[HN Gopher] Etsy Strike ___________________________________________________________________ Etsy Strike Author : KarlKemp Score : 863 points Date : 2022-04-11 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (etsystrike.org) (TXT) w3m dump (etsystrike.org) | tmountain wrote: | Seems like there's an opportunity here for a smaller scale | marketplace to move in and provide artisan makers what they | actually want. One could build a business around "white glove" | onboarding of sellers; meaning, you actually have a conversation | with the seller and confirm they're producing authentic goods, | build a profile for each seller letting folks know who they are, | and base the entire marketplace around authenticity. Is this a | crazy idea? The argument against it is likely, "it won't scale", | but I think and argument could be made that it could. | JAlexoid wrote: | > smaller scale marketplace | | There were a bunch of them. Most failed... | | > The argument against it is likely, "it won't scale", but I | think and argument could be made that it could. | | A curated and authenticated store is a very expensive | endeavour. They're complaining about hike in fees now, imagine | how many would be able to accept hundreds of dollars in | standing fees and cut from sales on top of that. | Workaccount2 wrote: | I think the argument against it is that customers actually only | care about price, despite the virtues they vomit all over the | place about "supporting small business". | | 98/100 will support the idea. 2/100 will pay 2x for something | because it isn't a Chinese knockoff. | swagasaurus-rex wrote: | They are not the same customers. The ones that pay 2x for | something are eventually replaced by people who want cheap | junk. | | They aren't compatible markets, but a company who values | profit above all else will start to cater to the lowest | common denominator and push out people who care about | quality, locally sourced, handcrafted etc. and become another | generic retailer. | mmastrac wrote: | It's the circle of life for a startup chasing more fees. Older | startups must die to fertilize the soil of younger sapling | businesses: | | small, handcrafted goods -> larger scale production -> mass- | market aliexpress/ebay | ianbutler wrote: | There's no reason to do this as a startup. Someone could spin | up an ecommerce site over a weekend and then put in the work | to white glove onboard sellers without ever taking investment | and turn this into a _very_ nice business all without outside | capital. As we 're now seeing, outside capital which _will_ | want a large return doesn 't jive with managing a business | for artisanal/homemade sellers. | MockObject wrote: | I had to read this three times before I realized that by | "startup", you implied "taking on investment". | ianbutler wrote: | Fair for me and I think a lot of people a startup is a | new business that attempts (and hopefully succeeds) to | take on outside investment to grow rapidly -- otherwise | you're just a new small business. | [deleted] | jacobwilliamroy wrote: | Juicero has proved to me that no idea is too stupid to win | millions of usd in investment capital. | unfocussed_mike wrote: | > Seems like there's an opportunity here for a smaller scale | marketplace to move in and provide artisan makers what they | actually want. | | There are two sites in the UK that do this, with slightly | different emphasis on each: | | https://folksy.com/ | | https://www.notonthehighstreet.com/ | ramesh31 wrote: | >The argument against it is likely, "it won't scale", but I | think and argument could be made that it could. | | http://paulgraham.com/ds.html | jeremymcanally wrote: | The main thing Etsy offers sellers is buyers' attention. My | wife and I have sold on Etsy for almost 15 years (!!!), and she | started selling from the first day she opened a shop selling | bow ties. Over the years, it's very rare we'll open a shop | offering something and not sell in the first day (and have | never had a concept not have at least one sale in a week). It's | hard to beat that kind of visibility with little to no | investment honestly. | | Even as our businesses have grown, the ease of use and | convenience are hard to beat if you want to keep them to | something casual. Sure, we could pop up a Shopify, ramp up | advertising, really grind to get it "out there," but then we're | spending more time and money to end up at the same spot. | | A smaller marketplace won't have that sort of network effect. | The only way I'd see it succeeding is if they really blitz on | marketing and making themselves a real outlet for makers (and | make sure they're perceived that way over Etsy). Their brand | recognition and entrenchment would be super hard to overcome. | JAlexoid wrote: | You're right. That's why they know the value they bring and | are increasing fees - which is reasonable. | jeromegv wrote: | They aren't adding any more value by increasing the fees. | And from the perspective of the seller, it got worse | because now they have to compete with factories in China. | JAlexoid wrote: | I didn't say that they are bringing "more value". | | They know they provide value and that their fees can be | higher. | | If you think that the value of their service is too low - | then you will leave. If you leave. - then they'll have to | address it. Original Etsy sellers have the leverage. | judge2020 wrote: | They were just undercutting themselves previously in the | pursuit of user numbers, aka the strategy of every b2c | startup these days. Few companies will stick with this | model for eternity, usually they either raise prices or | start to rely on Ads (YouTube). | nicolas_t wrote: | Do you have a link to your wife's store on Etsy? | bloudermilk wrote: | Have you written about your experience launching shops on | Etsy? A friend and I have a few craft-style products we're | itching to make as a side hustle and it sounds like you've | figured out some of the tricks of the trade :) | giarc wrote: | Market will just adapt. Resellers will just hire an actor to | pretend to be a small 'maker'. | [deleted] | afarrell wrote: | https://www.tellmemoregifts.com/ does this for the artists that | make gifts for their customers. | madeofpalk wrote: | This is an aggressive moderation plan! | actually_a_dog wrote: | If the argument could be made that it could scale, why don't | you make it? We've already got eBay and etsy as counterexamples | showing that "smaller scale" marketplaces don't stay true to | their initial visions, and I don't see this "white glove" | onboarding being enough of a value proposition vs just setting | up an eBay store, for instance. | matt_s wrote: | > it won't scale | | I think that is sort of the point, if someone were to niche | down to actual makers of things. One could make it an exclusive | club and spend money to get exclusive items for launch, for | example get specially made pieces from well known makers and | they can number them if they want, like 1/100 special thing-a- | mabob. | | Have actual interviews with artisans/makers, slowly ramping up | sellers. Take customer complaints seriously. Like if its | reported that artisan_maker_27 started shipping cheapo shit | from where-ever then they are kicked off the platform. | | I think the idea is to do as much as you can without scaling. | No AI. No ads on the platform (certainly advertise for it). | queuebert wrote: | If I understand correctly, our markets are flooded with cheap | Chinese trinkets because the Chinese government subsidizes | shipping, making it possible to sell something for 99 cents | online, send it across the ocean, and still make money. | | This could be very easily fixed for every website like this by | the US government adopting a small tariff on low-cost goods | shipped from China to cancel out that subsidy. Just enough that | it is no longer profitable. Something to think about. | jiveturkey wrote: | The US subsidizes it actually. (but the program has ended now) | banannaise wrote: | Our markets are flooded with cheap Chinese trinkets because we | have outsourced trinket manufacturing to China to avoid modern | labor laws. | jiveturkey wrote: | I am not an expert or a student of it, but my general | impression is that it is more about hazardous/toxic waste | issues than labor cost. | colinmhayes wrote: | But people want cheap trinkets. | julienb_sea wrote: | Such a tariff would have wide ranging impact. Low-cost goods | are not just finished products going to consumers, it would | impact intermediate products such as small chips or modules | that are assembled into final products. We also have come to | expect many commodity-like products to be readily available at | very low cost, something that a tariff would hurt. These aren't | trinkets, we're talking batteries, cables, etc produced from | reputable Chinese manufacturers like Anker. | queuebert wrote: | Yes, that's partly the point. Maybe we shouldn't have so much | cheap stuff. Maybe we should reuse and repair the stuff we | have. | Barrin92 wrote: | I'm not exactly sure why the Chinese government paying for the | transport costs of cheap trinkets likely bought by low income | consumers is a situation that needs fixing. | mardifoufs wrote: | I thought the ePacket loophole that made shipping from China | extremely cheap has been closed already | dangrossman wrote: | The cost of shipping individual trinkets already went up quite | a while ago. What you do is import a whole crate or shipping | container of trinkets, then distribute them from a US | warehouse. The shipping cost on the crate/container is higher, | but spread over hundreds or thousands of units inside that | container. | hayd wrote: | I remember buying an audio splitter for PS0.02 including | shipping from China back in ~2009. | throwaway-jim wrote: | Slightly off topic: I frequently hear it mentioned in threads | like this that Chinese companies are able to compete with native | sellers even while shipping individual pieces to customers? How | does it even work? international shipping is not cheap, | especially when you're not shipping in volume. Is the shipping | cost included in the product? If anyone can direct me to info on | how this trade works I would be thankful. | Nican wrote: | Planet Money did a podcast on the subject: | https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis... | | There is a fixed rate between postal offices to ship overseas, | and it may make the shipping cheaper when coming from China. | oriettaxx wrote: | Super! I will join! | tomatowurst wrote: | might be unrelated with overall strike but one thing that I never | understood is their double standards towards sellers in certain | categories, specifically my friend who saw CBD oil being sold on | their website, tried to do the same but was rejected because it | was an "prohibited substance" | | then he listed those existing listings and they were removed but | not all, just the ones he pointed out. | tpl wrote: | Honestly all the resellers on the site have driven me away from | using it completely. Etsy would be wise to listen to these people | at least for that part of their site experience. | 0wx wrote: | My girlfriend is one of you, her account on Etsy has been falsely | suspended by their AI and can't sell anything there, I think the | AI also scrape data from other website because my gf also selling | it on other place, so maybe they think it's not original because | of that. They really fucked up with their AI. | FYYFFF wrote: | The Internet commoditizes everything. | jdrc wrote: | Commodification is how human progress works though... | [deleted] | endisneigh wrote: | Why don't they just make their own site? | | I don't understand why people put their entire livelihood in | random sites that can change their rules at a whim. | | It's easier than ever in internet history to host your own site | and take payments and basically do the entire thing yourself. | | Of course you don't get the visibility Etsy provides, but isn't | that what you sacrifice? | acomar wrote: | it's hard to do (it requires a specific skillset), it requires | capital investment (servers cost money), and you become fairly | indiscoverable. these are surmountable problems given adequate | money but without it, a major platform like etsy has a real | moat. | Blackthorn wrote: | > Why don't they just make their own site? | | Why don't the buyers just make their own art? Because they're a | different set of skills. | JAlexoid wrote: | Most of the stuff on Etsy isn't art. | | But also - there are multiple easy alternatives to Etsy | storefront. | endisneigh wrote: | The buyers aren't going on strike and complaining about it, | though. Not to mention the comparison doesn't make sense to | begin with. The sellers are operating a business presumably. | | From Etsy's point of view the etsy sellers are like the | buyers from the etsy sellers point of view. Ultimately | everyone is going to do what they can to maximize revenue | from their end. | | If this strike has any level of critical mass they'd just all | leave and create their own thing. This is literally how Etsy | itself came to be to begin with. It's just the nature of | things. eBay sellers went on strike and all migrated over to | Etsy. If this is that big of a deal, it's time to do it | again. | jdrc wrote: | Essentially it is what they are doing, except the website is | still in "very early stages", so etsy has time to rethink | aphroz wrote: | Bringing customers to your own website is very costly and | difficult. You will need to spend a lot in ads and convince | your customers that you are legit. | heleninboodler wrote: | Reliability, scale, general operations, security, convenience? | Putting up a site is easy, yes. _Keeping it up_ while your | business is based on it, not so much. | endisneigh wrote: | There are literally sites that do everything except marketing | for you. It really is easy if you're willing to pay. | heleninboodler wrote: | "Do the entire thing yourself" is what you suggested in the | GP. Now you're suggesting a site that "does everything | except marketing for you." Those are very different | suggestions. | endisneigh wrote: | No, what I'm saying is that you can purchase everything | except marketing, and presumably the folks striking would | handle the rest, so in sum, yes they could "do the entire | thing yourself." | | You should look up the history of etsy, it literally | began by a mass exodus away from eBay. I'll never | understand why people handcuff themselves and then | complain about it. The question in the end if whether | etsy is worth it to them after all of the fees, | restrictions, etc. If so, continue, if not, move. Both | the etsy sellers and etsy itself aim to maximize profit. | heleninboodler wrote: | > I'll never understand | | > The question in the end if whether etsy is worth it to | them after all of the fees, restrictions, etc. If so, | continue, if not, move | | It seems you do understand after all, unless you are | making the questionable claim that Etsy provides | literally no value. | | I think the crux of the matter here is that these sellers | were previously happy with the tradeoff, and then Etsy | changed the terms and they don't think it's worth it | anymore. Getting angry and yelling about it in hopes of | changing it rather than just shrugging and moving their | whole business to another platform seems perfectly | logical to me. The stuff with garbage resellers does seem | like a really good point: Etsy is going to devalue | themselves into the toilet if they don't do something | about it and there is a mass exodus. | JAlexoid wrote: | Complaining is worthless, if you're staying. | | Businesses understand a hit to the bottom line, not some | abstract strike manifest. So exodus is exactly the most | efficient way of voicing your opinion to a profit seeking | operation | alecbz wrote: | Though TBH I wish the infrastructure was there such that this | could be a viable option. I feel like we're inching our way | there with "no code" products. | JAlexoid wrote: | But apparently all of those things are worth nothing to Etsy | sellers, as they are complaining about the costs. | true_maybe wrote: | A bit of a tangent, but Etsy lost me (and likely some amount of | other sellers) when they pushed so hard on free shipping. Not all | products are amenable to this, and we wound up losing money on | every shipped item under the new plans. Ebay also did this at | some point in the past, with the same results. | | Those two, and this example has me wondering why these companies | continue to side with the buyers? | dylan604 wrote: | >side with the buyers? | | Isn't it obvious though? The buyers are the ones transferring | their money from their account into the coffers of Etsy. If | they piss off one seller, 2 more will pop up in its place. | JAlexoid wrote: | > Those two, and this example has me wondering why these | companies continue to side with the buyers? | | Because the customer sets the demands. If the demands aren't | met - customer doesn't give you the money. | xeromal wrote: | Consumers just work that way. I've had an ebay account since | 2006 and I can't count the times I've posted something for 15$ | + variable (3-8$) shipping that wouldn't sell that I just sold | for 22$ with free shipping instead and it goes. | | Funny thing, I totally filter by free shipping too when I buy | on ebay. It's just easier. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | The problem with ebay is the scams where shipping is $50+ for | something that isn't large or heavy. I always just sort by | lowest price+shipping to push these off page. | notpachet wrote: | To anyone reading the above and thinking "well, just move the | shipping cost over to your product cost, duh" -- the problem | is that shipping becomes dramatically more expensive the | further the package is going. How do you pick one single | price for an item when 50% of your customers are in the US | and 50% are in the UK? Which half subsidizes the other? | JAlexoid wrote: | You can list the same product for different audiences. | notpachet wrote: | But there's another sharp corner to avoid: online product | ad services (Google Ads, Facebook ads etc), tend to | penalize merchants who list different prices depending on | where the customer is located[1]: | | > Don't change the price of your product on your landing | page based on a user's location. Ensure that users can | purchase the product online for the price that you | submit, regardless of their location. | | Which means that (if you don't want your Google ads | account deactivated) you can't bake in a variable | shipping cost into the product cost; you can only select | one amortized shipping cost. | | So sellers who want to offer free shipping are really | between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time in | terms of not losing money on shipping vs not overcharging | buyers. | | [1] https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324371?h | l=en&re... | lg wrote: | I saw an etsy tv ad the other day. My wife is an etsy seller so I | thought this was interesting. They pitched it as a place where | you can find someone to put your logo on a sign. The interaction | with the seller was minimal, their name was even shown as | anonymous "etsy seller". This seems like a use case that a bigger | co could easily support and downplays the value prop of etsy as a | place to connect with a craftsperson/artist to buy their work or | commission a unique piece. I guess they are trying to move away | from that model to more print-stuff-on-signs/shirts/etc. | ilamont wrote: | From the petition: | | _AI-powered bots shut down legitimate seller accounts seemingly | at random, while Etsy looks the other way on resellers who | undercut authentic makers by peddling sweatshop-produced junk in | clear violation of the spirit of the Etsy community._ | | AI lockouts are a huge problem on Amazon, too, not to mention | many of the sites and services used by HNers. I've said it before | and I will say it again: | | How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from | friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or | denied access to an important service, either through no fault of | their own or by an innocent action? | | No warning. | | No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of | [vaguely worded] policy." | | No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech- | savvy friend or relative. | | No recourse. | | There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for | people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also | the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives | in an instant with some poorly programmed process or | unanticipated edge case. | dotnet00 wrote: | Those poor companies can't be expected to be responsible with | their power, they only make several billion dollars off their | users every year and putting conditions on their ability to | remove content they find suspicious is comparable to me dealing | with a thief in my house. | noneeeed wrote: | Seriously. I got shot down on the last Google related thread | about this issue because "what about the scammers". I get