7 ms·

Etsy fell apart when they failed to police non-handmade goods. For example I was looking for a picture frame and any permutation of search terms I used returned

by a2tech 7y ago

Etsy fell apart when they failed to police non-handmade goods. For example I was looking for a picture frame and any permutation of search terms I used returned thousands of results from a handful of sellers that are obviously just Chinese junk I could buy at Wal-Mart (all mislabeled of course--I was searching for 'walnut 18x24 picture frame' and the results contained frames of all colors, shapes, and wood types). Then to make things even worse when I waded through the results I DID find someone selling a frame like I wanted, but then I looked a bit further down the page and found the EXACT same frame from another seller. They're located geographically near to each other (separate cities though) and they used the same pictures. And the prices were quite different. Some sort of scam is going on there but I'm not sure what--either people are buying from a local craftsman and reselling on Etsy, or the local craftsman is selling his products online at slightly different prices for a reason I couldn't quite grasp.

TorKlingberg 7y ago
For every comment like yours there is an other saying Etsy fell apart when they started making legitimate sellers jump thorough a bunch of hoops proving they are really hand-making their things. And a story about someone who got wrongly thrown out. I'm not sure it's possible to solve both problems.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  two sides of the same coin tbh.
- Swenrekcah 7y ago
  It’s possible to solve both problems if you are content not to be the only provider of this service in the world. I realise the forces dictate that direction, but that’s also why everything turns to crap in the end.
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  Just have a very clear separation of both. Call one Etsy and the other EtsyExpress or something like that.
- cellular 7y ago
  It's a love-hate relationship. Kickstarter also used to be about the little guy. Now you need thousand dollar videos, and pay to market your own project! Ironically, check out mine! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-cracker/poly-wants-a-cracker-robot-controller-for-bricks/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-cracker/po...
heymijo 7y ago
> when they failed to police non-handmade goods They never failed at this. Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move. FTA > But the growth — and yet another round of VC funding — put even more pressure on Etsy. Chief technology officer Chad Dickerson had taken over as CEO after Kalin was voted out by the board in July 2011, and in October 2013, in an infamous town hall meeting at Etsy HQ, he announced that the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team. Much of the community was aghast, fearing the change would ruin the culture of the site forever.
- Junk_Collector 7y ago
  You might call that a failure of management.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  > Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move. > the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team. I think your interpretation is a wee bit wide of the mark. The spirit of being able to contract outside manufacturers to help make their products is somewhat different from a2tech's observation of sellers buying a bunch of cheap mass-produced crap and dumping it on Etsy. There's a world of difference between a seller designing, for example, a nixie clock and outsourcing the PCB and perhaps some chassis/case fabrication, perhaps to China (based on your own design) and another seller dumping a bunch of imported cheap crap on the market.
  - Arnt 7y ago
    I like cufflinks and wear them all winter. So I buy some, and I don't mean "one pair per decade". This comment is specific to cufflinks, or maybe it just uses cufflinks as an example? There are a lot of artisans who make cufflinks based on parts they buy, but the item on sale is really the artisan's. There are also a lot of cufflinks on sale that aren't really artisanal, just two parts glued together with no taste or imagination, and I have to wade through these while searching for the good ones. The share looks like 99%/1% sometimes. But: 1. It's not reasonable to deny the artisans the use of that prefab building block, because many of the good ones are good for reasons that aren't related to the prefab block. 2. I can see that it's really difficult for Etsy to draw a line between the two types. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to sell 26×26 varieties of cufflinks with initials, for example? I don't buy anything other than cufflinks, but it seems to me that the same problem may occur in other categories. Or not. Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. That these things can fill the listing, so that the artisanal work that is the core to Etsy's business model is in the fringes of its search results.
wl 7y ago
I've had good luck with Etsy when buying things you can't find at Walmart. There's plenty of knitters and crocheters on Etsy who use the site to avoid accumulating finished objects. They're usually willing to do custom things, too. And Etsy is home to the only person in the world (that I know of) who is doing modern reproductions of cuneiform tablets.
deltron3030 7y ago
Etsy became a platform for private label sellers, similar to Amazon's marketplace, but with a slightly different audience that focuses more on whimsical and feminine aesthetics.
opportune 7y ago
Amazon is running into similar issues too with counterfeit items and other scammers. In fact I think this happens with any sufficiently large ecommerce platform It all boils down to inability to scale. These companies have internal narratives that they will scale completely horizontally and that they can automate everything. But at the end of the day I don't think anybody has eliminated the need to perform due diligence on their supply chain. What's strange is that Etsy and Amazon would rather their brands be damaged than hire more people to police what goes on their platforms
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arbitrage 7y ago
  > Amazon is running into similar issues too with counterfeit items and other scammers amazon has been running into this issue for decades. it's a constant ebb & flow. this is not new information.
  - scrungus 7y ago
    you have to spend money to make money
    - arbitrage 7y ago
      That has absolutely no bearing on anything I said.
      - scrungus 7y ago
        thats because you millennial always act like money grows on trees. (matthew 19:24) go to church somtime??
- mattmcknight 7y ago
  I'd say the primary similarity is the marketplace of third party sellers. For products where Amazon.com is the seller, it has about as many problems as anywhere else. Where Amazon.com is not the seller, it is like etsy or ebay, where the product listings themselves are completely unreliable. The #1 thing I hate about Amazon is how they mix third party items with items where they are the seller. However, third party has grown from 3% to 58% of sales on the site, so I don't see how they can get rid of it or fix it. https://qz.com/1592802/jeff-bezos-third-party-sellers-on-amazon-are-kicking-our-butt/ https://qz.com/1592802/jeff-bezos-third-party-sellers-on-ama...

