspond with him. Something really irks me about humans seemingly trying to be robotic, particularly in the process of performing a subjective review.
0: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/etsy-handmade-facto...
Hell, all I've heard about is griping from other sellers how "handmade" ISN'T a big deal from overseas sellers.
That is - they are really selling the hand-craftedness of the items, rather than the items themselves.
If you pushed hard enough, you could probably make a case for anything on Etsy as being "not handmade." Where did the yarn in that "handmade" sweater come from? Was it hand-spun? Who raised the sheep?! Is the dye from hand-raised and harvested vegetable sources or is it... INDUSTRIAL?!1?!
Given Etsy's touchy-feely narrative I'm betting they're just generally kind of suspicious of anything electronic and being disproportionately harsh in this case...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52082118@N05/sets/7215763303855...
They weren't satisfied.
The individual instances where policies fall down can be pretty nutty, but I honestly don't envy companies that have to solve this problem and figure out where to walk the line (at scale, no less).
Submitted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5708307
This is a "featured item" on the front page:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/88946705/tomato-art-print-lovely...
Does the creator need to send documentation of them creating the original? Why not?
What's happening here is more like he made a stencil from someone else's art and says it should count as hand made because he paints each canvas using the stencil and puts it in a generic frame he made.
If he is putting fully assembled boards into a premade box, is it hand made? In his post it sounds like he is saying he designs the front panel layout and has it cut and stenciled at a facility somewhere, and no doubt he screws in the potentiometers, attaches the knobs, and solders the leads. He says the boards come from China and are designed by someone else. He doesn't say if he populates the boards or if they come finished, ready for lead attachment. If lead attachment and the panel layout this is the extent of his work, perhaps etsy might not consider that truly handmade. Or perhaps they want more disclosure about how much is done. Maybe some consider that handmade, others not. It's kind of hard to say. Let's say I am a customer and someone is selling original "handmade" instrument designs in a wooden case. I very well may assume from this claim that it was their own design and they made the box. I probably would not be shocked if the board etching was done elsewhere. But then what if I find out that all the electronics were designed by another person and the boards are not just etched but populated in a large Chinese factory and arrive at the seller's house assembled. Was I ripped off by the claim it was handmade? Maybe.
He's not getting hammered for using a circuit board, I highly doubt Etsy is concerned about that. What they are concerned about is whether or not the guy is doing the work on these. He hasn't shown enough for me to be able to say that he is putting them together. He has pictures of a workbench, some soldering equipment, some wood and other parts, and the finished product.
How does this differ from a driftwood lamp or a clock with a ready-built clockwork? It's not just semantics. Obviously there are things that Etsy allows and things they don't but it's also the craftiness (is that a word?) of the project. I'll be honest that this guy's project doesn't seem very crafty, whether or not he's putting everything together there's nothing really crafty or unique about it. This doesn't take anything away from what it is or the demand for it, it just might not fit in as an Etsy business.
That's because moog have been peddling the same circuits/sounds for decades, attaching massive markups to Bob Moog's name. Allowing people to see the process is just part of the marketing game.
Not that they don't sound good of course. But the world really doesn't really need any more 2osc monosynths with 24db/oct ladder filters and no interesting features. Especially when they cost $1000 and up.
Half of this argument is rejecting Etsy's unfair demands for more documentation while my shop remains close and my ability to sell if frozen on non-existent grounds. Guilty until proven innocent policy drove me mad.
Moog is an international company. In a way, I'm not exaggerating when I say all other synths are just derivatives of what they do and they have the priviledge to not give a hoot about people looking into their windows. They know they own the synth world. As a small scale assembler you can understand that we cherish our procedures a bit more as it can make or break us. But to be honest, I make everything as open-source as I can, because I imagine it going to kids like me just trying to make weird noises. When I imagine a big company using it, it drives me mad. Something I'll have to reconcile.
The "hand made" issue is almost null to me at this point. I've made a unique enclosure for a device in a batch of three. They're made by hand.
He could have described his process a lot more clearly. He could have said which bits were bought in, and then which bits he did more work to, and then what gets assembled to what.
I especially like the wood casework. I used to work for a guy who built his own hardwood cabinets to house his computers because his wife wanted things to be "pretty." The cabinets were oversize and easy to work on besides being beautiful.
He should have called it a "found electronic objects sculpture", and also glued a uterus to the bottom of it.
