4 ms·

TechCrunch Teardown: Etsy, It's Crafty

17 points by replicatorblog 16y ago

gfodor 16y ago
Check out our tech blog: http://codeascraft.etsy.com http://codeascraft.etsy.com We post fairly often in detail about the technical challenges we've had to overcome while growing the marketplace.
- bmelton 16y ago
  In reading through the blog, there's an article on the technical challenges of resizing the 135 million + images as you reorganized the site. Perhaps this is a dumb question, but if you've already got a resize script that resizes images into 6 different sizes when the seller uploads it. What was the reason you didn't just re-point that script at the filesystem instead of an uploaded file object? It may have taken slightly longer to process, but my hunch is that it may have compensated for man-hours you spent in building something new. What was the limiting factor there?
  - code_duck 16y ago
    Excellent question. Check out the comments. A few members of the community have questioned why they chose this elaborate process, which actually ended up with the new images actually having noticeably lower quality. This was noticed by the artists themselves, too, as Etsy's customers labor for a long time to get the highest quality photos possible. Etsy's response when this was brought up in the member forums was that they 'learned from this' and would take note for the future... a more satisfying response would be "we acknowledge that the images are inadequate and we'll re-do them". Why Etsy thought they had to seek new image algorithms rather than just using the ones they already used is the sort of question they very rarely answer. My analysis is that it is related to the fact that they did the processing on an Amazon server. To save bandwidth, transfer time and processing time, they sent over the medium sized images rather than the original, full size image. Of course, that doesn't explain why they decided to do it in 'the cloud' at all rather than, as you say, just operate directly on the file system, in house. They claim to have gone through an elaborate comparison process, apparently with the visual quality comparison being done by engineers - not people specializing in the non-technical side of photography or graphics. They seem to have entirely missed the quality issue, though it was apparent enough to customers that at least a hundred of them brought it up in the forums once the switch to the new image sizes was made.
smokey_the_bear 16y ago
My fiance and I are purchasing our wedding rings from an Etsy jeweler. It's the largest online purchase I've made, and it's a testament to how well Etsy manages its reputation. Also speaks to how irritating going into local jewelry shops was though.
- code_duck 16y ago
  There are definitely some excellent craftspeople with shops on Etsy. Etsy has done a good job of managing their appearance, to where they clearly appear more upscale than eBay or other marketplaces. There are some issues with that but there's no reason to get into it here... if anyone is interested, the juicy action is always on their forums, when it hasn't been suppressed yet.
strebler 16y ago
Great story, but I definitely dislike seeing financial projections with such unnatural jumps - August to September 2010 has a $500K+ jump in monthly revenue, which would appear to be the largest month-to-month increase in revenue (as an absolute and I'd say as a percentage too). Not saying it's impossible (maybe the September numbers so far support this), but the jump from ~2.1 million to ~3.7 million in 4 months feels a bit unnatural given the historical data.

Check out our tech blog: http://codeascraft.etsy.com http://codeascraft.etsy.com We post fairly often in detail about the technical challenges we've had to overcome while growing the marketplace.

bmelton 16y ago
In reading through the blog, there's an article on the technical challenges of resizing the 135 million + images as you reorganized the site. Perhaps this is a dumb question, but if you've already got a resize script that resizes images into 6 different sizes when the seller uploads it. What was the reason you didn't just re-point that script at the filesystem instead of an uploaded file object? It may have taken slightly longer to process, but my hunch is that it may have compensated for man-hours you spent in building something new. What was the limiting factor there?
- code_duck 16y ago
  Excellent question. Check out the comments. A few members of the community have questioned why they chose this elaborate process, which actually ended up with the new images actually having noticeably lower quality. This was noticed by the artists themselves, too, as Etsy's customers labor for a long time to get the highest quality photos possible. Etsy's response when this was brought up in the member forums was that they 'learned from this' and would take note for the future... a more satisfying response would be "we acknowledge that the images are inadequate and we'll re-do them". Why Etsy thought they had to seek new image algorithms rather than just using the ones they already used is the sort of question they very rarely answer. My analysis is that it is related to the fact that they did the processing on an Amazon server. To save bandwidth, transfer time and processing time, they sent over the medium sized images rather than the original, full size image. Of course, that doesn't explain why they decided to do it in 'the cloud' at all rather than, as you say, just operate directly on the file system, in house. They claim to have gone through an elaborate comparison process, apparently with the visual quality comparison being done by engineers - not people specializing in the non-technical side of photography or graphics. They seem to have entirely missed the quality issue, though it was apparent enough to customers that at least a hundred of them brought it up in the forums once the switch to the new image sizes was made.

smokey_the_bear 16y ago

My fiance and I are purchasing our wedding rings from an Etsy jeweler. It's the largest online purchase I've made, and it's a testament to how well Etsy manages its reputation. Also speaks to how irritating going into local jewelry shops was though.

code_duck 16y ago
There are definitely some excellent craftspeople with shops on Etsy. Etsy has done a good job of managing their appearance, to where they clearly appear more upscale than eBay or other marketplaces. There are some issues with that but there's no reason to get into it here... if anyone is interested, the juicy action is always on their forums, when it hasn't been suppressed yet.

strebler 16y ago

Great story, but I definitely dislike seeing financial projections with such unnatural jumps - August to September 2010 has a $500K+ jump in monthly revenue, which would appear to be the largest month-to-month increase in revenue (as an absolute and I'd say as a percentage too). Not saying it's impossible (maybe the September numbers so far support this), but the jump from ~2.1 million to ~3.7 million in 4 months feels a bit unnatural given the historical data.