by a2tech 7y ago

TorKlingberg 7y ago

For every comment like yours there is an other saying Etsy fell apart when they started making legitimate sellers jump thorough a bunch of hoops proving they are really hand-making their things. And a story about someone who got wrongly thrown out. I'm not sure it's possible to solve both problems.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
two sides of the same coin tbh.
Swenrekcah 7y ago
It’s possible to solve both problems if you are content not to be the only provider of this service in the world. I realise the forces dictate that direction, but that’s also why everything turns to crap in the end.
hiccuphippo 7y ago
Just have a very clear separation of both. Call one Etsy and the other EtsyExpress or something like that.
cellular 7y ago
It's a love-hate relationship. Kickstarter also used to be about the little guy. Now you need thousand dollar videos, and pay to market your own project! Ironically, check out mine! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-cracker/poly-wants-a-cracker-robot-controller-for-bricks/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poly-wants-a-cracker/po...

heymijo 7y ago

> when they failed to police non-handmade goods They never failed at this. Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move. FTA > But the growth — and yet another round of VC funding — put even more pressure on Etsy. Chief technology officer Chad Dickerson had taken over as CEO after Kalin was voted out by the board in July 2011, and in October 2013, in an infamous town hall meeting at Etsy HQ, he announced that the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team. Much of the community was aghast, fearing the change would ruin the culture of the site forever.

Junk_Collector 7y ago
You might call that a failure of management.
teh_klev 7y ago
> Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move. > the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team. I think your interpretation is a wee bit wide of the mark. The spirit of being able to contract outside manufacturers to help make their products is somewhat different from a2tech's observation of sellers buying a bunch of cheap mass-produced crap and dumping it on Etsy. There's a world of difference between a seller designing, for example, a nixie clock and outsourcing the PCB and perhaps some chassis/case fabrication, perhaps to China (based on your own design) and another seller dumping a bunch of imported cheap crap on the market.
- Arnt 7y ago
  I like cufflinks and wear them all winter. So I buy some, and I don't mean "one pair per decade". This comment is specific to cufflinks, or maybe it just uses cufflinks as an example? There are a lot of artisans who make cufflinks based on parts they buy, but the item on sale is really the artisan's. There are also a lot of cufflinks on sale that aren't really artisanal, just two parts glued together with no taste or imagination, and I have to wade through these while searching for the good ones. The share looks like 99%/1% sometimes. But: 1. It's not reasonable to deny the artisans the use of that prefab building block, because many of the good ones are good for reasons that aren't related to the prefab block. 2. I can see that it's really difficult for Etsy to draw a line between the two types. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to sell 26×26 varieties of cufflinks with initials, for example? I don't buy anything other than cufflinks, but it seems to me that the same problem may occur in other categories. Or not. Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. That these things can fill the listing, so that the artisanal work that is the core to Etsy's business model is in the fringes of its search results.

wl 7y ago

I've had good luck with Etsy when buying things you can't find at Walmart. There's plenty of knitters and crocheters on Etsy who use the site to avoid accumulating finished objects. They're usually willing to do custom things, too. And Etsy is home to the only person in the world (that I know of) who is doing modern reproductions of cuneiform tablets.

deltron3030 7y ago

Etsy became a platform for private label sellers, similar to Amazon's marketplace, but with a slightly different audience that focuses more on whimsical and feminine aesthetics.

opportune 7y ago

Amazon is running into similar issues too with counterfeit items and other scammers. In fact I think this happens with any sufficiently large ecommerce platform It all boils down to inability to scale. These companies have internal narratives that they will scale completely horizontally and that they can automate everything. But at the end of the day I don't think anybody has eliminated the need to perform due diligence on their supply chain. What's strange is that Etsy and Amazon would rather their brands be damaged than hire more people to police what goes on their platforms

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
arbitrage 7y ago
> Amazon is running into similar issues too with counterfeit items and other scammers amazon has been running into this issue for decades. it's a constant ebb & flow. this is not new information.
- scrungus 7y ago
  you have to spend money to make money
  - arbitrage 7y ago
    That has absolutely no bearing on anything I said.
    - scrungus 7y ago
      thats because you millennial always act like money grows on trees. (matthew 19:24) go to church somtime??
mattmcknight 7y ago
I'd say the primary similarity is the marketplace of third party sellers. For products where Amazon.com is the seller, it has about as many problems as anywhere else. Where Amazon.com is not the seller, it is like etsy or ebay, where the product listings themselves are completely unreliable. The #1 thing I hate about Amazon is how they mix third party items with items where they are the seller. However, third party has grown from 3% to 58% of sales on the site, so I don't see how they can get rid of it or fix it. https://qz.com/1592802/jeff-bezos-third-party-sellers-on-amazon-are-kicking-our-butt/ https://qz.com/1592802/jeff-bezos-third-party-sellers-on-ama...