When his project is inevitably accepted back onto Etsy, he should make some marketing hay out of this, because his project is so ambitious and well-finished that Etsy thinks it must be a large-scale commercial project.
...probably didn't build actual clock himself, he's just cutting a base for it and applying a photograph. So, that's interesting w/r/t the article. (Edit: Oh, someone below me said that already.)
At any rate, thank you for showing me Regretsy. I didn't want to work today, and this is a good start.
That said, US business customs are hard to grasp for me. The only thing that is certain nowadays is that for everything promised in the advertisement material there is a mangled TOS clause for the company to avoid delivering it.
Heck if you don't have the right TOS you could get sued by someone who never purchased from you in a court on the other side of the country.
That is the case when there is punishment available, and both parties are acting in good faith. When the defendant is a "spammer" then there isn't really any punishment available: eg suing them would be extremely expensive and unlikely to succeed for logistical reasons. And a spammer isn't acting in good faith - they are poisoning the well. If you tell them exactly how your "poison" detector found what they were doing, then you've just told them how to work around it so the arms race escalates with the spammer getting a head start.
Spammers clog the pipes, drown relevant information under irrelevant one and hinder the free-flowing business of innocents, so we are creating procedures that clog the pipes, suck people's focus away and hinder the free-flowing business of innocents. And that get people used to arbitrary decisions and based on no due process.
You're confusing business policy for law.
I know the man. Known him for years; lived with him. I watched him teach himself how to build electronics simply from books he checked out from our college's library. I've been in his workshop and watched him build his devices. He's legit, and this is fucking unfair. He's unemployed and this is one of his few sources of income right now.
He should definitely set up sales in multiple sites like Tindie or Gumroad.
What's the criteria for modification. How much must you change an object before it passes. Maybe if he covered it in fake rhinestones he would have been OK.
I think this would be something that Etsy should clarify. I imagine that if each case was hand painted with a different design it would have been OK.
But what if instead of a real painting, it was just splashes of color? Or a stamp print of your logo?
Sadly, I'm guessing your rhinestone comments dead on.
Until some of that happens, it probably makes sense to avail yourself of the most profitable venue and marketing channels available to you; if Etsy brings you exposure you wouldn't have operating elsewhere, use it until you have a problem. Most people probably aren't capable of replicating the entire commercial ecosystem just to avoid being reliant on any of it, and even when they are, focusing on that instead of getting their product/service in front of customers probably isn't the most profitable path. It's better to have contingency plans for unlikely events than to act like they've already happened.
For example, if you develop an iOS app and Apple decides (for whatever reason) not to accept it, you will have a bunch of useless Objective-C code, which can basically be ported to another language and platform, or thrown in the trash.
Conversely, if you develop a web app on a cloud PaaS, and the provider treats you wrong or isn't reliable, you can swap out with another service, or host it yourself. You may have to do some work to get everything situated in the new environment (how much work that is depends on the service, from what I understand), but you do have a backup plan in case things go south.
Landlords can't easily throw you out before your lease expires. They usually have to give you notice in advance that they won't be renewing your lease. Commercial leases are frequently long-term, since no company wants to have to deal with relocating every year. A lease is a contract enforceable in court.
Dealing with Etsy's somewhat arbitrary rules seems quite a bit more precarious. I don't think that anyone who invested a significant amount of capital in their business would want to put up with that kind of uncertainty.
True, but in each of the situations, there's generally a lot of doable options. Hosting is a completely commoditized business with thousands of plausible options. For payment processing, there are many possible processors just for credit cards, 'show online pharmacies stay up, and many options to credit cards (including up-and-coming things like Bitcoin). 'Your supplier' is too generic to address, so maybe not there. There are many houses or buildings on the market to try out if you're able to make the rent in the first place, so that's not a huge issue. Countless banks to choose from, both online banks and mortar banks. And you may well be switching city/township in the first place when you're leaving your current landlord, so as long as you don't have to leave the country (which could be a big issue) you're not terribly badly off unless you're a local business which needs to be in a specific place.
In contrast, how many successful marketplaces for handmade goods are there besides Etsy?
Consider the following platforms that deliver vast quantities of consumer have alternatives which are tiny in market size or severely lacking:
-Google Adwords, Adcenter delivers a fraction of the traffic with continual quality issues
-Google's organic search traffic. Encyclopedias could be filled with stories of companies that built large businesses around Google's targeted free traffic, and flopped.
-Facebook, no meaningful alternatives in size and scope.