it, | you need a process for stopping the scammers/psammers, but any | system you create will make mistakes and so it must have a | genuine system of appeal and recourse. | | At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone | with enough power to force them to do a better job. | m_coder wrote: | >>At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone | with enough power to force them to do a better job. | | And then they fix that one situation and go on about their | normal business. At least that is what it seems to me. I | would wish for something more long term to happen but I am | becoming less hopeful. | shmatt wrote: | Claiming (in whatever "official" existence this website is for | the sellers) anything made in China, or any other non-western | country, is "sweatshop-produced junk" is definitely not the way | to fix this | | Manufacturing has moved to these places in some cases because | many customers just can't tell the difference or couldn't care | less about the difference | | Are the people organized under that website all wearing leather | shoes hand sewn in Maine cottages? Or are they wearing more | sweatshop produced junk | raylad wrote: | Etsy seems generally to have some tech issues. | | I bought a couple of things on their site a while ago, but have | never been a seller. | | Somehow I keep getting emails intended for sellers in France | and other places, trying to coordinate shipments or orders, or | complaining about issues with orders. This has been going on | for at least 4 years and I've reported it to Etsy multiple | times with no follow-up at all on their side. | ianbutler wrote: | There are various markets where I'm pretty certain taking outside | capital will eventually cause you to lose the plot as to how your | business benefits it's users. This seems to be one of those | cases. You take outside capital to grow rapidly and take on | scale, you go public for more capital to do more business again | at a larger scale. This is all in the interest of a large return | for your investors and maybe some retail investors and employees. | | I'm not sure how this could ever continue to have the best | interests of artisanal crafters and sellers in mind when that | market is clearly smaller than the one needed to grow the | business to successful after-IPO public company. Someone should | make a competitor with no aims to go public and you'll probably | wind up with a rather large successful business not beholden to | anyone except artisanal sellers and more in line with benefiting | artisans long term. | | Not everything needs to be a public company and not everyone | needs to take on VC money. You have to know your goals and then | assess different monetary avenues to accomplish them, you can | have a large private company without diluting the vision, just | not maybe a multibillion dollar organization but that's okay, not | everything needs to be that either -- but it will be what your | forced into an attempt at making if you take on outside capital. | toper-centage wrote: | However, there's literally no incentive for the owners and | investors to protect that initial plot. Etsy is so big, that it | won't ever fail overnight. As long as it's profitable for a few | years and everyone gets a fat check out of it, they are happy. | This will always happen. Never trust cult brands to stay loyal | to the niche market that made them successful to begin with. | dangrossman wrote: | Those smaller non-public competitors typically end up being | acquired (or destroyed) by the larger, well-funded incumbent. | Etsy's acquired a number of other marketplaces already. | ianbutler wrote: | That's totally fair but at what point are Etsy and <non- | public-whoever> actually serving different markets -- and so | not really competitors -- so it's not worth it for them to | crush or acquire the non-public company focused on what is | now a minor niche to the larger incumbent. | | I'm not saying you're wrong, I very much agree that it does | tend to play out like that but from the strike it seems like | some vocal segment of Etsy's market is no longer actually | served by Etsy -- and more importantly (all speculation) Etsy | has determined it's not in the best interest of Etsy to serve | them so there is some niche to now be captured. | wesleytodd wrote: | My wife is an etsy seller, so I asked her opinion on this. TLDR | of her response: "it is the people who don't take it as a serious | business who are having issues with the etsy cut increase". | | Basically, the ones who try to compete on price with the mass | manufacturers (aka already low-balling their prices). The ones | who make a living already have the etsy fees in their product | prices so will just bump up accordingly and likely not loose | customers. | | That said, the demands listed are all ones she agrees with. The | user experience of having to tell if a product is really hand | made is bad for buyers and sellers alike. | jeremymcanally wrote: | Yeah, as someone who sells five figures on Etsy every year, the | fee increase (while crappy) isn't shocking or offensive. It's | the other things they enumerate in the demands that are chafing | us. | | I don't even see how things like the AI-powered "trust and | safety" garbage they implemented or the "Star Seller" thing | benefit Etsy in the slightest. The T&S bots have nabbed our | shops a few times and every time it wasn't even anything they | should have been concerned about. One time they shut us down | completely for a week because they _thought_ we got too many | orders (even though we filled them in a day). Like, what? And | Star Seller basically makes you a slave to unreasonable | customers. It's almost Uber-esque in the degree of perfection | it expects in turnaround and ratings, and in a world where "I | didn't read the listing" ends up in a three-star review, it's | just untenable (and again, what's even the benefit??). | dangrossman wrote: | > I don't even see how things like the AI-powered "trust and | safety" garbage they implemented or the "Star Seller" thing | benefit Etsy in the slightest. | | Etsy basically tripled its user base in the past 2 years, to | something like 100 million active buyers and sellers. This | happened during the pandemic, when Etsy's offices were locked | down, everyone had to learn to run the business remotely, and | the labor market tightened up making it harder to hire (and | then to train remotely). | | Almost every change Etsy's made in the last two years is | about reducing the burden on their staff, which now has a | much higher user to staff ratio to deal with. Requiring | sellers respond to messages within 24 hours reduces the | number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring | sellers resolve issues to customers' satisfaction to maintain | their standing reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's | support staff. Requiring customers contact sellers before | they can open a case reduces the number of people contacting | Etsy's support staff. Implementing AI-powered review of new | sellers and listings is the only realistic answer to having | ANY review of new sellers and listings when there are | hundreds of thousands of them being added every month for | each employee in charge of enforcing policy on them. | [deleted] | fleddr wrote: | We just keep running into this same issue indefinitely: the | internet is a winner-takes-all mechanism. | | I wish things were more like in the physical world, where you | might have hundreds or thousands of "etsys". Each having a unique | vibe, products on offer, and so on. Each of these individual | stores would have a reasonable and stable margin and relatively | stable group of customers. They can all co-exist. | | No such thing on the internet though. Inevitably you always end | up with one place to rule them all. Easy for buyers, no need to | browse many websites. Easy for sellers, reach the maximum | audience with the least effort. | | The model always breaks, and the platform facilitating the | exchange turns "evil". | | The conclusion is primitive. We're all responsible for this. | Consumers always pick convenience over any alternative, and they | do buy knock-offs. Buyers will always be attracted to singular | platforms, want to pay the lowest fee for the largest reach. | | We all want "something for nothing", and this is what we end up | with. It is the accumulated outcome of billions of tiny selfish | decisions. | AlexandrB wrote: | Is this a natural property of the internet or is it a | consequence of how internet businesses are usually funded? It | always struck me as weird that "predatory pricing" of a product | at below cost can be considered anti-competitive behaviour when | done by market leader, but is OK when done by a "start-up" | fuelled by millions in VC money. This is especially apparent in | the gig economy space, where local knowledge _should_ give you | a competitive advantage but instead you 're forced to compete | with foreign businesses that are happy to sell $2 worth of | service for $1 of revenue. | freeone3000 wrote: | I think it's an issue with discovery. Organic discovery on | the internet does not exist -- you do not pass by a cool | internet store on your way to whatever else you were doing, | the only way for you to know it exists is for it to be | advertised to you. | fleddr wrote: | Yes, I'd say centralization of attention/discovery is an | inevitable force of the internet. | | For digital products, say "content", it has been there since | the early beginnings. When people had their "independent" | blog, already then they had blog rolls linking to other | bloggers and over time a class of top bloggers emerged. A | handful getting all traffic, the other 99.99% gets nothing. | | Before search engines, we had directories. Lists of links. | But there's only so much space, so a few sites get all | traffic, the rest none. | | We democratized it with things like Digg, but in reality 3 | people decided what gets on the homepage. | | So yes, it seems to me that centralization of attention is | built-in. Or rather, it's a human condition. A centralized | service offers more convenience and people tend to do the | most convenient thing. Creators do the exact same thing. | | ...and then we blame the platform. My point is that WE did | it. WE created the situation, not the platform. | | As for physical goods, I consider that to be somewhat of a | separate topic. The internet in itself does not magically | produce and ship ultra cheap goods. Such a thing is only | possible due to very specific international trade | circumstances. | shmatt wrote: | I shop at many physical world boutiques who also have a | successful online presence. Etsy is actually the worst place | for these kinds of things, as the people there are running | under margins where they could never afford physical world | rent. A physical world store showing up on Etsy, where people | with some free time make things at home, would cheapen their | brand as a physical presence in a community | | The place where these physical world "etsys" live is usually | Shopify | einpoklum wrote: | I recently bought a nicely designed coffee mug on Etsy... which | never arrived. Tried to contact the store - no answer. I didn't | go broke and go homeless, but it certainly stung. Especially | since it was supposed to be a birthday present for someone. | ramesh31 wrote: | I will never use Etsy again after my first experience with it | recently. I paid $200 for (what I thought) was a full size high | quality living room rug. What I recieved was a polyester bath | mat, that was shipped via DHL from Turkey, and took two weeks to | arrive... I don't know what happened along the way, but I see | Etsy now as simply an extension of Aliexpress. | | No thanks. | xyzzy21 wrote: | Honestly, it might be easier to pivot your business model and/or | use a different channel. This seems too much like "some one else | do the work to make my life easier again!!" | DanTheManPR wrote: | Anecdotally: I get about 49/50ths of my sales from Etsy. They | have captured a lot of the virtual storefront at least for the | stuff I sell (accessories I make for board games and toys). | It's almost not even worth your time to list on other sites. | Did they get there through the luck, or genuine business savvy? | I can't say one way through another, but they're starting to | really press their advantage to extract as much money from | their customers/sellers as possible. | Blackthorn wrote: | There are no other channels for small sellers. Etsy has spent | their time on the top aggressively purchasing all viable | competitors and shutting them down in order to maintain their | lead. | calflegal wrote: | It's wild that one of the best e-shopping techniques is now | googling "___ review reddit". We find ourselves playing a strange | whack-a-mole game of trust amongst organizations. | 97s wrote: | As an etsy seller. I don't really care about the rising fees, | they send so many customers my way I am okay with that. What I do | care about is that their report features don't work. I have | reported so many shops just reselling commercial items that I am | shopping for. Literally they don't even remove the branding, just | straight up reselling a finished good that isn't vintage. So | lame. | mincer_ray wrote: | i will say they are right about one thing, small sellers are | getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress | resellers. as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through | pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and | original work. make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? | quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress, then sold by all the | boring resellers on etsy. 90% of rpg dice sellers are selling the | exact same stuff they got from the exact same bulk deal. | | one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im | buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks. | | idk if this is just affecting the retro games / dice communities, | or if others are also hit. ALSO you can kinda just sell semi- | illegal "grey" goods on etsy? TONS of sellers just selling | bootleg game boy games and rarely mentioning that in the product | description. | stickfigure wrote: | > make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly | stolen, mass produced on aliexpress | | I work in this space and can provide a little | correction/illumination: | | The folks selling printed phone cases, gameboy cases, etc are | generally not shipping these over from aliexpress. They are | almost all printed on demand from printers local to the country | of the buyer (there's a half dozen big phone case printers just | in the US). Nothing is mass produced except the blanks. | | The sellers come up with the artwork and | titles/tags/descriptions/etc. Software like mine creates the | Etsy listings and processes orders, routing to appropriate | printers which ship directly to the customer. Etsy provides an | API for this. | | Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property. | They jealously guard their high-resolution images, but that | doesn't stop the industry from having a big ripoff problem. | Low-effort ripoffs copy a public low-res image, which makes a | terrible print but potential customers/victims might not be | able to tell from an online mockup image. High-effort ripoffs | involve hiring an artist to make a new work substantially (or | identically) similar to something else. Both cheat the | intellectual property of the original artist, but they're using | the same print companies. | | Whether this stuff is "handcrafted" is somewhat ambiguous - is | a book handcrafted? Is a set of patterns for a dress or a piece | of furniture handcrafted? Something 3d printed? Certainly | someone came up with the artwork "by hand", but printing it on | a tshirt or phone case is pretty mechanical. | tyingq wrote: | The volume folks also aren't shy about outright lies in the | product descriptions. Like pictures of stained glass that | clearly show real, leaded-joint stained glass, that turns out | to be a painted plastic copy. Where the pictures are probably | stolen from a genuine seller. | WalterBright wrote: | Back in the early 90's, I visited Santa Fe as a tourist. I | enjoyed browsing the local shops looking at the American Indian | art for sale. After a while, I noticed the same things over and | over in different shops - most (all?) the stuff was imported | from other countries. | | A few years ago I also toured souvenir shops in Malmo, Sweden. | I asked the proprietor of when where the merchandise came from, | she said it all came from China. | | With a global economy, that's just the way things are. | honkdaddy wrote: | Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese | don't have to respect the system of copyright or patent in any | capacity at all? It seems like we're converging on a point | where nearly any novel invention or concept will be quickly | stolen by the Chinese, repackaged, and sold in the global | marketplace for a fraction of the price. | bsder wrote: | > Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese | don't have to respect the system of copyright or patent in | any capacity at all? | | Even if these were prosecuted, would it really help in | electronics, for example? | | Since everybody has access to the same chips and creating a | PCB is cheap and relatively quick, what would you even | prosecute? Sure, you could prosecute the exact clones, but, | most people are just following the manufacturer reference | designs from the datasheet so there's nothing stopping | someone else from doing that. | | The problem is that once you prove there is a market for a | piece of electronics, somebody in China will now pick off | that market for cheaper. Is this not capitalism at its most | raw? | | The problem that this causes in electronics is that this | _trashes_ scaling as well as customer support. You can sell a | $100 thingit, create a reddit community, and mostly tell | people they 're on their own with the occasional answer from | somebody semi-official. Or you can sell a $10K+ thingit and | actually provide excellent customer support. | | In both cases, you will get cloned and ripped off--which | limits the amount of money you can get from the market. | | The current "solution" is to always have a cloud component | which can't be cloned. This is, of course, anathema to open | source, but I haven't seen anybody in open source have a good | answer for this, either. | com2kid wrote: | Working at Microsoft, I was not allowed to even read patents | incase I accidently infringed on one, which would become | willful infringement since I had read the patent. | | So, that means no learning from what others had done, which | is the entire idea of publicly posted patents vs trade | secrets. | | The patent system is literally causing the opposite of | innovation to happen in certain technology spaces. | AlexandrB wrote: | It's hard to have respect for the copyright/patent system | we've constructed in the west when it's frequently abused and | often favours large industry players over "little guys". | There are some advantages to the wild-west remix culture you | see happening with Chinese goods. There are also plenty of | inventions that are so trivial/obvious that they should not | have had patent protection in the first place[1]. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click | baristavibes wrote: | I hear that designers are being steamrolled by Aliexpress or | Shein all the time. The landscape has obviously changed. I | wonder if a pioneering designer somewhere used this to their | advantage to mass manufacture their products while integrating | a staple design element by which they end up promoting | themselves? | agentdrtran wrote: | I've come across very niche products that get ripped off, it's | affecting everything. if your tiny custom tshirt shop gets | enough sales you'll be copied soon enough with apparently no | recourse. | Melatonic wrote: | Yea this is hugely annoying now on Etsy - I used to love going | there for random gifts for people of handmade stuff. Usually | you can tell the real from the aliexprses BS by asking the | seller how much they can customize the item. But the | marketplace is legit flooded with crap | uuyi wrote: | I know someone who was selling an electronic module on Tindie. | One day sales went through the floor. Turned out someone had | cloned his entire product and was shipping volume on | aliexpress. He just closed up shop. | | I myself have spent weeks navigating the maze of dodgy NanoVNAs | out there. Even one of the official resellers decided to cut | costs and ship out poorly functioning clones and try and deny | it. | | Can't win so don't play. Eventually the markets will fall due | to crap saturation. | nebula8804 wrote: | Will the markets actually fail? Or will there always be a | sucker ready to try their luck? I remember seeing this happen | in the Retro Video Game community with Flash carts. | | Independent developer developed a flashcart for the Sega | Dreamcast and was subsequently ripped off. After he | complained on Twitter, most of the community sided with the | cloners. They just want their cheap garbage and they have no | idea/care regarding the massive effort it takes to develop a | device like this. | | Never mind the fact that the original developer will be | inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while | the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen | all the value. | | He eventually walked away from the project from what I recall | which pissed off his original buyers and now others have | stepped up with their own devices(And will probably be | cloned). | | Luckily the one (temporary) respite you have in | software/hardware is DRM. If you can implement a complex | enough DRM system you can slow down the cloners from stealing | your software for some period of time. It sucks but this is | the world we live in. | | One tactic that a Flashcart manufacturer is using is some | sort of serial coded firmware updates that only operates on a | specific date code of flashcart. It requires the user to log | into an account and get the specific firmware update that is | tied to their flashcart. It has caused some complaints from | the community regarding ease of use + resale | woes(transferring ownership from one legit user to another) | but overall this is an interesting solution. It hasn't fully | prevented clones but has slowed them down somewhat. | | I wish there was some way this could be applied to the non- | software world but you can't defeat the physical layer. | zozbot234 wrote: | > Never mind the fact that the original developer will be | inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while | the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen | all the value. | | This seems like an opportunity in disguise. Provide paid | support, possibly after upselling the crowd to genuine | product if required. Then word-of-mouth will be to the | original dev's benefit; few will side with the fly-by-night | cloners. | | DRM makes your product less "hackable" by the customer and | less likely to sustain a committed community. It's a very | short sighted approach. | dendriti wrote: | The people who are buying Chinese knockoff pirated flash | carts, are not the same people pulling out their credit | cards for paid support. Also, retro gamers are a | notoriously difficult and time-consuming market to | support. | after_care wrote: | It's ironic to me because flashcarts are widely used to | pirate console games. Someone making a tool for pirates is | complaining about their IP being pirated. | | Yes, I know flashcarts are also commonly used for homebrew, | and I use mine exclusively for homebrew. I also understand | that many of the older games have become collectors items, | and wanting to play backups instead of the original is | another use case. This doesn't change one of it's most | common use cases, which is playing illegal roms. | nebula8804 wrote: | Yeah I get where you are coming from. That does not | change the fact that these products require massive | effort to develop. In the case of PSIO(product with the | serial encoded firmware) it was started by a high | schooler + firmware developer from Belarus in | 2012(original concept in 2010) and took years before the | product was finally in a state to ship. From what I | gather, their custom menu + firmware system is ~50k of C | code/MIPS assembly made from scratch. | | I watched as this high schooler got harassed for years as | people did not believe such a product was even possible. | After he released it, everyone forgot about all the | harassment that this product was vaporware and impossible | to develop and now he continued to get hounded for bug | fixes to fix timing issues with specific games(he is | emulating the complete CD drive and many games expected | exact timings to overcome specific undocumented bugs in | the system). | | Now you have to throw in the threat of clones. To this | day he is continuing to fully support the product despite | some clones appearing in the wild. A competing product | has recently appeared that takes a simpler approach to | emulating the CD drive and likely has not had as | extensive of a QA process. It remains a question whether | this other approach is better compared to PSIO(new | product only supports 3 motherboard versions out of | dozens + you lose the CD drive altogether) but because | the price is cheaper a large chunk of the community does | not care and have moved on. The remaining community are | now bashing the PSIO team for temporary slowing down | development to rewrite the firmware to stop the latest | round of cloners. | | You can look at it as theft, but others would see it as | preserving and promoting software development on a ~28 | year old console. This team also gone into excruciating | detail to document the system to help enable new software | to be developed. | | Just from the outside looking in, I don't know if it is | worth the effort to spend years making something like | this only to be harassed nonstop for years, getting your | IP stolen by the Chinese and in end still be making a | product that is a grey market item. I suspect that down | the road we will have nothing but low quality Chinese | made junk on the market if anything at all. | after_care wrote: | I'm in this space as a hobbyist, a consumer and | occasional producer (I've done some limited runs on | simple projects). I'm specifically interested in jp coin- | op and 16-bit home console. I see your concern. | | There's always going to be the originals, which will | almost definitely hold value for the lifetime of | millennials at least. | | This is always going to be a small market driven by | passion. If you can write a PlayStation flash cart you | can almost defiantly make something with a higher market | value. | | There is an active market for extremely high quality | products in this space. Look at Analogue (analogue.co) | which is building FPGA reference-quality reproductions of | classic consoles (NES, SNES, GENSIS, and recently | GB/GBC/GBA). These machines play original carts better | than original hardware, they are widely critically | acclaimed, and the company keeps outputting fantastic | machines. Many speed running and other competitive | organizations accept plays running on analogue hardware, | but not other knock-off consoles. | Melatonic wrote: | Is there an easy way to tell the clones vs the original | developer? Legitimately curious in this Dreamcast item | nebula8804 wrote: | Typically they have their own website. Like I mentioned, | I believe this specific developer has thrown in the towel | but others are making competing products. Typically their | website has a list of authorized resellers or sells them | directly. | foldor wrote: | To be fair to the GDEMU situation you touched on for the | Dreamcast, the reason the community took the side of the | cloners was because it was nearly impossible to get a hold | of the original authentic design. He made the ordering | process as terrible as possible, seemed to have a shitty | attitude to his actual customers, and the demand | drastically outpaced his ability to supply the market. The | retro community is large, but most of the time people would | rather buy from the original source over a clone product, | but in the case of the GDEMU he kind of forced people to | choose a clone instead. | nebula8804 wrote: | Yeah I wasn't a customer just a follower as I am | fascinated by the efforts used to create these devices. | At the same time, PSIO(which I also referenced) has taken | as many efforts as possible to provide the product in | sufficient quantities and be as supportive as possible | but there is a loud portion of the community that still | berates them for their anti-clone efforts. | | The gaming community just seems to suck as customers. You | see this with all the hate a publisher gets when they | release something that isn't perfect as well. | | There are also people buying the Everdrive clones and | then expecting support. I have seen these complaints on | Reddit and in various forums. I don't know how rampant | this is but its so silly. | foldor wrote: | PSIO definitely isn't beloved, I'll give you that. I | think the main hate of PSIO is because their product | always felt like a beta to users who expected something | more polished. I'm not going to say either is right or | wrong, but it's what it is. PSIO's anti piracy stuff was | pretty annoying for the end user vs what other companies | are doing like XStation and others can do. | | You're right though, that in general the end users are | very much entitled assholes in general, and there _are_ | still people buying Everdrive clones, even when the real | deal was still in stock and available. But Everdrive is | still successful for Krikzz, and all of the clones out | there are based on a very outdated design that his newer | devices are far surpassing in terms of features and | support. | xwdv wrote: | I've decided to protest the issue of counterfeits by simply not | buying anything at all. Can't trust the source, can't buy. | light_hue_1 wrote: | Any time I find anything on Etsy, I double check Amazon. A lot | of the time, I find the exact item for sale for less. | | Now, I just skip Etsy most of the time, wading through so much | junk to find something original is too much work. | throwmeariver1 wrote: | And If you go on aliexpress you can trade 50% of the price | for 2 weeks of shipping. | [deleted] | elefantastisch wrote: | It does seem like Etsy has basically become eBay. I used to buy | from Etsy all the time, but at this point, I have zero trust | that I would actually be buying something handmade from a real, | independent creator. Which of course means I just won't buy | from them at all. I don't know why Etsy seems to welcome this | instead of doing everything they possibly can to fight it. | cjsawyer wrote: | Sounds like short term greed overcoming desire to hold onto | their unique gimmick that made customers initially care | alecbz wrote: | Yeah... that may seem naive (to value the "niche" over | actual revenue numbers), but once etsy loses its original | niche, I'm not sure what differentiates them from | Amazon/eBay/etc. => their brand dries up => revenue | eventually dwindles? What stops this? | dylan604 wrote: | >What stops this? | | Nothing really. Most people do not pay attention to how | the sausage is made. They don't care if the car service | they use was a total toxic fratbro culture using | unsustainable pricing to lure in users. They just wanted | "cheap" rides without caring about why they were cheap. | Just as another comment on this topic suggested they | don't care about original as long as the thing they want | is cheaper. | | So no, I don't really think that educated populace will | stop supporting shit practices because they can't be | bothered. | nebulous_two wrote: | Not true. What stops this is the creation of another | service that comes in to take that space...until they go | public again | | OR | | They remain a private business that keeps that long term | aim in spite of the volatility they are bound to | experience over time. | dangrossman wrote: | What stops that is the incumbents destroying or acquiring | upstarts in their space. Etsy has already purchased | Depop, Elo7, A Little Market, Trunkt, Reverb... | dylan604 wrote: | Why does Depop, A Little Market, Trunkt etc not get | blamed for "selling out"? Because at the end of the day, | people start businesses to make money. In fact, it is a | tried and true model to create a start with the specific | purpose of getting acquired. | dylan604 wrote: | OR | | Etsy buys them to prevent a viable alternative to taking | hold. | | At the end of the day, there is typically a number that | can be written on a check that will persuade. | alecbz wrote: | Well I'm not talking about people supporting Etsy though, | I'm talking about Etsy itself. | | Like one possible story is that Etsy does this and it's | shitty for sellers and maybe a lot of buyers too, but it | ends up making Etsy successful in the long-run so they | don't care. | | That's _not_ the story I 'm telling though, it's one | where Etsy chases medium-term revenue at the cost of | their long-term niche and thus their long-term success. | If me and GP are right, in theory Etsy itself ought to | not want this to happen. | dylan604 wrote: | But the only way that Etsy can measure any decision they | make is with the number of transactions from which they | receive a cut. If they allow mass produced items to be | sold that increases the number of transactions, then | that's the bottom line numbers they care about. If they | force a rule that it has to be small batch hand crafted | type of items to be sold, then the per transaction | numbers go way down. Bean counters and stock analysts | don't like those numbers, and they are after all the | people any public corp are most concerned. | alecbz wrote: | Yes, but the interesting question I think is _why_ the | bean counters are given free reign to make decisions that | ultimately lead to the company 's downfall[0]. | | Like what if you had a fine dining restaurant where | things are going okay, and someone comes in and is like | "Hey guys, I noticed we're spending a lot of time washing | plates. We'd be able to serve X% more customers if we | just like scraped off the food and did a quick rinse." | The restaurant tries it, it works for a bit until diners | see specs of old food on their plates, the restaurant's | reputation tanks, they lose all their customers, and they | go out of business. | | I think most restaurants are structured such that this | does not happen. The restaurants correctly see that even | though it seems like doing this might make some graphs go | up in the short-term, it will actually make everything | terrible in the long-term, and so they don't do it. | | And again, this isn't about like, benevolent restaurant | owners valuing the custom experience even if it's bad for | the bottom line. Washing the plates thoroughly is _good_ | for the bottom line; any sufficiently intelligent | restaurant owner shouldn 't listen to the bean counter | even if the owner's just a greedy capitalist. | | (This reads enough like a Scott Alexander post that I'm | pretty sure I might just actually be copying one; I think | he wrote something along these lines once.) | | [0]: Again, all of this is precipitated on the idea that | actually Etsy will fail once it loses its niche, since | it'll just get beaten by Amazon/eBay/etc. when it's just | like any other seller of goods. If what's really going to | happen is that Etsy will do fine as a company, then this | becomes a totally different shape of problem: "the market | rewards things that we actually maybe don't want for | society". | dylan604 wrote: | Did Amazon fail when it opened the flood gates to the | mass market? Did eBay? Did Walmart? No. I don't accept | your premise that a company switching from handmade to | low price mass produced will fail. | | Fail means different things to different people, but to | the stockholders that the bean counters are beholden to | determine fail/success by stock price and profits. What | definition the original users of the site expecting | handmade/small batch type of items have of fail/success | means nothing to those in charge. It's not really a hard | subject to understand is it? You have to accept that the | "leadership" of Etsy is different now than when it was | created. Their ethos has changed. It happens. You are the | one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not | change reality. People still use Google now that "don't | be evil" is no longer their ethos. | JAlexoid wrote: | What's their unique gimmick? Paying for mass produced | quality weekend project items?.. Tie dyed tees at 3x the | price? | | I bought from Etsy once, but even then the items were | recommended to me via Instagram. Etsy in 2014 was already | filled with poorly made "artsy" crap at double the price. | | No idea why people are so excited about it. | troydavis wrote: | > It does seem like Etsy has basically become eBay | | That's what Etsy's board chose when they appointed ex-eBay | executive Josh Silverman to be Etsy's CEO: | https://www.etsy.com/team/member/jsilverman (2017) | | More background: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog | .pl?/pl/2018/8/1... (2018), https://www.vox.com/the- | goods/2019/9/4/20841475/etsy-free-sh... (2019). | | Chad Dickerson ran Etsy. Josh Silverman turned it into eBay. | fao_ wrote: | As a parallel, I'm not sure how Elon Musk would turn SpaceX | into PayPal. | dangrossman wrote: | You wouldn't hire Elon Musk to turn anything into PayPal, | as he wasn't a founder nor truly even an employee or | executive of PayPal. Musk joined PayPal via merger with | his fledgling X.com online bank. It was Confinity's | PayPal product that continued from the merger, not Musk's | X.com product. Musk was appointed CEO of the combined | business, but contributed nothing of note to it. He was | only there for a few months before the board ousted him | from the company, while on vacation: his regular absence | from the job was one of the reasons. The other was that | his contribution to the engineering direction of the | company amounted to "let's stop working on the business, | and instead rewrite the platform on .NET to run on | Windows servers", which the organization found so | preposterous they circulated a petition to the board | among the engineers to have Musk removed. The board did | so. | ineedasername wrote: | I suppose he could let rando users load their crap into a | launch and then have people bid on "owning" a bit of | spacejunk memorabilia orbiting the planet. Think, _" | Shamrock Beanie Baby, but orbiting the Earth!"._ | | Probably not great if you want the actual thing, in hand. | No one spending 3x the price of a Steam Deck right now | will want that price going towards launching it into | orbit instead of having it in hand, playing games. Still, | maybe there's a market for "owning" orbiting space debris | contributing to Kessler Syndrome? Sort of like buying & | burning an item to make an artificial scarcity NFT? Only | this way you get to contribute to the destruction of | mankind's ability to easily launch anything into orbit. | redisman wrote: | I would guess it jives better with SEO garbage and brings | more sales in the short term | ineedasername wrote: | _> I don't know why Etsy seems to welcome this_ | | I've sold on Etsy for a while as a hobby side business. The | change seems to happen after their IPO. It felt like pretty | quickly after that there began a trickle of incremental | changes. A rule that allowed "manufacturing partners" really | opened a huge loophole though, and in general things went | down hill rapidly over the last 2-3 years. | JAlexoid wrote: | To be fair - you really can't do volume sales without | outsourcing manufacturing. | | There's only so much you can get from handcrafting. | ineedasername wrote: | Depends on what you consider "scale". I did 5k+ orders in | about 5 years. I scaled back a bit after that because I | had some large projects at my main job, but that's not | bad scale for hand-made items on a hobby basis. If I'd | been devoted to it full time & increased efforts to get | more exposure (which I avoided since I had all the sales | I could handle already) then even as a solo creator I | could have scaled to 25K in that time period & earned a | nice salary doing this FT even after setting aside $$ for | PTO & retirement funds. | | On the other hand, if you consider "scale" to be > | $300k/year, then yes it's hard to do it without a | manufacturing partner. And that can be a legitimate route | even within the traditional Etsy framework! Design | something, punch out countless copies w/ the "partner", | and do final finishing/customization yourself. Or a few | other similar models. The problem is this opened the door | for sellers & etsy to rationalize keeping all sorts of | definitively _not_ handcrafted items in the marketplace. | _At best_ it 's handmade by the "partner" through mass | cheap 3rd world labor. At worse it's white labelled junk. | | Anyway, the entire point of Etsy is that, even if | "there's only so much you can get from handcrafting", | _that was what Etsy was for_. The place where true, | actual, real handcrafters were selling their items. Sure, | it represents a cap on scale, but that was Etsy 's | _mission_. Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or | the knockoff junk you find on Amazon. | JAlexoid wrote: | > Depends on what you consider "scale". | | Scale is value and the potential to sales increase. | Software license sales have infinite scale, Gwyneth | Paltrow egg sales is high scale and $200 hand crafted in | spare time earing sales is no scale. | | > Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the | knockoff junk you find on Amazon. | | Yes, it was intended a storefront for handmade junk for | 2x the price... With occasional interesting things. | christop1957 wrote: | That's a little cynical. We don't make the screws that go | into our furniture or smelt the iron ore that goes into | the steel pipe fittings or grow the trees or generate the | electricity that supports distribution of this thread. | But we do feel like we make each piece that we sell on | Etsy. | JAlexoid wrote: | It's not cynical. | | I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to | produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale | outsourcing of production is the only way. | | These days you can outsource original product | manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't | mean that you're not the artist behind them. | | I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully | prebuilt by mass manufacturer. | freeone3000 wrote: | To sustain etsy? To sustain a storefront, maybe a bit of | search? I'm sure 8% of sales are enough to cover that, | regardless of the actual volume. | ineedasername wrote: | _> I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully | prebuilt by mass manufacturer._ | | I don't have a problem with "manufacturing partners" in | this sense. It's when that loophole is used to justify or | hide countless sellers simply white labelling items that | is the problem. If I make a design and have a manufacture | stamp out copies in the thousands, but then offer | customization that I add JIT for each order (a hallmark | of etsy) then that's fine. But if I take a $0.50 beaded | necklace bought in bulk on Alibaba and resell then at $10 | with not other value added, that does not fit the | supposed mission of Etsy. Take that to Amazon, Ebay, & | it's okay. But it's absolutely not within the handcrafted | marketplace, even when "handcrafted" is loosely defined, | that Etsy is supposed to be. | christop1957 wrote: | Yes I agree, Etsy used to make sure you were original or | had manufacturing partners. They had some kind of vetting | for the partners until Josh Silverman(?) came on board. I | think that is when those rules loosened and AliBaba | became a legit partner on Etsy. It's been a slippery | slope. My segment on Etsy is not conducive to mass | production and I think we have simply priced ourselves | above it as a way to keep separate . I have started | seeing furniture made in Turkey and Poland and Romania | that is now beating us up a little on price, not sure how | they get the shipping so cheap but that is a different | issue | withinboredom wrote: | Isn't that literally the point of Etsy? | notpachet wrote: | It was before the IPO. Now the point is to make money. | Hence the problem. | IgorPartola wrote: | Exactly. It sucks because I have bought absolute garbage from | there. I know the seller matters just like on eBay but the | trust that I'll be getting a craftsman-made item when buying | from Etsy is now firmly lost outside of specific stores. It | is actively user hostile now. | DanTheManPR wrote: | I started out selling my own hobby stuff on eBay, and then | switched to Etsy because I appreciated the way it presented | my products as a storefront. It seemed more "legitimate". But | with the way things are going, I'm ironically thinking about | moving primarily back to eBay and just embracing the free- | for-all there. | mardifoufs wrote: | Ironically enough Ebay is probably the most trustworthy | platform atm. It might sound insane but eBay listings are | usually pretty clear on the origin and condition of the | items. You know when the seller is from China, or if the item | is used, and while there are tons of scams and misleading | descriptions... for the most part sellers are usually pretty | honest in the item descriptions. I don't mind buying knock | offs as long as I know that they aren't the real deal, and | cheap items are at least priced accordingly. Which is not the | case on Amazon. | pessimizer wrote: | The differences between shopping at Ebay and Amazon are | that on Ebay you're 1) buying from a particular seller with | feedback that actually refers to their own performance and | products, rather than "reviews" that refer to a semi-random | selection of different products purchased from a completely | unrelated range of sellers, and 2) on Ebay those products | are half the price of Amazon. | | Somebody sent me an Amazon gift card a while back, and I | still haven't found reason to use it. The only thing I | still find Amazon useful for is to buy small amounts of | industrial supplies and parts that are usually sold | directly from suppliers to businesses in large amounts, who | often have terrible web storefronts (or only use Amazon for | ecommerce) because they usually deal with their ( _buy-by- | the-case, repeat_ ) customers by phone or in person. If I | only need two specialized bolts or two feet of tubing, I'll | go to Amazon. | brudgers wrote: | For hardware (non-computing) I can't find at Ace, I use | Mcmaster-Carr. | | https://www.mcmaster.com/ | pessimizer wrote: | Me, too. It's a great site with as good of an interface | as you could possibly dream of for a company that's | selling eleventy billion products. | mbesto wrote: | Whoever championed (CIO?) and executed that e-commerce | deserves an award. Serious. I work with a bunch of middle | market manufacturers and distributors and doing | e-commerce is HARD for them. I use that site as a | reference on "how to do it right", every. single. time. | jiveturkey wrote: | At a very excessive markup. But for low quantity | purchases and very high customer-is-king level of | service, it's unbeatable. | brudgers wrote: | In the US, if you buy specialty hardware from Amazon you | probably are going to pay a markup on the markup because | McMaster Carr is probably the previous source. | deelowe wrote: | Fastenal is another good option as well. Grainger can be | good for other random industrial things (tho pricey). | I've found that fastenal's shipping is INSANELY fast. | Like get it delivered the next day fast. Though that | could be my location. | heavyset_go wrote: | Not sure if eBay still does it, but they also let sellers | recycle old listings' reviews for different products on | new listings. I experienced that at least once with a | return. | vlunkr wrote: | You've convinced me to try ebay again. It's gotten so | tiresome trying to identify whether or not you're buying | garbage on Amazon. I put plenty of time into it and I | still get burned occasionally. | reilly3000 wrote: | I dropped my Prime membership over a year ago and have no | regrets. eBay has made that possible. I've gotten | consistently fair prices and quick shipping, and ironically | fewer quality issues. Target and Costco have also become a | bigger factor as well with free shipping and in store | returns. | | My cloud computing has moved to GCP, DO, and my homelab | (built from eBay stuff!). | | I still use Amazon if I have no other option. I just pay | for shipping, but surprise... it's usually still free over | $25. | | #cancelprime | function_seven wrote: | I think I'm headed the same way you went. | | It's crazy how these 2 platforms seemed to have switched | places. Several years ago, Amazon would have been the | place to do for scam-free purchasing, and eBay was the | shady site that you had to do your due diligence on | before buying. | | More and more it's the opposite. I have to wrangle with | searches and filters on Amazon to try and avoid the | "fake" brands and knockoff goods. eBay is easier and | often cheaper to boot. | cogman10 wrote: | I think it's because eBay, since it's founding, has had a | scam problem that it's been actively trying to address. | They aren't perfect, but they have certainly been putting | in multiple measures to increase trust. | | Amazon, on the other hand, has nearly done the opposite. | They don't do anything about scammers and have created an | environment where even when you buy something directly | from amazon you might get a knock off. You can't trust | anything there. | | Everyone knows the amazon reviews are garbage, even | amazon. Yet they keep them because having 1000 garbage | reviews looks better than having 10 legitimate reviews | (and many of them negative). | | Amazon has optimized for moving any and everything. | twic wrote: | I also don't have Prime, and buy from eBay where | possible, but a substantial fraction of the time, the | things I buy turn up in Amazon boxes. I think there are | eBay sellers who have Prime, list items at slightly less | than Amazon's price including shipping, then use their | free shipping to drop-ship items to customers. They | collect slightly less than Amazon's shipping fee in gross | margin, and only have the Prime free as overhead. | mistrial9 wrote: | Target physical stores still build profiles of shoppers | using non-disclosed facial recognition? "theft | prevention" | bin_bash wrote: | Do they not deserve to know who is coming into their | store? Do I have a right to anonymity if I'm on private | property? | nebulous_two wrote: | There is an understanding between shopper and shop owner | about what is happening on said property. The shopper | normally does not expect that the shop owner would | instantly know your entire biography + family lineage | just by stepping onto the property. | burntoutfire wrote: | How can he get that from just a photo? | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | You collect cell phone IMEIs and sell it to a data broker | that aggregates multiple sources to pinpoint strong | associations that lead back to a shopper's home. In | return you get demographic data on your customers. | heavyset_go wrote: | From firms like this[1]. | | [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmkyq/heres-the- | file-clearv... | JAlexoid wrote: | Yes, you do have a right to expectation of privacy. A | verbal contract is still required for filming you. Open | ended contracts aren't valid as well. | | We don't live in ancapistan. | bin_bash wrote: | > verbal contract is still required for filming you | | I mean that's obviously not true. Otherwise they wouldn't | have security cameras. | JAlexoid wrote: | Those are typically written contracts - as in the sign | with a camera when entering buildings. | mistrial9 wrote: | sure - posted plainly to the public. "caveat emptor" | While we are at it, where are those records kept? Who | sells them, to whom? What happens when there are factual | errors in a private profile on members of the public? | What other restrictions are placed on members of the | public due to undisclosed records? What political | affiliations do the owners of TARGET have, and do they | use their company assets for political purposes, or | private law-enforcement activities? Politics and law- | enforcement are regulated acitivities, for historically | important reasons, right? | bduerst wrote: | One of the alternatives is to just close stores bc of | excessive theft, like Walgreens and CVS are doing in the | Bay Area. | | I'm not saying Target's implementation is justified, but | surely there's a middle ground for scaling anti-theft ops | and using technology responsibly? | everybodyknows wrote: | San Francisco closings hit the national news a few months | ago -- what's the state of it now? Any reopenings? | bduerst wrote: | We did the same thing back a few years ago, and were able | to move about 95% of online shopping on Amazon Prime onto | other platforms or local BnMs. | | There's still a few items that are really hard to find | elsewhere though, but that was Amazon's core value prop | originally with rare books. | bluGill wrote: | I wanted to do that. But EBay has decided my account was | hacked (I haven't done anything in 5 years and suddenly | want to sell something - I understand the red flag). This | can only be resolved by calling them at a phone number | they will not give me. | mardifoufs wrote: | Oh that's a very good point though. Ebay support is great | for refunds but absolutely useless w.r.t any account | specific problem. I couldn't buy anything for 2 years a | while ago and they would never explain why. | | Turns out my old PayPal account had a minor issue, and | that meant I couldn't use ebay even if I didn't even have | my PayPal account linked to ebay anymore and I was using | a new credit card. I had to figure that out by myself, | ebay was completely useless and unhelpful. | quickthrower2 wrote: | What is the reason to boycott Amazon, but where Google is | ok? | KingOfCoders wrote: | I also dropped my Prime - had it from the very beginning. | | Amazing how Amazon wants to push me back into prime, | heavy handed or subtile. | cogman10 wrote: | What's the point of prime? | | Seems like the free shipping and 2nd day shipping is all | but a thing of the past. | JAlexoid wrote: | Prime Video, Audible and deals. | | A bunch of brands officially sell through Amazon and | super fast shipping. | | If you're in a metropolis - you get a lot of benefits, | including 1 hour groceries. | treis wrote: | Also free full resolution photo back ups. | JacobThreeThree wrote: | I agree that eBay has quietly become more trustworthy than | most others, and they have more experience with user review | and trust management systems that just about anyone. | Melatonic wrote: | I am not even sure that eBay has become more trustworthy | - they just kept doing what they were always doing. The | others have just become significantly more shady. | vt240 wrote: | The greatest part about eBay for me, is that it actively | encourages you to network with a set of vendors, and | develop a level of trust. That's just something I've never | got from Amazon. | zucked wrote: | I have repeat purchased from vendors on eBay for | different items based on previous experiences. eBay makes | that easy - Amazon is the complete opposite. They hide | the vendor as much as possible. | KingOfCoders wrote: | I also buy (after 10+ years) much more from eBay than | Amazon. First for trust, second they often have more | specialized filters than amazon (E.g. cardboard box sizes). | kingcharles wrote: | eBay's search gets worse every year, but Amazon's sucks | way harder. As you say, at least you can filter better on | eBay (although their price filters are getting vague like | Amazon). | bduerst wrote: | I disagree. | | Unless Ebay has overhauled their reputation system | recently, you will buy counterfeit/mislabeled goods from a | merchant, and then either receive a bribe (as a partial | return) to keep a five star rating or you have to open an | incident to get a full refund, in which you can't leave a | rating and tell other people to beware. | | This allows terrible merchants from all parts of the world | to push crap on unsuspecting customers. | slg wrote: | How much demand is there truly for handmade products from | independent creators? It is possible that Etsy has decided | that is no longer a market that is worth pursuing and they | would rather try to compete with Amazon and AliExpress. It is | often better to have a small piece of a huge pie than the | majority of a tiny pie. | TigeriusKirk wrote: | There's more than enough demand to support a good-sized | business mediating such sales. | | However, there's not enough to demand to keep the | shareholders of an IPO'ed company happy. | | And there's the problem. | JAlexoid wrote: | Considering that the strike is complaining about hike in | fees - it doesn't seem like there is enough demand. | | Is Etsy such a good aggregator, that setting up a | storefront with Square is that hard? | dangrossman wrote: | Etsy has somewhere on the order of 100 million active | buyers, searching Etsy for goods to buy every month. If | you set up a storefront on Square, you start out with 0 | active buyers, searching your storefront 0 times every | month. Marketplaces bring tremendous value to small | sellers. | JAlexoid wrote: | So... Let me get this straight - they get a lot of | customers off other people's work, but aren't willing to | pay for the increased costs of providing them those extra | customers. | | These Etsy people sound like entitled brats. | naravara wrote: | The pattern with these sorts of Web 2.0 companies is grimly | familiar now. They start promising more access and reach | for small creators. They get a lot of small creators in the | door with the ease of use and cutting out of the old | middle-men. Then they implement a bunch of mechanisms to | foster lock-in and fleece the small creators in ways that | aren't much better than the old middle-men (though, | admittedly, with more reach). It's like one of those fish | traps you put in a current where the fish swim in but can't | turn around to get away. | wtf242 wrote: | yeah, the last item I bought from Etsy showed up in an Amazon | box. The seller legit just bought the item on amazon and | shipped it to me for 2x the price. | nomel wrote: | From what I've recently found, the search results have been | completely overrun with ugly 3d printed goods, most being | duplicate designs. | Nextgrid wrote: | > I don't know why Etsy seems to welcome this instead of | doing everything they possibly can to fight it. | | They can raise short-term profits this way. The problem is | that there's only so much rent you can seek before it becomes | unprofitable for sellers. It turns out that "industrial- | scale" sellers, copycats and outright scammers have lower | operating costs which means they can stick around and replace | the independent creators that have essentially been priced | out of the market. Of course, in the long-term it will be the | death of the company, but by that time, bonuses would've been | paid, raises would've been awarded, stock would've vested and | lots of "shareholder value" would've been created. | | They've also recently bought Depop for a significant amount | of money and I'm not sure if it's profitable, so they might | be intentionally cannibalizing their earlier product to make | money to prop up the next one. | treis wrote: | Why can't you build a business around selling "industrial- | scale" artsy/customizable stuff? | | In a different context, someone made a great point that | your first million users don't necessarily need to be | included in your next 20 million. Maybe Etsy has or will | cycle through all their early buyers & sellers. But that | doesn't matter if the group cycling in is more valuable. | Nextgrid wrote: | > Why can't you build a business around selling | "industrial-scale" artsy/customizable stuff? | | That's essentially what old-school furniture & home | stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think | that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce | and margins are low. | | I also suspect that a lot of the industrial-scale | producers & copycats use the artisans as their R&D | department and only copy their successful designs. In | this case, the innovation still comes from the small- | scale independent sellers, which if they are driven off | the platform would eventually kill off the industrial- | scale sellers and copycats as they'd no longer have | anything to copy (and designing in-house might make them | unprofitable). | treis wrote: | >That's essentially what old-school furniture & home | stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think | that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce | and margins are low. | | Eh, I can't think of a directly comparable site. The | closest would be something like Pier 1, but there's no | customization there and it's all sold by Pier 1. | JAlexoid wrote: | Independent, small scale sellers aren't priced out. Cost of | doing business includes sales costs - that needs to be | integral to the price. | | What means is that these craftspeople don't produce enough | value for the markets they are targeting. | Pet_Ant wrote: | Well part of the value is being handcrafted and being | original. If others lie about the first, and can just | steal the second, then yes, it is hard to compete. | JAlexoid wrote: | Brand recognition and originality is value. Making felt | handbags for 10 years and expecting that no one else | would copy that - is what drives people away from | stagnating crafts people. | Workaccount2 wrote: | Etsy makes money on transactions. More transactions = more | money. | | Most users of etsy do not care about source or authenticity. | They just want what they see for the price listed. | | Losing the handmade trinket shops is meaningless compared to | the full scale China operation doing 100x more business. | Customers by and large cannot tell the difference nor do they | actually care too much. | after_care wrote: | I disagree. Having a reputable online handmade trinket shop | was very valuable because it was the largest and had the | best brand recognition. Being a Chinese factory retail | outlet is less valuable because _everyone_ is a Chinese | factory retail outlet. | Workaccount2 wrote: | We just have to solve which market has a larger space to | grow in: | | Market for cheap Chinese goods. | | Market for handmade trinkets. | | I have a pretty good feeling that I know which one is | more profitable. I'm sure investors know too. | after_care wrote: | Sure, the market for cheap imported goods is much larger. | It's also more competitive. Do you really think Etsy is | going to stand against Walmart, Amazon, etc? | Aunche wrote: | Etsy is occupying a niche of semi-customized trinkets, a | minority of which are hand-made. This isn't a space that | Walmart and Amazon seem particularly interested in. | naravara wrote: | I don't think it's that simple. The real problem is that | people want nice, handmade trinkets at cheap Chinese | goods prices. Which is why the cheap Chinese good | manufacturers spam their generic AliExpress-tier wares | into places like Etsy to fool people as to what they're | getting. | | The websites that function as clearinghouses (Amazon, | Etsy, etc.) could figure out ways to prevent it but they | have incentives to play along with obfuscation as to | which market the consumer is shopping in. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Small businesses have absolutely no obligation to work | for "investors." | Cederfjard wrote: | Is Etsy, a public company with a valuation in the tens of | billions, still a "small business"? | JAlexoid wrote: | Every business has an obligation to work for the | investor. | ehvatum wrote: | That really depends on how the small business is funded. | Nextgrid wrote: | The problem is that "cheap Chinese goods" is already | monopolized by eBay, Aliexpress, Banggood and Amazon. I | don't see how they're ever going to break into it. | ProjectArcturis wrote: | The only reason to go to Etsy is to (try to) find unique | stuff. If that stuff is diluted 100-1 by Chinese knockoffs, | there's no reason to go there anymore. I might as well go | to eBay or Amazon, which probably have even lower prices. | BobbyJo wrote: | I think the glaring issue with that line of thought is that | the position of 'rent seeking middleman providing a web | storefront' is pretty commoditized, and is likely not | viable long term. | | In their niche, they had a smaller addressable market, but | they had a moat from their brand within said niche. Outside | of the niche, that moat doesn't exist, and they are | competing against Amazon, Ebay, and many others. | JAlexoid wrote: | Cost. Simple as that. | | Etsy cannot charge AirBnB commissions, to verify every single | seller and keep them in check | impostervt wrote: | The "easy" solution seems to be - if it's sold on Amazon, you | can't sell it on Etsy. | | But I guess that would still harm the original developers of | the IP :\ | have_faith wrote: | I used to visit Etsy to buy gifts and that sort if thing but I | hardly go there any more because of all of the spam products. I | can usually tell what is and isn't an independent seller but I | can't be bothered with sifting through them all anymore. | naoqj wrote: | > as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of | aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original | work. make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly | stolen, mass produced on aliexpress, then sold by all the | boring resellers on etsy | | As a buyer it is a massive joy to see the price of some item go | down when there's diversity of sellers instead of a monopoly. | samstave wrote: | I have a few designed items that I have oft been told to sell | n etsy - I have literally no interest in setting up an etsy | shop -- however, I DO have interest in finding out how to get | things I design made via AliExpress for my own desires - and | dont care if other items crop up so much... | | How does one go about getting a product made through | aliexpress? | xsmasher wrote: | What kind of items? | | Redbubble lets you upload designs for t-shirts, phone | cases, etc, and make them available in their web | storefront. You only get a small slice of the sale price, | but it's very easy to get your designs "out into the | world." | samstave wrote: | Physical Objects, not art prints. | | I come up with mechanical designs as well as "artsy" | things - which could be mass produced... but never like a | logo-shirt or something as mentally ephemeral.. | | --- | | Right now I am modeling an 'thing' as a 3d printable (or | injection molded at scale) attachment to a common house | hold power tool, but can come in various grades | (home|pro|industrial)... | | I messed up and had a bunch of money in 2020 that I | should have bought a printer with, but spent on stupid | stuff like food and living expenses instead... | | Other items are home-goods improvements/desires... | | Think of me as the SamCo (Like RonCo) of my personal | universe... but I am hoping some of that bleeds put into | other universes such as xsmasherCo :-) | Jarwain wrote: | Does uploading the model to shapeways' marketplace or to | thingiverse, or having it printed by a 3d printing | service not suffice for your needs? | agmater wrote: | AliExpress is for consumers, for bulk orders you can use | Alibaba. You can also get in contact with the manufacturers | to make things to your own liking, they'll quote you a | price. | JAlexoid wrote: | Yep. You can literally get anything on Alibaba. | | I bought bulk washing machine motors for millions of | dollars and audio amplifier modules for a few thousands | and N95 masks for a few hundred. | [deleted] | nerdawson wrote: | That arguably goes against the purpose of a craft | marketplace. If you want competition over cheap imported | products, there's already Amazon and eBay. | bovermyer wrote: | Just to make sure I understand your position... are you | saying that it's OK for someone to copy someone else's | original design, mass produce it at lower cost, and give no | credit or royalties to the original designer? | naoqj wrote: | Yes. It's better for the buyer, and I'm the buyer. | mint2 wrote: | That is a very short term an narrow view that leads to a | race to the bottom in terms of quality and innovation. It | leads to cheap mass produced generic fair. In the long | run it's terrible for buyers. | fleddr wrote: | Not if that is what the buyers want. Evidence suggests | they buy low quality low durability items, also in the | face of better choices. | autoexec wrote: | > Not if that is what the buyers want. Evidence suggests | they buy low quality low durability items | | Low quality/durability items are not what most people | want most of the time. It's sometimes all they can | afford, or they think they found a good deal and feel | ripped off when the item arrives and they discover that | it's low quality/durability, but either way they aren't | happy about it. What people want is high quality goods at | prices they can afford. | fleddr wrote: | You're suggesting that people do not willingly buy low | quality crap, but they most definitely do. Even when | knowing it is crap, and even when having the budget to | buy higher quality goods. They'll still buy the low | quality crap, at massive scale. | | I'm from the Netherlands. One of the most successful | retail stores here is "Action", which in the category of | low quality garbage sinks to the absolute bottom. | | Everybody knows it's garbage. One may buy a pair of | scissors there and have it break down in 2 months of | usage. So then people just buy another one. It's not | strictly a budget issue, most shoppers can afford a good | pair of scissors, one that lasts 10 years, but they | prefer the cheap one anyway. | | "Alibaba shopping" is mainstream here. Everybody buys | their small items there. One of my colleagues, whom is | upper middle class, was proudly telling me how he buys a | "value" pack of 10 phone chargers every year. They're all | terrible and soon break down, so then he'll just move to | the next one. He could just buy a single decent one, but | no. | | I wish you were right, but you're not. People just want | the absolute cheapest thing, and they want it now. | mint2 wrote: | >"Not if that is what the buyer wants [in the immediate | term]" | | That's generally how a race to the bottom happens. Short | term narrow minded outlooks that barely consider how one | action effects another. It's terrible long run for | buyers, employees, and the planet. | notpachet wrote: | You just accidentally summarized humanity. | throwaway675309 wrote: | Obviously you're not a creator otherwise you'd possess at | least some minimal amount of scruples in what is blatant | plagiarism. | Kranar wrote: | It absolutely is. Most of what people are calling | "original" designs aren't even original. Etsy is rampant | with copyright or trademark infringement, or just rehashes | of the same designs someone else made. The only difference | between Etsy and the spooky Chinese is that China has | mastered manufacturing and distribution and that's what | puts a lot of independent vendors out of business. | | Plenty of industries deal with this in various ways and | manage to survive and the consumer ends up winning in the | end. Restaurants, fashion, heck even app stores all deal | with this and the end result is better products for the | consumer at cheaper prices. | | No one has a monopoly on designing yet another cute | bracelet or rainbow lanyard or generic pillow cover. | duxup wrote: | I largely quit going to Etsy for this reason. | | Had a couple run ins with what looked like good quality product | only to get what was clearly just bulk garbage. | | Etsy was a neat bonus where I could access handmade small | makers, but now that it is a hassle/ I don't know what I'm | getting... I just don't go there. | CommanderData wrote: | I avoid etsy for this reason. I want original work. Its in | etsys interest to stamp this out. | | They are not another ebay and shouldn't want to be. | heavyset_go wrote: | > _i will say they are right about one thing, small sellers are | getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress | resellers. as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through | pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and | original work._ | | At the end of the day, any increase in sales means more revenue | for Etsy. The company is following the same digital flea market | model that Amazon does, and it has all of the same perverse | incentives. | DanTheManPR wrote: | I've started open-sourcing all the design files for the stuff I | sell online, because IP protection is very weak (and frankly, | I've come to think it's basically impossible). It's been a more | healthy way for me to approach my products: I am a manufacturer | of this product, and my competitive advantage is my own | familiarity with the product and my own reputation. Whether | that's fair or not is besides the point, since it's the nature | of online sales these days. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | Within 45 minutes of where I live lies a little town that is | known for hundreds of miles around as a place to go shopping | for locally-produced art and hand-crafted items of almost any | kind. You know, glass items, wind chimes, paintings, etc. Why | does this still work, 30 years into the internet revolution? | Curation. The shop owners choose very carefully what to sell, | based on extremely limited space. Etsy purports to be the same | idea on the internet, but they'll let anyone who wants to sell | on their platform. THEY'D BE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE IF THEY | DIDN'T. But for the same reason that I buy less on Amazon and | more from brick-and-mortar stores, they're finding that the | CURATION is the key to VALUE. The problem of course, is that | Etsy, or Amazon, or ANYONE who has a PLATFORM -- like Apple -- | has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom | line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual | customers. It seems that an easy "gate" to erect on the | platform would be to limit how many chochkies you can sell per | month. It would seem to be a fix for people who are trying to | use volume and SEO to take over someone else's product idea. | Someone here could probably blow a hole in that idea, though. | But if it's a site for personal hobbyists to sell something on | the side, then you have to come up with rules to CURATE the | content to produce that outcome. | mschuster91 wrote: | This is why I buy music related stuff (e.g. cables) only from | Thomann. Amazon more or less relies on vendors to fill out | metadata like product type, cable length, plug types and | communication standards, and the result is that the Amazon | product filter is often just _horribly fucking broken_. | Meanwhile, Thomann does all that curation work on their own, | and it 's just a breeze to use. | | Our biggest electronics chain Conrad however... oh jesus they | have gone really downhill some years ago with their website | design - the search is broken, metadata for parts are | (sometimes completely) wrong, and to make it worse even the | in-store staff has to rely on the website instead of a | dedicated ERP software which means if you are searching for a | part with specific specs (e.g. temperature) even the store | staff can't help you any more! | bjelkeman-again wrote: | Thomann and the like killed my local music instrument | stores. I don't think Thomann will go away, but it | depresses me that it is nearly impossible to find an | instrument I want to purchase to test without travelling 5 | hours. And I live in a capital city. | Spivak wrote: | > Thomann and the like killed my local music instrument | stores. | | I think that's a good thing. The business of "holding | things in a building" that are occasionally purchased and | don't benefit from last-mile caching should go the way of | the dinosaur. It will be good to get the space back. The | thing that's really needed is a community space but the | economics of it are hard unless you're selling stuff. My | city tries to promote this stuff with arts council | grants. | bjelkeman-again wrote: | But Thomann doesn't stock what I want, and the stores | that carried it died, so now I am no better off. | verve_rat wrote: | There is value in being able to check out the thing you | want, in person, before you buy it for a lot of things. | mschuster91 wrote: | Thomann started out as a small music/instrument/stage | tech store, too - but unlike their competitors, they | fully embraced the future instead of showing the typical | German skepticism towards change. | | I mean, I get your pain. But on the other hand I'm just | sick about the Mittelstand complaining that online is | eating their lunch... they have _all_ sat on their wealth | and glory and thought they had carved out their forever | niche guaranteeing themselves profits without having to | do anything any more, and every single one that collapses | fills my heart with a bit of joy. | newaccount74 wrote: | A couple of years ago, I went shopping for headphones. I | went to a couple of different small electronics/audio | stores, and none would let me try the headphones!! They | had them in the plastic packaging and said they are not | allowed to open them. | | What the fuck! | | I just left and bought something online. | | (I know there are high end hifi shops that will let me | try headphones. But I wasn't looking for 500EUR | headphones, I just wanted something that didn't sound | like shit. Thomann is perfect for that.) | doublepg23 wrote: | HiFi shops won't let you try anymore either. People come | in to try them and then just buy them online. | | Record player sales are booming though, according to the | shop I went to. | toyg wrote: | _> People come in to try them and then just buy them | online._ | | It still puzzles me how much of a disconnect exists | between e-commerce and brick & mortar, almost 25 years | from Gates's "Business at the speed of thought". | | Those people who come in the store should be converted | right there and then, by making it trivial to order in- | store a home delivery option that is price-competitive | with non-b&m-equipped businesses. Keep razor-thin local | inventory that commands a premium for the fact that you | get it there and then, and everything else can be | ordered. This should allow you to offset a decent amount | of showroom costs while still competing with web-only | operations. | | If the price difference is small enough and the friction | low enough, making the order in-store becomes a better | option than leaving, sitting down somewhere, searching | again for the item on some other store, etc etc. | | There are still big opportunities out there for retailers | who can figure out that sweet spot. | Afton wrote: | I mean, you could have bought them. Tried them out while | in the store, then returned them if they weren't to your | liking. But I'll admit that might be more overhead than | you were hoping for. But it would also be a great way to | communicate to the store that their policies are bad. | "I'd like to return these. Nothing really wrong, just | don't like them. Oh, and I'd like to try...I mean buy | these headphones. ... Actually, I'd like to return these | please [etc, etc] | ciupicri wrote: | You're assuming the store would accept the return and | even if they did, they might not do it for the same | price; a (restocking) fee might be charged. | ciupicri wrote: | Yeah, but who's going to buy them in an opened package | and at what discount (loss for the store)? | markbnj wrote: | I live in the northeast and we seem to still have local | music stores offering the usual mix of instrument sales | and service, lessons, sheet music and other supplies, | etc. If I understand correctly from casual conversations | with the owner of our local store many of them make a lot | of their revenue renting instruments to local school | students. | skrebbel wrote: | Just in case you weren't aware, if you surround a word by | _asterisks_ , you can emphasize a word without YELLING | | Eg *hello* there | | Becomes | | _hello_ there | 1-6 wrote: | Honest question though, when is it ever appropriate to | yell? Have you seen people ever do it? I think the all caps | could be a useful tool for emphasis. Would I do it though? | No. | ______-_-______ wrote: | I think yelling is appropriate if someone says they're | thinking of building an Electron app. That's the only | reason I can think of. | zarmin wrote: | So! How's your first day on the internet going? | Stratoscope wrote: | It's never appropriate here. | | > _Please don 't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want | to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it | and it will get italicized._ | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | Of course, uppercase is appropriate for an acronym or | initialism that actually is spelled that way, such as SEO | in the comment we're replying to. | WhitneyLand wrote: | Thank you, for responding in a more productive way than I | could have. | [deleted] | JAlexoid wrote: | But... That curation is a VERY expensive task. | | Etsy is for artists/creators. If you add curation to the mix | one side needs to take a hit - and it ain't going to be your | wallet. | | Basically the reason for Etsy to exist is "direct to | consumer" model, with low intermediary overhead and 0 setup | hurdles. | | (If you ever tried to get a product on a supermarket shelf, | that's how it is to get onto a successful curated store | shelf) | christop1957 wrote: | Etsy may be compromised these days but it still IS for | artists/creators as you say. We have a stand alone website | that gets 2 to 9 visitors a day and our main Etsy site gets | hundreds every day. That's why we are on Etsy. We are too | small to hire comprehensive SEO/advertising help (I've | tried a few) so we let Etsy collect the main slug of | customers. We employ 4 people full time. | JAlexoid wrote: | Therefore it should be clear that the rise in fees is a | reasonable tradeoff, for access to more potential | customers. | | I understand the desire to make sure that goods are | authentic, but that is the only reasonable argument in | the whole strike manifesto. | cinntaile wrote: | What kind of products do you sell? | nvr219 wrote: | Bootleg game boy games. | nameisname wrote: | Underrated comment lmao | christop1957 wrote: | we make furniture out of old wood | cjohnson318 wrote: | Curation is expensive, and difficult/impossible to | automate, but there's value in it, in a world where anyone | can post anything anywhere. We all felt better using Amazon | ten years ago, when we could trust reviews, and trust | products, but now it's flooded with brand names like | "UZOOG" or whatever. People generally liked Facebook more | before their grandparents and weird uncle got on it. | londons_explore wrote: | Look at Reddit as a platform which has many well curated | 'subreddits', almost entirely for free. | | It's totally possible on an e-commerce platform. Just | nobodies quite managed it yet. | spacexsucks wrote: | I would argue that for artists all their work is already | curated if they built it themselves and hence they wouldnt | need to curate stuff | | But if i am selling someone elses stuff, then i am in the | business of curation. | JAlexoid wrote: | You're right. But we are talking about Etsy taking an | active role in what is available on their site, which is | curation. Not an easy task as well. | | They also decided to be way more lax, than some people | want it to be. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | Looks like Etsy made $160M last year. I think they can | afford to ramp up their efforts in this area. But, like the | Apple App Store, people are only going to get satisfaction | if they can make a big enough stink on social media. | JAlexoid wrote: | A) Why should they? | | B) Are investors not allowed to make any return on their | investments in form of dividends? | giaour wrote: | > Why should they? | | Because otherwise their brand is asymptotically | approaching just being a more expensive Ali Express. | JAlexoid wrote: | The brand is established and it's not that heavily | diluted... Even then - it only needs to keep up with the | aesthetics and product types, to keep on top. | | So no... They don't need to. And curated storefronts were | many - I knew of at least 5 startups in that space - they | all folded. | vorpalhex wrote: | > Why should they? | | If they do not, many sellers will stop using them. Many | buyers will stop using them. They will have competition. | JAlexoid wrote: | You're basically arguing for a monopoly now. | | Let them fail. | vorpalhex wrote: | As a consumer, I don't want to go through the effort of | finding the next Etsy. I want to be lazy and have the | current Etsy be good. | | Whatever comes next will be small. They will lack some of | the things I want for many years. | JAlexoid wrote: | As a lazy person I want sixpack abs, without putting in | the effort. | | Also - monopolies are never good. | vorpalhex wrote: | If shouting at the sky had a chance to convince God to | endow me with abs, I would make it a daily practice. | | Etsy does listen to it's consumers, at least some times. | The cost of complaining here is commensurate with the | potential benefit. | dwighttk wrote: | Is Etsy paying dividends? | _aavaa_ wrote: | That is the cost of doing business. Without the curation | they risk losing their customer base. Why should I as a | customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap | rather than handmade things? | JAlexoid wrote: | > Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled | with knockoff crap rather than handmade things? | | You don't go there. They aren't a curated product | website, so why do you expect them to be one? | | Let them fail. It's baffling to me why so many people are | so heavily invested into that brand here... | davidhyde wrote: | I see an opportunity here. A website who wants to curate | products could use Etsy to locate sellers and convince | them to list on their site. That curation website could | develop a "stamp of approval" brand and grow that way. | The art seller could include a printed note in the | delivery saying "find more products like this on this xyz | site". That way you use Etsy to draw in new customers but | keep them as repeat customers for other products on this | curated site. The main idea being that the curated site | would not have to spend nearly as much money on | advertising that Etsy does. Might work. | loeg wrote: | > They aren't a curated product website, so why do you | expect them to be one? | | They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade | things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, | nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're | just a shitty ebay. | caconym_ wrote: | I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high | quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know | where else to go for them. | | Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no | particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past | they've done a great job living up to that promise for | me, and I have to assume others have had similar | experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium knockoffs | and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product | will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose | our business. | | So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of | blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider | that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer | Etsy over other options. | _aavaa_ wrote: | > It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily | invested into that brand here... | | Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor | do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not | a good reason to ignore doing something that your | business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff | "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated | goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with | buyers). | Spivak wrote: | Maybe, but Etsy is part of a long line of businesses that | think they can solve adversarial search. The fact that | Google can't and is losing the war should tell you | everything about your chances. As long as you never use | the "discovery" half of their business and find shops | elsewhere, IG, TikTok, it's a fantastic experience. | Basically Shopify but a little more streamlined. | bdcravens wrote: | This assumes every customer has that discernment. No | shortage of potential buyers end up on Etsy because they | saw something cool, asked the person where they got it, | and the only answer they received was "Etsy". | giaour wrote: | Etsy is _also_ for curators, though (at least a specific | kind). You have always been able to sell vintage items on | their platform, and antique sellers are curators and | restorers. | | Before manufactured goods were on the platform, you were | basically browsing items that were either handmade or hand | curated. It was a much better experience. | JAlexoid wrote: | Etsy is really for everyone, but the brand image is that | it's really artists sales channel. | | Based on my experience, curators add an extra 50%+ to the | price of a product. Which is the cost of well curated | storefront. | john_moscow wrote: | Well, yes it is. And it works just fine on the "mom and pop | shop" scale. But the whole idea of the post-2008 startups | is to "disrupt" the industry by replacing the knowledgeable | people with algorithms and minimum wage employees. | | So what is the bottom line? Consumers get to enjoy products | that are 2x cheaper and 4x worse. Individual makers get | priced out and have to join the drone ranks. And the | corporate owners of trademarks and algorithms rake in so | much cash they don't know where to invest it anymore. | | Sadly, this is happening across every sector, and most | people seem to be just fine with it. | hitpointdrew wrote: | >has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE | bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their | actual customers. | | This will never happen with Etsy, Amazon, or any other | publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a | fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money | as possible. If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, | they will be replaced with others that will. If you want a | platform like you are describing it will have to be privately | owned. | BolexNOLA wrote: | >Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their | share holders to make as much money as possible. | | There has been this odd trend over the last few years of | mischaracterizing what this means/what that duty translates | to. People talk about it as if every CEO has to redline the | company at all times and _never_ think about longterm | consequences for literally any reason. Every single cent | that can be extracted _right now_ must be extracted or the | investors will rise up in all their anger crying out | "FIDUCIARY DUTY!" as they drag the poor CEO off kicking and | screaming. | | Companies can think longterm. They're allowed to sacrifice | short term profits for sustainability/longevity. I don't | get where people get this idea that they can't. To me, | "fiduciary duty" has become almost memetic - it's some | weird hand wave-y line people throw out to excuse | businesses being short-sighted, as if they never had a | choice. | coldpie wrote: | Whether it's a legal requirement or not, companies | definitely act as if it is. Setting a company on fire to | acquire short-term profits with a golden parachute | guarantee is the pattern for executives of public | companies under American capitalism. | BolexNOLA wrote: | Oh let me be perfectly clear here, I know that that is | how things often shake out, especially in the US. What I | am talking about is the way people defend businesses that | behave this way. | | They act as if they have no choice, that there is some | legal mandate to just wring out a company all day every | day and damn all consideration beyond "I can make another | dollar this second." | feoren wrote: | > Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their | share holders to make as much money as possible. | | I feel like this is in semi-myth territory. Yes, there have | been cases where shareholders have sued company leadership | because they weren't making them as much money as they | could. But it's not quite as clear-cut and well-tested in | the courts as you make it sound. | mattkrause wrote: | In fact, the case law goes _firmly_ in the other | direction. | | Management has a _ton_ of latitude to run the business as | they see fit. The "remedy" for bad business decisions is | supposed to be divesting and starting a competitor, not | the courts. | | Cases like _Dodge v. Ford_ or _Caremark_ are odd because | the board was basically not running a business at all: | Ford flat-out said he was doing something not for the | business, but in support of his philanthropic beliefs. | Caremark was so asleep at the helm that they racked up a | quarter-billion dollars in silly fines. | | Anyone can, of course, sue over anything, but if it's | even vaguely legitimate (and the "facts" in _Shlensky v. | Wrigley_ are pretty bonkers, IMO), they won 't win. | tyrfing wrote: | That meme also contrasts with the rise of modern ESG, | where a lot of shareholder pressure on management teams | has been in the direction of making less money. There is | a lot of _really_ interesting stuff out there done in the | name of ESG, EXFY being a particularly good example. | andai wrote: | >Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 | (Mich. 1919) is a case in which the Michigan Supreme | Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor | Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than | in a charitable manner for the benefit of his employees | or customers. It is often taught as affirming the | principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, | although that teaching has received some criticism. | [Wikipedia] | mattkrause wrote: | Yup, but the facts of that particular case are tricky. | Ford refused to issue a dividend to the Dodge brothers | because "My ambition is to employ still | more men, to spread the benefits of this | industrial system to the greatest possible number, | to help them build up their lives and their homes." | | This isn't a business decision; it's an ideological one. | | It's been argued that if he said less ("No, just no"), or | a bit more ("And this will let us recruit the best | workers/expand our customer base/etc"), he would have | been fine. This commentary lays that argument out nicely: | https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/603 | imwillofficial wrote: | "fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much | money as possible" No they don't. That's an oft repeated | myth. The have a responsibility to manage in the best | interests of the business. That's pretty vague. On purpose. | BolexNOLA wrote: | In my experience it's just a repeated line to excuse | companies for not thinking longterm or about | anyone/anything beyond immediate revenue. It's very silly | and not what the term means at all, yet as you pointed | out, we see it all the time. | JAlexoid wrote: | There's a "however". Actions that reduce the shareholder | value without any long term prospects is something that | will drive down investment and could trigger lawsuits | imwillofficial wrote: | A lawsuit does not indicate a breach of law or anything | really. | andrepew wrote: | As much money as possible over what timeline? Crank profits | now at the expense of the long-term business? Lose profits | now to improve long-term business? | | It isn't a straight-forward call to make. The current | status-quo with resellers might be making money now, but | there will be long-term brand damage in exchange. Will | their business still be viable in 5 years if they develop a | reputation for being Aliexpress lite? | peterbell_nyc wrote: | If you are publicly traded and don't have leverage (e.g. | different share classes with different voting rights for | the founders) it's a straighforward call to make. | Optimize for short term profits or be replaced by someone | who will do. | JackFr wrote: | > Optimize for short term profits or be replaced by | someone who will do. | | No. Optimize for shareholder value. | | Amazon shareholders, for instance, are happy to make | little in way of profit because Amazon management has | shown an ability to increase the value of the enterprise. | | In general though, the market is legitimately skeptical | of most managers which is not a bad thing. | notpachet wrote: | Not sure why you're being downvoted. | | > If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will | be replaced with others that will. | | This is exactly what happened at Etsy when they fired the | previous CEO and installed Josh Silverman. | kareemsabri wrote: | They are being downvoted because "make as much money as | possible" is not a clear cut proposition. Apple ran | (runs) an expensive recycling program and investors | complained that it wasn't valuable at annual meetings. | Steve Jobs said "We disagree" but he wasn't replaced. | Lots of companies don't maximize the dollars out of every | single thing, in response to a bigger picture / longer | term vision, and it's up to leadership to sell it to | shareholders. | | Etsy could certainly argue their bottom line in the long | term will be helped by curating a higher quality | marketplace and getting rid of junk sellers, if that's a | problem. | JackFr wrote: | Steve Jobs earned the ability to say that. | | Most managers are not Steve Jobs. | judge2020 wrote: | I had the same thing happen[0], but the point is that | companies don't have to make _as much money as possible_ | by sacrificing everything else like brand image and human | decency; anything that goes against obvious profit- | increasing practices must be properly accounted for by | the board giving a reasonable explanation. A hypothetical | shareholder meeting: "Q: why did you reduce your cut of | sales when still trending upward in user and revenue | growth? A: we believe higher user growth numbers is more | important in the long term and envision our revenue | growth will continue to increase despite this change". | | 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30893551 | rr808 wrote: | Most artist markets feel the same as Etsy, the majority of | stuff is made in China too. | bduerst wrote: | >small sellers are getting totally run over by design theft and | aliexpress resellers | | Some friends and I were discussing this point recently: Etsy | has become _Ebay_ , sans the auction veneer. | | Truly frustrating that they can't implement some sort of | quality control, but that's a hard problem to crack at scale. | ss108 wrote: | "one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im | buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks." | | Potential use-case for NFTs? :thinking: | nerdawson wrote: | How would an NFT help? I'm not opposed to the concept of | NFTs, I'm just baffled as to how they in any way provide | benefit in this situation. | sleepybrett wrote: | They don't there are smaller NFT platforms that offer NFTs | of art by smaller artists and there is a ton of fraud | occuring on those as well. People misrepresenting | themselves as the artist etc. | philote wrote: | I'm sure I'm just being naive, but why wouldn't it help? | Aren't NFTs used to securely show unique ownership of some | item? | freeone3000 wrote: | The knockoff seller also has unique ownership of the | knockoff. It doesn't fix anything. | rdtwo wrote: | You don't really need a block chain, you can just | register serial numbers on a legitimate website. This was | solved early on with cd keys. | strbean wrote: | Not an NFT, but blockchain approaches have been suggested | for proof-of-invention problems. | circa wrote: | you're 100% correct. Very similar to Amazon and their 3rd party | market. There is very little policing of the products being | sold I feel like. Lots of knock offs and even things available | for free being sold at a cost. (ie. ETSY USB sticks pre-loaded | with freeware like Coin OPS X) | freedomben wrote: | This is a major problem that put my wife and a couple of her | friends out of business. Another major problem right now is | that small blogs/instagram accounts/etc are nearly impossible | to establish because the "influencers" (the big blogs now) will | rip off ideas and shameless repost them within hours! Not only | does this mean all google traffic takes people to the | "influencers" page instead of the young blog that created it, | but it makes the young blog look they are _ripping off a big | blog_. It 's quite despicable. My wife has shut down because | she got tired of inventing great recipes that are damn hard to | come up with (ever tried to make Keto desserts, or vegan | scrambled eggs?) that get stolen right away. | | I've been trying to think of a way to use blockchain to prove | "who posted it first" but it's got a major network problem | (nobody uses it because nobody will use it because nobody uses | it). | lnxg33k1 wrote: | I am just going to write it here, having no idea of the income of | the Etsy sellers, but let's say that someone arrives and builds a | fair Etsy, then how long until they go the same path? Or how long | can you be victim of a corporate warlord? And I understand a | small seller has less visibility and power to build a small | e-commerce for itself alone... What I was thinking: how much of a | stupid idea is for like for a bunch of Etsy sellers to put power | together and create a marketplace where they have full power of | votes about the marketplace direction and policy? Here seems that | small players are getting fucked at every step, either on Amazon | or on Etsy, but can small players fight back by joining forces | and abandon these big marketplaces? | kirubakaran wrote: | In theory a cooperative of craftsman sellers not beholden to | VCs could develop the marketplace software. But they will need | to attract, retain, and manage software developers without | being able to offer them any equity with "lottery ticket | potential". Managing software engineers itself is not for the | faint of heart, to put it mildly. | | A cooperative of altruistic software developers could build | marketplace software. Open source exists after all. Then | someone will need to run this as a company. Perhaps as a non- | profit? | | It sounds possible. But I haven't seen a single marketplace run | like this yet. | ahtihn wrote: | Building an ecommerce website is pretty much a solved | problem. It doesn't require top tier software engineering | talent. | | Etsy's value isn't the tech, it's the brand giving easy | access to potential customers. | lostgame wrote: | >> Perhaps as a non-profit? | | Even if we kept the original 5% fee, and kept it there - and | kicked out the stupid resellers - we'd be making a lot of | people happy. It really wouldn't be hard to whip up something | basic. It would be much harder to attract people to it and | keep a user base, of course. | llamataboot wrote: | There should be some law of good marketplaces on the internet, | that if they need to grow beyond a certain amount they inevitable | become a trash heap of crap and end up losing whatever customer | and seller goodwill they built up in the first place | | I have some etsy sellers I know and love bookmarked, and some of | the more niche areas (like hand built midi controllers) are still | remarkably free of cruft, but the bigger categories are just | dropship knockoffs | KarlKemp wrote: | The "Law of Marginal Nostalgica"? | rafaelturk wrote: | I'm afraid thats not how life works... *End the Star Seller | Program*? Are serius? Star seller means exceptional service. What | you're advocating is to reduce the overall quality of the | platforms so bad sellers can be perceived just as good sellers. | blintz wrote: | I have often wondered how close the fees that 'marketplace' | companies charge are to the value they provide; of course, in a | perfectly competitive world, they would be very close. However, | it seems that in practice, the marketplace uses VC money to | obtain a near-monopoly (probably aided by the network effects of | marketplaces in general), and then extracts what amounts to an | economic rent thereafter. | | It's interesting to see a strike organized against the | marketplace. Perhaps this will be an ultimately more successful | way to apply downward pressure on the fees? I wonder if consumers | will read this and also participate, ramping up the bad PR for | Etsy and putting more pressure on lowering fees. One challenge is | that, unlike a labor union, I don't think there are really any | legal protections for a 'seller strike'. | status200 wrote: | Etsy used to be my favorite