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> Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move. > the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so

> 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.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Something like https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=cufflinks https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=cufflinks ? Some of those look pretty nice.
  - Arnt 7y ago
    That's the second category. One end is the same, the joining bar is the same, and the other end is decorated. Once you have a few pairs, you may come to grow tired of that sameness. Here's the more artisan pair I wore yesterday. Steel wire and four well-selected pebbles from a stream: https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/cufflinks.jpg https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/cufflinks.jpg
- teh_klev 7y ago
  > Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. I agree, this is kinda the point I was trying to make (probably very badly). I like cufflinks as well so I appreciate your appreciation of them. Sadly I don't own any shirts :/

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.

mcguire 7y ago
Something like https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=cufflinks https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=cufflinks ? Some of those look pretty nice.
- Arnt 7y ago
  That's the second category. One end is the same, the joining bar is the same, and the other end is decorated. Once you have a few pairs, you may come to grow tired of that sameness. Here's the more artisan pair I wore yesterday. Steel wire and four well-selected pebbles from a stream: https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/cufflinks.jpg https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/cufflinks.jpg
teh_klev 7y ago
> Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. I agree, this is kinda the point I was trying to make (probably very badly). I like cufflinks as well so I appreciate your appreciation of them. Sadly I don't own any shirts :/