-eBay, any other giant auction market?
-Craigslist, I can't think of an alternative to this either.
-App Store, alternative being Cydia, not a great one since all of your customers have to "break" their phones.
-Google Play, a fractured market of disappointing alternatives such as Amazon's Appstore.
It is easy to say, just diversify your source of customers -- but that is very hard to do due to numerous reasons. In this particular case the platform (etsy) user discovered these pitfalls early on. Often companies don't discover this until they've borrowed or raised millions of dollars.
In some circumstances, the product itself is platform dependent (App Store or a Facebook social game.) Irregardless of the dependance, business owners and employees develop expert knowledge about the particular platform by necessity and shear time spent navigating potential and existing shortfalls. If they manage to succeed, that particular platform delivers huge amounts of users in a very addicting manner.
Investing time in an alternative is unlikely to result in the same volume and value users of users because the actual business model of the company was molded around that user platform's uniqueness! iOS users are different than Android users. A user that arrives through a Facebook ad is very different from a user that performed a search on Google. (By the way, that is usually the root of the stories that X platform/traffic/advertising is crap.)
I propose a new executive job title, Chief Platform Dependance Officer.
This is a very critical topic to every start up and internet business requiring a steady stream of mass market consumers (more market dependent for b2b.)
They have automated responses that are made to appear like real people responding to you. They also kept my remaining balance for 90 days. I was lucky that it wasn't my only income stream.
As a buyer, you get all the power on sites like this. I can see why they do this (they want Amazon to be a trustworthy marketplace), but it's unfair to legitimate sellers that get banned because an automated script somehow thinks they are doing something illegal or against the ToS.
This is simply disgusting. Is a hand craftsman actually a threat to the MegaCorp?
I just don't see why this would happen.
[edit: I just read part 2] Were I you, I'd start making another one and have a friend photograph the process. Hurry. Time is of the essence!
Perhaps such language has no place here, but I'll not sit by and call a cow a chicken just to please a few geese.
Or, perhaps it is the fact that I actually gave some good advice to Mr Byrne when I said to quickly make a new one & get pictures this time?
It seems to me that the OP probably has an assembled unit on hand. If so, disassembly followed by reassembly while getting some good photos shouldn't be too tough to do.
Secondly, the issue is that they think he isn't making his stuff by hand. They're not somehow persecuting him because he's a handcraftsman. Selling stuff you make by hand is the entire point of Etsy, and they've built a successful business around it.
Politics is beside the point. You're just not making any sense.
meats? 7:20 And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.
7:21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 7:22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: 7:23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
7:24 And from thence he arose, and went into the borders of Tyre and Sidon, and entered into an house, and would have no man know it: but he could not be hid.
7:25 For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet: 7:26 The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.
7:27 But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.
I've met quite a few Etsy employees and they're all quite nice, smart, and want to do right by people. Good luck!
But Etsy's at a point where they're driving people's income that they depend on. The process for remediation and reconciliation shouldn't be unclear until they shut down your site.
I'd also like to see Etsy take on less of a shoot first and ask questions later approach. Especially when something is as grey-area as this. If he's using a factory, he clearly isn't pushing enough product to justify having a factory.
Then why are they seemingly taking their customer-relations cues from the PayPal playbook?
[1] http://tindie.com/
The seller BaliELF has a large range of shoes available in different colours and sizes and is based in Indonesia. They has a lot of feedback from the last 12 months suggesting that they have shipped a fair number of shoes. I don't know much about shoe making but I'm jumping to the conclusion that they are a small factory 'hand making' lovely shoes.
And yet the email to the OP states, 'Items Handmade by You' and wants him to document his workflow. The emails from Etsy seem quite buttheaded. I wouldn't think that a company with just 300 staff has to be so unwilling to engage with their partners.
Just check out "macbook pro" covers, nearly all are mass produced & shipped from China. For example.
I would suggest they are resellers but the amount of customization makes that seem very unlikely.
You could also sell through multiple channels (Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.) concurrently. Etsy would make up a small fraction compared to, for example, Alibaba.
https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZitXdXLKEghtM4FeDb...
And of course, they can spread their already low fixed cost over multiple distribution channels.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indonesian_provinces_by...
They'll build it how you like too, so if you want neat and tidy cables they'll lace them or spiral wrap them or cable tie them. And if you want untidy spaghetti mess they'll do that too.
He's admitted that he doesn't actually design the circuits, and there's still some question about how much of the actual assembling he does.