place to purchase bespoke artisan | crafts and products, and it has turned into a cheap tchotchke | reseller hive full of low quality, print-on-demand and other pure | garbage. | artursapek wrote: | I recently bought something on Etsy and received a package from | Amazon. I felt sort of cheated. | dangrossman wrote: | You may have been scammed, or you may have simply purchased | from a home business that sells on multiple channels. Lots of | Etsy sellers are also eBay sellers and also Amazon Handmade | sellers. If you've already shipped your inventory to Amazon's | warehouse, it can be cheaper and easier to have Amazon fulfill | the orders regardless of what channel they come in on. | paxys wrote: | Agree with all of them except #2 ("crack down on resellers | [...]"). There's really no good definition of what a reseller | even is, and what exact line between handmade and mass produced | Etsy should draw. Ultimately you have to compete on quality and | appeal of your own product, not by restricting others. | itslennysfault wrote: | It's funny 'cause that is the only one I fully agree with. Etsy | used to have strict rules that everything posted had to be hand | made. Obviously, they weren't able to scale that rule as they | grew, but for me it is the entire appeal of the site. If I want | to buy mass produced goods I'll can go to any big retailer or | eBay if I want a deal. That said, I rarely use Etsy anymore | because all of the hand made stuff is drowned out by all the | mass market crap and it's hard to even search out unique hand | made items anymore. | eatonphil wrote: | This is a seller strike not a worker strike, just to clarify. | | But this made me wonder (since I'm not an Etsy buyer or seller | myself), who is their primary market/customer persona? Based on | it being heavily craft-focused my naive guess would be stay-at- | home/homemaker/caretaker people? | | I've tried to use it a few times to shop for used or handmade | shelves/lights/tables but always ended up going with Ebay or | AptDeco. I found the UI too confusing and there were too many | low-quality and super-high-quality pieces when I just wanted | something decent but not too expensive. | sokoloff wrote: | > This is a seller strike not a worker strike, just to clarify. | | I found this clarification interesting. If a headline said | "Uber Strike", I think most of us would assume it was the | drivers (rather than Uber's in-house employees) striking. I | naturally thought the exact same thing here. | eatonphil wrote: | Maybe I'm getting it mixed up with some other similarly sized | tech companies in NYC but I thought I remembered Etsy workers | talking about forming a union and I thought this might be | related. Maybe I'm thinking of Kickstarter. | Beltalowda wrote: | I used Etsy a few times to buy art paintings. Back then there | were certainly a few high-profile sellers who kept showing up | with the same stuff again and again. Not necessarily anything | wrong with what they were doing, but I don't need to see it | over and over again... | | But with a little bit of effort I could find some pretty neat | art to decorate my walls with. | bradly wrote: | I'm the primary audience. I sell hand made wooden goods (shaker | trays, boxes, urns) and most of the listings around me for | similar items are less than 25% of my prices. I sell less than | 10 items a month. | | It's difficult, though. What is hand made? Can you use a CNC? | 3D printer? What percent must be hand made? I use a table saw | and mitered joints instead of truly hand made dovetail joints. | eatonphil wrote: | Sorry I didn't mean who's the primary audience of this strike | I meant who is their customer (persona). I should have said | market or customer instead of audience. | coldpie wrote: | There's a lot of mass-produced crap and plenty of overpriced | stuff on Etsy, but it's not too hard to find real creators. I | recently bought some nice wooden guitar wall hangers, made by | some guy in Pennsylvania. My wedding ring was made by a guy in | Luisiana. I felt both were reasonably priced for something not | made in an overseas factory. | | Edit: My method is something like, search for what I'm looking | for, flip through items to try to find things that actually | look like a person made them (i.e. not made of metal or | plastic, unless the shop specifically specializes in those; not | identical to five hundred other listings), then look over | reviews and search for the creator online. Most creators | maintain their own web presence outside of Etsy, too. It | doesn't seem that onerous to me, you'd want to do that research | anyway for a nice, hand-made item, wouldn't you? I don't really | understand how people get scammed by drop-shippers on Etsy. Do | you just click "Buy Now" on the first listed item you like the | picture of? | culi wrote: | I live with a lot of early artists. A ton of people make and | buy art on Etsy | dfxm12 wrote: | I agree, it's usually easy to weed out real creators from | drop shippers/pirates _if you care to_. The one method you | left off was to send a message to the seller. It 's pretty | easy to tell through communication. | intrasight wrote: | This is now my approach. Communicate. Ask for more info. | Customization options. A photo of their shop. ask where is | there shop. | ryukafalz wrote: | For buyers it probably varies a lot but there's a lot of | anime/video game/tabletop gaming stuff. I know it's the first | place I look if I want the sort of things I might otherwise buy | at a con. (Think pins, custom dice, etc.) | eatonphil wrote: | Got it, thanks! | yasabione wrote: | nonamenoslogan wrote: | Let us know how it works out. | | ~signed, an ebay seller. | sergiotapia wrote: | >Crack down on resellers with a comprehensive plan that is | transparent, so sellers can hold Etsy accountable. | | This is very reasonable. Etsy is diluting it's brand and becoming | a flea-market where I don't trust it. | pavon wrote: | I think it would make sense for Etsy to spinoff a separate site | for used / mass produced goods. While some of the reseller | volume is sellers trying trick buyers into thinking the | products are first-sale handmade goods, and others are sellers | simply going where the market is, I think there are also a | large number of sellers and buyers that simply like the Etsy | model better than Ebay. | | If they had a separate site the consequences of cracking down | harder would simply be that sellers need to move their products | to this other site, not shutdown altogether. This is | particularly important for the fuzzy definition of used (sorry | "antique") goods. Thus there would be less push-back and gaming | from the sellers, and less financial incentives for Etsy Inc to | be lax with the rules. It would improve the experience for both | buyers and sellers of handmade goods, without harming buyers | and seller of used goods. | | I think the main objection to this would be handmade goods | sellers complaining that Etsy Inc is supporting knock-off | sellers. While true, it isn't within Etsy's power to remove | these off the internet altogether, and as long as the buyer is | aware that what they are purchasing isn't handmade, I don't | think Etsy has any obligation to avoid this market. | DanTheManPR wrote: | What it reminds me of is Network Decay: | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay | | Etsy began as a service to a niche market, and was a good | platform for small sellers. But they're a public company, and | their purpose is to create more and more returns... ultimately, | diluting their brand and flooding their site with slop might be | a money-making proposition. | jnmandal wrote: | My etsy store is paltry compared to most but I joined the strike | in solidarity. | | I sell seeds that are collected from my own garden, but I often | see other sellers reselling seeds from established farm/ag | operations. Its also clear that some of these sellers are selling | seeds as a loss leader. | | There's no point of a small scale operation like mine even being | on etsy when I have to compete against such stuff. I assume if | they continue down this path a new marketplace will spring up for | handcrafted/original products but it would be nice if we didn't | have to go through that cycle. | dbcurtis wrote: | Doesn't NFT proof-of-provenance solve this? | scblock wrote: | No. | thechao wrote: | A tag or a sticker with a piece of paper with an expert opinion | attached to the item provides provenance. An NFT provides a way | to harm the environment. | throwmeariver1 wrote: | What? How do you come even remotely to the conclusion this is a | problem pop would solve? | dbcurtis wrote: | To you down-voters: this was a serious question. I have heard | that NFTs are used to provide provenance for collectables and | artwork. So based on cursory knowledge, this would seem to be a | use case. What am I missing? | | A little more education and a little less snark and vitriol, | please. | orliesaurus wrote: | I love everything about this! More power to you!! | junon wrote: | Went to buy a Ukrainian flag earlier on in the war. Would only | buy from a Ukrainian or a charity that directly sent proceeds to | help. | | Etsy was absolutely overrun with corporations plastering the | Ukrainian flag onto everything. Quickly gave up - there's | absolutely no way to cut through that garbage. | kyletns wrote: | So so sad, and was always coming when the investors installed a | new CEO who dropped their B-Corp status | | https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2017/11/30/etsy-gives-b-corp-... | rkalla wrote: | This won't be successful - ETSY is a publicly traded company, | unless corrective action can replace the loss revenue from | ads/punishing duplication/aliexpress - it's not going anywhere. | | This is exactly what happened to eBay for anyone that remembers | when it was garage-sale mania, then it became publicly traded and | effectively became Target.com with < 1% of personal things | sprinkled in. | | No one messing with quarterly earnings. | milderworkacc wrote: | Whether or not you agree with the demands, it's probably | disingenuous to call this a strike. | | It's much closer to cartel conduct, and a flagrant | antitrust/competition law violation. | | While the "number of small labourers team up against large | employer" narrative sounds superficially like the actions of a | labour union, what this appears to be is actually a number of | small businesses forming a cartel to influence the prices for | their goods. Probably blatantly illegal in much of the developed | world. | marcinzm wrote: | They're not working to change the pricing of their goods but | rather to force a service provider to change its pricing and | behavior. They're not asking to restrict competition or to | prevent each other from lowering prices. So not sure where you | get cartel from. | milderworkacc wrote: | They're openly demanding a lower fee, backed by the threat of | collectively restricting output. That's _textbook_. | andy_ppp wrote: | One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist... | [deleted] | postsantum wrote: | Etsy, just find other sellers, right? | jdrc wrote: | Or just, the free market. I doubt anyone would call a very | large number of buyers not buying a service a cartel. at best | it's a boycott. | jpollock wrote: | Not saying this is right or wrong, or if it even matches up | with the case, but this is what I found on price fixing. | Businesses are (from my training as an engineer) generally | not allowed to coordinate any behavior related to pricing | with a competitor. | | https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition- | guidance/gui... | | Quote: | | Example: A group of competing optometrists agreed not to | participate in a vision care network unless the network | raised reimbursement rates for patients covered by its plan. | The optometrists refused to treat patients covered by the | network plan, and, eventually, the company raised | reimbursement rates. The FTC said that the optometrists' | agreement was illegal price fixing, and that its leaders had | organized an effort to make sure other optometrists knew | about and complied with the agreement. | malkuth23 wrote: | I know you are getting downvoted and a lot of gaff, but I | do think you propose an interesting question. I am not sure | what is illegal and what is not, but I am confident I | support the strike. | | So, let's say you are right. Would that make it illegal for | all Uber drivers or strippers to strike? They are | independent contractors, not employees. It also seems to me | that these laws are created specifically to protect the | consumer. Without damages, where is the crime? Even the | example of the optometrists includes some theoretical | damage to the consumer as the prices of their insurance | could go up or the consumers had less access to eye care. | | In the case of Etsy sellers though, I can not see how this | could hurt consumers. Sellers are striking to lower the | price of fees, which should help consumers and only hurt | Etsy. I don't know the law, but I do feel like the law | should be written in a way that these government agencies | only act to prevent non-competitive activities that could | hurt consumers. | jdrc wrote: | This is not a group of competitors, etsy is not 'the | market', and sellers have not agreed anything to each other | alecbz wrote: | > This is not a group of competitors | | Why do you say that, just because things sold by Etsy | merchants aren't sufficiently substitutable for each | other? | | I think Etsy sellers are certainly less in competition | with each other than say, idk, oil sellers, but I do | think there is some degree of substitution between the | kinds of things sold on Etsy, and so to a degree they are | competitors. | | > etsy is not 'the market' | | So? It's a significant part of the market. A cartel | influencing just one seller doesn't necessarily make it | not-a-cartel. | | > sellers have not agreed anything to each other | | Have they not? Isn't that the whole point of the strike? | Communicating to other sellers "hey how about we all do | this thing together? if only a few of us do it nothing | will happen, but if all of us do it we can influence | Etsy". | | ---- | | If you replace the many small Etsy sellers with a smaller | number of larger sellers, this starts to look very much | like a cartel "bullying" a buyer. Like OPEC refusing to | sell to the US unless they abide by certain policies, or | something. | | Like GP I don't think this is bad or anything, but it's | interesting to note that cartels and strikes are kinda | similar in shape, and it's more "sliding" properties (how | many sellers? how big are they? how strong is the | competition between them?) that differentiate them. | jdrc wrote: | I think they are obviously very substitutable And surely | many of them are selling elsewhere and consumers aren't | being forced to pay more. there doesn't seem to be a | conspiracy behind it, this is a very public petition , | like boycotting russia . It would be quite a stretch if | this falls anywhere near anticompetitive. What's next, | banning uber drivers from boycotts? | jpollock wrote: | Wouldn't that depend on the result of the various anti- | trust suits against Amazon/Apple/Google that define the | market as their marketplaces? | jdrc wrote: | Who knows, but etsy should be very low in that list. | beaconstudios wrote: | This is a capital strike: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_strike | | Though, many Etsy businesses are sole proprietorships or family | businesses, in which case capital and labour are the same, and | it's also a labour strike. | milderworkacc wrote: | "Capital strike" tends to be used in situations where this | kind of behaviour is spurred by an unfavourable government | policy, and enacted by firms that have some form of market | power (or political power). | | These are small businesses with no market power agreeing to | collectively price squeeze another player in an | upstream/downstream market. Textbook cartel behaviour. | | Edit: typo | beaconstudios wrote: | Capital strike is a strike by capital. There can be typical | cases, but fundamentally that's what this is - though under | platform capitalism, I think platform residents hold a much | more precarious position than traditional capital because | they answer to more than just the government and the market | - the platform forms a second government for them. | | A cartel is a group of businesses who collude to take | market power as an oligopoly. That's not what this is, | because these sellers are striking for platform changes, | not consumer domination. You can keep saying it's cartel | behaviour, but you're working with a different definition | of cartel to the mainstream one. They're colluding yes, but | they are not warping market forces the way a business | cartel does (the typical example being the lightbulb | cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel). | JAlexoid wrote: | Etsy sellers could become a cartel. And banding together | to force some third player to only play with them, to the | exclusion of others, is classic cartel behaviour | beaconstudios wrote: | they weren't forcing Etsy to only play with them, it's | not like they're striking for Etsy to become a closed | shop with only those sellers. | milderworkacc wrote: | They absolutely are warping market forces - that's the | whole point. | | We can argue about whether or not this is good (by the | sounds of it, probably?) but the _entire purpose_ of them | agreeing to restrict their output is to influence the | cost of their inputs /outputs. | | In the absence of market power, individual firms can't do | that! | beaconstudios wrote: | I wouldn't describe it as market forces when the | organisation they're opposing is a platform with monopoly | power. Etsy has fiat power over anybody on their | platform. | | If we're talking about the generic concept of a cartel | that encompasses basically all special interest groups, | then yes they're a cartel - but they're not a business | cartel in the same way that Phoebus group were. The power | imbalance puts them in a position more comparable to a | labour union. | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | Collective bargaining is always a weird line between bad | anticompetitive behavior, and well... good anticompetitive | behavior. We needed a minimum wage, for example, because labor | dynamics meant some other worker would generally bid lower than | that. Labor competition drove wages too low. | | While you're right in your categorization, you aren't | necessarily right in calling it bad, because that category | isn't always bad. Particularly because of the asymmetry between | actors. In this case, that same asymmetry is there (like with | uber's "contractors"). You might be right, but I think it's | less blatant and more nuanced than you're giving it credit for. | maccolgan wrote: | There's no such thing as "good anticompetitive behavior". | milderworkacc wrote: | You're right, which is why I didn't call it bad. I called it | a cartel. | | In fact I probably agree with their demands, but on its face | this is a) not a strike and b) in need of authorisation or | similar mechanism under completion law. | LadyCailin wrote: | Let's assume you're correct. What exactly is the crime here? | You went on vacation for a week? You're not allowed to stop | selling your goods? | milderworkacc wrote: | Of course you are allowed to change your output - but | independently and in reaction to your own circumstances. | | Collectively agreeing to simultaneously stop selling in order | to force a change in the cost of your inputs is in most cases | not legal. | | The easy test is to ask yourself if it makes sense for an | individual seller to reduce their output in the absence of | any other changes. In this case, the answer is no. Only when | they all collide to do it at the same time does it work. | md_ wrote: | Where'd you get your law degree, Mr. Hutz? | gruez wrote: | >It's much closer to cartel conduct, and a flagrant | antitrust/competition law violation. | | >While the "number of small labourers team up against large | employer" narrative sounds superficially like the actions of a | labour union, what this appears to be is actually a number of | small businesses forming a cartel to influence the prices for | their goods. Probably blatantly illegal in much of the | developed world. | | Aren't labor unions (especially closed shop ones) basically a | cartel for labor? | maccolgan wrote: | They are. | milderworkacc wrote: | A union is explicitly a labour cartel. But we as a society | decided that giving workers more money and better conditions | is good, and that they should be allowed to collectively | bargain for them. | | At the same time we for the most part decided that businesses | best serve society when in the absence of market power, hence | competition law enabling unions and outlawing cartels. | lostgame wrote: | The fee increase literally only harms the sellers. I use Etsy at | least about once a month - I'm a huge fan of custom knick-knacks | such as this lovely 'fix your hearts or