It seems he's certainly doing some amount of work with his hands, the issue whether it's enough to count as "handmade" in the sense that etsy's customers expect.
I know as a musician if I purchased a "handmade" synth and later found out that it was basically just a kit that had been assembled for me, I'd be a little irked. Though if the store was up front about it, I would consider purchasing it to save myself the trouble of assembling it.
Personally I think it should be allowed as long as the seller is honest about it, though I could see why etsy might find it a bit dubious.
Ah. That makes it clearer for me. Thanks.
1. It should satisfy etsy's requirements of displaying how it is handmade
2. You and your customers may appreciate the video (a little advertising)
I understand that etsy's request is unreasonable and the conversation with them, unpleasant, but I think this would be a solution. If the video is done well, you hopefully won't be giving away any secret sauce to your manufacturing process.
If all else fails, I suppose it would be time to find another community of craftsmen.
Appropriately and by sheer coincidence, I just got into time lapse photography. Here's my first vid. It's terrible!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMPEb1GEva8
Did I make this video to satisy Etsy's ridiculous expectations (that aren't documented anywhere)? NO! Did I make it because it's fun? YES!
The problem here is that Etsy isn't my boss or my manager. That's the whole reason I sell through them. I want to avoid someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm working all the time or working within their absurd guidelines.
This is the question I really want to discuss about Etsy. Obviously, I'm against the radical approach to just closing stores based solely on suspicion!
But given that the finished board could be outsourced just as easily as the PCB, the Etsy emails seem to be inquiring about that--without really asking outright, which just adds to the confusion. OP's admission that he is preparing a lot more products without being able to provide photo proof further adds doubt to his case.
I don't know Etsy, their rules, their policies, or what they allow in their store, but they seem to want OP to prove he soldered his boards himself, and he hasn't. I don't know if that's fair or not, but it does seem evasive on OP's part. Also, going nukular and posting the whole thing online (thus knowingly reducing the chance of being reinstated to near-zero) strikes me as something that a dishonest person does when they get caught/called out.
[1] http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/110487/my-cus...
I don't know if Etsy has fair policies or enforces those policies fairly. But the OP has a hole in his own story, right around a very significant detail. That raises a red flag in my book.
Yeah, I know. Sharing his side of the story when dealing with the corporate wall became too much!
What a jerk!
Non-sarcastically, if you don't want this to happen, don't surprise your customers. Give them actual standards. And don't be hard to reach.
Not a day goes past with out some poor user being booted from a website for reasons which are either misunderstood, unknown or unreasonable. So many sites mean a lot to many many people, and to be arbitrarily booted is quite an awful experience, especially if it seems unreasonable or plain wrong. It seems unjust that the issues are decided at the whim of the site, and are often not reversed. Too often the people working for these sites wont back down for silly ego reasons, they make a simple mistake and don't want to admit it, and it is very hard to break past that. There is too often no way back either.
I would like to see some sort of independent arbitration process for this sort of thing. Quite how that would work, I dont know, but there has to be some fair and consistent way to resolve these issues. Right now, it seems the only way a user can solve a problem is to make as much noise as possible to almost bully the website in to taking them back. But in the end, that isn't a "happy" resolution.
Disregarding the fact that having my shop up gains me at least one follower a day, it just so happens I don’t want Etsy to know exactly how I go about constructing my electronics and especially the enclosures. I realized this was an intellectual property issue and that Etsy was making an unfair and undocumented demand of me.
seems like taking a principled stand where a pragmatic one would serve you better. There have to be parts of the process you can document without giving away secrets. Secrets that very very very very few people would even know how to take advantage of anyway.
You have to put effort into telling artists to shut up about their latest newly mastered technique, whereas industrial designers / factory owners / mass producers / operations analysts usually consider the smallest details of the production floor to be their sole secret sauce and source of profit. From the outside "we" may not realize that response is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, from Etsy's point of view. Its not helping his case that he's an artist selling on an artist site.
Its a wood box. If you think you can school Roy Underhill about handmade traditional wood jointery, you might theoretically be right, but you're almost certain to be wrong. AND you think you can also school the recently deceased Mr Bob Pease on analog electronics? Again, yeah in theory maybe, but not very likely. The relevance of those two guys is they are/were both incredibly skilled and also good teachers who I've learned from, and I'm a relative peon in both fields. Something identified as a secret is probably not a secret, but being mis-categorized.