die' 'Twin Peaks' pin in | support of transgender equality: | | https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/542366240/fix-your-hearts-or... | | There's a lot of cosplay items, etc - Etsy is an incredibly | unique market that looks like it needs a replacement with | accountability towards it's community. | | Sounds like maybe my next project, tbh. :) | dangrossman wrote: | The fee increase does not "literally" only harm the sellers. | Fee increases are necessarily passed on to buyers (as are all | expenses; buyers are the only source of funds moving in the | marketplace), so if you feel that a fee increase is a harm, | it's also harming the buyers. However, the fee increase does | not only harm anyone. The increased funds going to Etsy will be | spent, and some of that money will be spent on growing the | number of buyers on their platform, which puts money back into | sellers' pockets. Potentially growing their business by even | greater than the 1.5% the fee is going up. After the increase, | Etsy still has the lowest fees of any major marketplace -- | cheaper then eBay, cheaper than Amazon Handmade, etc. | sprkwd wrote: | Am totally buying that. Thanks! | darkstar999 wrote: | I would love to see an Etsy alternative that is verified handmade | goods rather than reseller junk. | 8note wrote: | I'd like to see an Etsy alternative that is owned by the | handmade creators. What Nebula is to Youtube | ramesh31 wrote: | >I would love to see an Etsy alternative that is verified | handmade goods rather than reseller junk. | | Pretty ironic that if you replace "Etsy" with "eBay" in that | statement, you have the original value prop for Etsy. The | circle of life, I suppose. | _fat_santa wrote: | I feel like Etsy should have done this from the get-go. The | problem I think for them is without all those re-sellers, they | would have a fraction of the sellers they have now. | chucky_z wrote: | This was how Etsy used to work and they were really strict | about it. It changed about 2 months after they IPOd | Karsteski wrote: | I've seen the private -> public transition ruin many | companies, and it makes me sad. I'm holding out for Valve | but I imagine that if they ever go public that'll be the | end of my game purchases, unless a worthy competitor | arises. | chrisan wrote: | Valve barely makes games anymore. Are you referring to | the steam platform in general somehow getting bad/worse | than competitors? | Karsteski wrote: | Yep I'm referring to the platform itself. I wish Valve | made more games, but I'm happy with the direction they're | going in, i.e. working to make SteamOS3 and their Steam | Deck a success, since this will also be a win for Linux | gaming. | JAlexoid wrote: | That's called a brick and mortar store. Try visiting one and | check out the opportunity cost price, while you're at it. | toper-centage wrote: | How would you verify that? | capableweb wrote: | Make each seller verify their account by sending one of the | products to the business hosting the platform in order to | open the storefront. And if in the future, that store is | receiving complaints about "reseller junk" or similar, either | via your marketplace customer service, or from reviews of the | seller, make a order via a fake name to review it again. If | they break the rules, throw them off the platform. | JaggedJax wrote: | I work with a lot of Etsy sellers and the parts of this I am | familiar with and can confirm are: | | * resellers - I see lots of sellers with thousands or tens of | thousands of products. These sellers are obviously not making | craft items. Etsy does nothing to limit this from what I've seen | and experienced. And come on, I'm sure Etsy makes more money from | these sellers, so what's their incentive to stop them (other than | killing their platform). | | * extreme AI actions - If you build an app to connect to Etsy's | API, you'll need to test it of course. Except that Etsy's AI will | ban your account for performing any testing. I hope you don't use | that app to support hundreds of Etsy sellers, because they all | get screwed. Wait several days to hear back, and then they tell | you some silly tricks to avoid getting caught by their AI when | testing next time. No real test environment and no promise they | won't turn around and ban you again tomorrow for the same thing. | | It feels like they're slowly building another Amazon, and haven't | learned any lessons other than that's where the money is. | eatonphil wrote: | Genuine question, why is the fee increase such a big deal? I | assume Etsy assumes this will just get passed along to the buyer. | And if there are less sales as a result of items becoming more | expensive to cover the fee increase then Etsy would feel that | too. | | The other items make more sense about not wanting ads and wanting | fairer representation between creators and resellers. I just | don't follow why fee increases are such a big deal for sellers | since they can be transparently passed along to buyers. | errantmind wrote: | Because sellers cannot always raise prices to cover the fee | increase. Demand is varying degrees of elastic | thepasswordis wrote: | The problem is how you define the "acceptable" goods. | | If I design a t-shirt, and then farm out the manufacturing and | shipping, is that okay? How about if I also hire a designer? | | What if I'm just clicking "go" on a laser cutter etching things | onto other things that I ordered on aliexpress? Or 3D printing | designs that I bought somewhere else? | | Are these handmade goods? | | This isn't just a problem at etsy, btw. Every single craft fair | is also dealing with this. Just endless seas of people selling | what looks mostly like MLM "nutrition" and "lifestyle" products. | xeromal wrote: | Yeah, how does Entsy enforce the farmer's market feel that it | used to have? | MassiveOwl wrote: | Has anyone tried buying art from Etsy recently? It's very | difficult to find something that is actually original. Etsy is | full of super hero Chinese knockoff poor quality shite | pnathan wrote: | As a buyer, I don't even know if I can find actual small seller | goods anymore. its all existing shops having another sales | channel. Sometimes horrible quality trinkets from industrial | shops. | | The unique value proposition of etsy is almost invisible at this | point. Just like shopping Amazon these days... | dfdz wrote: | > End the Star Seller Program | | I did not know exactly what the star seller program was. It | requires that in the last three months of shop data [1]: | | > 95%+ of first messages in a thread are responded to within 24 | hours. | | > 95%+ of orders ship on time with tracking | | > 95%+ of orders receive 5 star reviews | | > minimum of 10 orders and $300 in sales | | In the petition [2] they explain the Star Seller Program as: | | >Passive aggressive efforts to influence seller behavior are | counter-productive and result in a worse customer experience. | Rather than making us mad at buyers who leave glowing 4-Star | reviews, or making us feel that we can no longer offer letter | class shipping on items like cards and stickers, Etsy should | leave us to individually do the best we can for each and every | customer in each and every situation. | | [1] https://www.etsy.com/starseller | | [2] https://www.coworker.org/petitions/cancel-the-fee- | increase-w... | Beltalowda wrote: | That 24-hour response time seems easily gamed by just replying | with just "we'll get back to you ASAP". | | Indeed, Etsy even helps you with that; from their FAQ: | | > What happens if I can't respond to messages on weekends and | bank holidays? | | > If you're having a difficult time responding to messages | during certain time periods, consider setting up an auto-reply, | which counts as a response. | efsavage wrote: | 95% of the ratings I leave aren't 5 stars, so that number | triggers my fake-reviews alarm. I'm generally far more | suspicious of a 4.9 rating than a 4.2. | AlexandrB wrote: | > 95%+ of orders receive 5 star reviews | | This is going to be subject to Goodhart's law[1]. As soon as | buyers are aware their favourite sellers on Etsy are evaluated | like this many of them will _always_ leave 5 star reviews, | while others will try to use the threat of a < 5 star review | to get special consideration from the vendor. | | This is the same reason many people leave automatic 5 star | reviews for gig workers unless something goes grotesquely | wrong. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law | traverseda wrote: | > 95%+ of orders ship on time with tracking | | They actually hide some stuff in there. Tracking is _expensive_ | , if you add tracking to all your orders than someone else will | offer a lower price and out-compete you. | | Buuut, if you buy your shipping labels directly from etsy that | counts as having tracking, even when there isn't any tracking. | | So the actual effect of this is just to force people to buy | their shipping labels through etsy directly. I presume etsy | gets a bulk discount and keeps the difference. | notpachet wrote: | > So the actual effect of this is just to force people to buy | their shipping labels through etsy directly. I presume etsy | gets a bulk discount and keeps the difference. | | Yes. A lot of ecommerce companies (Etsy, Amazon, eBay, | Shopify, etc) have a labels side-business that works in this | way. Volume-based discounts from carriers. | atrus wrote: | I don't think so actually. The prices of the labels on Etsy | match the USPS prices for volume labels exactly. | jeremymcanally wrote: | The first two bullets are fairly reasonable (especially | shipping on time...24 hours response isn't great but whatever), | but expecting that high of a 5 star rate is almost unheard of. | I see shops that do it, but we get 4 stars quite often for | things like "Oh it was smaller than I expected" even though the | listing says the exact measurements like 4 times. | | Also note that it says "95% of _orders_ " not "95% of | _ratings_. " We get feedback, maybe, like 40% of the time if | we're lucky. If you're not begging for ratings, you won't hit | that number. | | They aren't overtly doing much with the Star Seller program | yet, but I can almost guarantee that they will in the future. | I'm 99% sure it's already influencing search rankings (since | they influence them in other ways already, such as prioritizing | listings with free shipping). I understand some of that is to | promote sales which benefits the seller and Etsy, but if they | are or start using Star Seller to tweak results, that's not | really benefiting anyone that I can see. | tmp_anon_22 wrote: | Seems to me they should offer at least 2 tiers of this rating | system. Star sellers for organizations that can give out free | product in exchange for 5 star reviews, and ~Premium sellers | for those who can't. | mdoms wrote: | I ordered a bunch of stickers from AvE, my one and only | purchase on Etsy. It seems ridiculous that he should have to | package my stickers with tracking to get them to me, and I | live on the other side of the world in the midst of a | shipping crisis so I don't care one jot if it takes him a few | days to pop my stickers in the mail. Consumer expectations | these days are so ridiculous. They're stickers. | DanTheManPR wrote: | It effectively means that a 4 star review has the same impact | as a 1 star review. | mym1990 wrote: | Programs like this also encourage bots to come review or even | buying reviews to game the system and if there is not a good | way to combat this misuse, it can get out of hand pretty | quick. Most reviews I look at on Amazon are pretty useless to | me nowadays because I can't tell what's real and what's not. | jeromegv wrote: | You seem misinformed, this is 95% of ratings. | | https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/your-star- | selle... | | https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/introducing- | sta... | jeremymcanally wrote: | Perhaps it's all ratings then because we've shipped 100% on | time, pay someone to respond to customer messages within 8 | hours, and we still somehow don't meet the criteria. | nanidin wrote: | 95% only seems reasonable for thumbs up / thumbs down style | rating systems. Too many people treat 5 and 10 star rating | systems differently to require 95% 5 star ratings. Etsy and | others should disclose the downsides to leaving a 4 star | review at the time the customer is leaving the review. For | me, 3 is OK, 4 is good, and 5 is PERFECT and is rarely ever | given out on any system. | kbenson wrote: | > 95% only seems reasonable for thumbs up / thumbs down | style rating systems. | | Maybe for average of ratings, not for average of all things | that could be rated, whether rated or not. Those are very | different things. | Taylor_OD wrote: | Exactly. Even more so when having anything other than the | top 5% or 10% is functionally as bad as having a 45% | rating. | systemvoltage wrote: | As a buyer, there are so many ways to get screwed on | eBay/Etsy, I am 100% with these requirements. | | eBay has had super sellers for 20 years now. Not as stringent | but it is beneficial to customers. | | Meanwhile, Amazon continues to dilute their store with no | control over review authenticity. Not saying Etsy isn't prone | to that but Amazon's entire business model is to let these | things slide. Etsy is at least doing something. | | I really don't care about sellers. I want a place for high | quality products. Period. | lkbm wrote: | I'm definitely skeptical of dinging people for 4-star | reviews, but each of these bullet points are encouraged by | Etsy because they improve customer satisfaction and sales. | | The petition does make a good point that some products may | be better just shipped dirt-cheap without paying for | tracking, but overall Etsy is pushing sellers to provide | better service and do things that bring in more revenue, | both for them and the seller. | vitaflo wrote: | My wife is a star seller on Etsy and it hasn't been hard for | her to maintain at all (and she's never asked for ratings). | But she's also never had even a negative comment made about | her product after thousands of sales. I wonder if some | product types are more open to criticism than others. | Beltalowda wrote: | > we get 4 stars quite often for things like "Oh it was | smaller than I expected" even though the listing says the | exact measurements like 4 times. | | It's hard to really gauge the size of something from just | measurements. One thing that often annoys me about product | pages is that have a bazillion images of the thingymabob, but | don't actually have a bunch of images where it shows the | thingymabob in perspective; e.g. somehow actually holding it, | a wider-angle picture of it in regular context (e.g. a | painting actually framed on a wall in a regular living room | or whatnot), and that kind of stuff. | | Anyway, just an aside. | | I also see a 4-star review as "excellent", but many of these | platforms seem to see anything less than 5 stars as "bad". | jeremymcanally wrote: | I agree, but we've really tried everything to be honest! We | put comparative photos on there, mention comparative sizing | (e.g., "This is about the size of a normal business card"), | and so on. Still, people get it and think it's going to be | bigger/smaller and somehow that's a defect? It's just part | of working with retail customers of a physical product, but | unfortunately minor things like that have an outsized | impact in a sales ecosystem like this that expects | perfection in these interactions. | Beltalowda wrote: | As a customer, it's really hard to write these kind of | reviews; people may still end up expecting something | slightly larger, because even with the best of efforts | it's just hard to judge these things from a picture or | video. This is not anyone's "fault", it's just that | humans aren't really good at judging these sort of | things. | | So what review do you leave? 5-star because the product | is "as advertised" and otherwise good? Or 4-star because | it's not _quite_ what you were looking for? I think both | options are reasonable. | | The Real Problem(tm) here is thinking you can automate | these sort of things without any human judgement and | expect to somehow end up with a reasonable response. | There will always be outliers that any human would judge | as "yeah, that's just silly" but computers don't care. | capableweb wrote: | It seems pretty simply. If you get whats advertised, you | rate it good. If it isn't, you rate it worse. If it was | what was advertised, but you figured out that wasn't | actually what you were looking for, the rating for the | product should still be good, even though you made the | mistake of buying it. That's not the sellers fault in any | way. | Beltalowda wrote: | But isn't a review at least partly subjective, based on | how much _you_ like the product? Or at least, it seems to | me that 's how it _should_ work. | capableweb wrote: | Yes, that is true. But I think it has to be compared to | how much you liked this product VS others who do the same | thing. Not "I thought this product did X" (but it was | never specified for example) and then leave a 4 star | review after returning it, or similar cases. Maybe I | ordered this thing and thought I would like it, but | because of something _not-the-fault-of-the-product- | itself_ I ended up not liking it, I don 't think the | seller should suffer from it. | mosseater wrote: | A 5-star review should be left. If you are given | measurements and the product matches those measurements, | the only one at fault is you. A measurement is literally | a definitive answer to the size of something. Get a ruler | or measuring tape out and visualize it for yourself. | Humans aren't good at judging things precisely, that's | why we have tools! | | My ex was a clothing Seller on Etsy. A 4-star review | because something didn't fit right was super stressful | for her, because it meant her average rating went down | and her seller status might be demoted. | | I think a better option is to contact the seller directly | if you are dissatisfied with the product. That way you | aren't transferring your problem to them. | wincy wrote: | So it'd be super stressful if you run into people who are | like "yeah they did a pretty good job I'm satisfied. Not | the most amazing clothes ever but I'll wear them. 3 | stars"? | | That's exactly the type of person I was before I became a | dev and learned about these insane algorithms. As someone | else on this post said 3 star - good 4 star - great 5 | star - absolutely amazing perfect service! went above and | beyond | pcurve wrote: | Cheap stuff on Etsy is never going away. Misrepresentation on | Etsy is here to say, as long as there's cheap labor offshore, if | not China then in other countries. | | Even if something is born as a small batch small creation, if it | sells well, then Chinese will copy it and sell it. | | And guess what? If the quality is decent enough, majority of | buyers will _not_ care. | | The problem is also on the buyer/demand side. | mcdonje wrote: | >We will put our shops on vacation mode April 11-18. Those of us | who can will strike for the whole week, and some of us are | striking only for April 11. | | The reality that many (most?) sellers can't afford to strike will | significantly limit the scope and impact of the exercise. | | This is exactly why unions have strike funds. | | It may seem weird for a bunch of small business owners to form or | join a union, but that's what they should do. | giarc wrote: | I think that most sellers won't "strike" simply because there's | likely a financial incentive not to. For that week, you can be | the only "custom sticker maker" on the platform and increase | your profits. What can the other sellers do about it?! | | The reason why workplace strikes work is because you are | visibly seen 'crossing the picket' line and so majority of | workers comply. Other Etsy sellers can see you continue to | sell, but what does it matter, you don't work with them. They | are all independent of each other. | hayd wrote: | There's always a (short-term) financial incentive not to | strike. | KarlKemp wrote: | Something to keep in mind now that workplaces are going | remote-first. | JAlexoid wrote: | OK. You realize that they can move to eBay and Shopify. | | If their complaints are true, then Etsy is already unusable and | using Instagram ads is clearly a simpler way of doing business. | abeppu wrote: | If sellers are willing and able to organize a change to their | business operations, and put up a public site and social | media/marketing push to raise attention ... then how much further | would they need to go to just splinter off Etsy? | | Is there room for a federated or coop model, where the sellers | own+govern their own marketplace? | samstave wrote: | Etsy is a Tech/Data Company which gathers data on all the | sellers etc... | | Sellers are artisans, to think they are going to handle setting | up an actual clud hosted marketplace and hire a savvy tech | staff with devps, eng, support, cloud arch etc... | | Nope. | imwillofficial wrote: ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-11 23:00 UTC)