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Etsy Strike

• tpl 5y ago
  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.
• rafaelturk 5y ago
  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.
  • SixDouble5321 5y ago
    Maybe you missed it, the sellers think this program is meant to benefit the corporate resellers and harm the individuals selling on Etsy.
• milderworkacc 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      They’re openly demanding a lower fee, backed by the threat of collectively restricting output. That’s textbook.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • andy_ppp 5y ago
        One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist...
      • postsantum 5y ago
        Etsy, just find other sellers, right?
  • jdrc 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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/guide-antitrust-laws/dealings-competitors/price-fixing 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.
      • jdrc 5y ago
        This is not a group of competitors, etsy is not 'the market', and sellers have not agreed anything to each other
        • jpollock 5y ago
          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 5y ago
            Who knows, but etsy should be very low in that list.
        • alecbz 5y ago
          > 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.
  • beaconstudios 5y ago
    This is a capital strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 5y ago
      “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 5y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel).
        • milderworkacc 5y ago
          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!
  • md_ 5y ago
    Where'd you get your law degree, Mr. Hutz?
  • gruez 5y ago
    >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?
    • milderworkacc 5y ago
      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.
    • maccolgan 5y ago
      They are.
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    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.
    • milderworkacc 5y ago
      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.
    • maccolgan 5y ago
      There's no such thing as "good anticompetitive behavior".
  • LadyCailin 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
• mincer_ray 5y ago
  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.
  • agentdrtran 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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
  • bduerst 5y ago
    >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.
  • tyingq 5y ago
    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.
• eatonphil 5y ago
  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.
  • coldpie 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      I live with a lot of early artists. A ton of people make and buy art on Etsy
    • dfxm12 5y ago
      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.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  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!!"
  • Blackthorn 5y ago
    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.
  • DanTheManPR 5y ago
    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.
• deleted 5y ago
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• elefantastisch 5y ago
  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.
  • redisman 5y ago
    I would guess it jives better with SEO garbage and brings more sales in the short term
  • cjsawyer 5y ago
    Sounds like short term greed overcoming desire to hold onto their unique gimmick that made customers initially care
    • alecbz 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        >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.
        • alecbz 5y ago
          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.
• sergiotapia 5y ago
  >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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    What it reminds me of is Network Decay: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay 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.
• lostgame 5y ago
  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-die-blue-rose-charity 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. :)
  • sprkwd 5y ago
    Am totally buying that. Thanks!
  • dangrossman 5y ago
    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.
• darkstar999 5y ago
  I would love to see an Etsy alternative that is verified handmade goods rather than reseller junk.
  • ramesh31 5y ago
    >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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      This was how Etsy used to work and they were really strict about it. It changed about 2 months after they IPOd
      • Karsteski 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          Valve barely makes games anymore. Are you referring to the steam platform in general somehow getting bad/worse than competitors?
          • Karsteski 5y ago
            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.
• pnathan 5y ago
  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...
• tmountain 5y ago
  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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • mmastrac 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        I had to read this three times before I realized that by "startup", you implied "taking on investment".
        • ianbutler 5y ago
          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.
• FYYFFF 5y ago
  The Internet commoditizes everything.
  • jdrc 5y ago
    Commodification is how human progress works though...
• endisneigh 5y ago
  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?
  • jdrc 5y ago
    Essentially it is what they are doing, except the website is still in "very early stages", so etsy has time to rethink
  • Blackthorn 5y ago
    > 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.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      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.
    • JAlexoid 5y ago
      Most of the stuff on Etsy isn't art. But also - there are multiple easy alternatives to Etsy storefront.
  • aphroz 5y ago
    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.
• true_maybe 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    >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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
    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.
    • notpachet 5y ago
      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 5y ago
• wesleytodd 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
• ramesh31 5y ago
  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.
• lnxg33k1 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
      >> 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.
• dbcurtis 5y ago
  Doesn’t NFT proof-of-provenance solve this?
  • scblock 5y ago
    No.
  • thechao 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    What? How do you come even remotely to the conclusion this is a problem pop would solve?
  • dbcurtis 5y ago
    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.
    • CharlesP 5y ago
      I think it could, create an Association of X with some sort of DAO/governed organization that only allows you to mint NFTs if you are part of the Association. They do the vetting. As for it "hurts the environment", that depends on your blockchain. PoS, nope. PoW/PoST, maybe but it depends. Edit: Also for non-mom/pop shops NFTs are probably huge. Getting a provable NFT w/ your shoes for example will raise the level of difficulty for mass-producing knock offs substantially.
• eatonphil 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Because sellers cannot always raise prices to cover the fee increase. Demand is varying degrees of elastic
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Yeah, how does Entsy enforce the farmer's market feel that it used to have?
• dfdz 5y ago
  > 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 https://www.etsy.com/starseller [2] https://www.coworker.org/petitions/cancel-the-fee-increase-work-with-sellers-not-against-us https://www.coworker.org/petitions/cancel-the-fee-increase-w...
  • jeremymcanally 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
• pcurve 5y ago
  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.
• ianbutler 5y ago
  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.
  • dangrossman 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
• junon 5y ago
  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.
• abeppu 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
• yasabione 5y ago
  [flagged]
• orliesaurus 5y ago
  I love everything about this! More power to you!!
• queuebert 5y ago
  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.
  • banannaise 5y ago
    Our markets are flooded with cheap Chinese trinkets because we have outsourced trinket manufacturing to China to avoid modern labor laws.
    • jiveturkey 5y ago
      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.
  • mardifoufs 5y ago
    I thought the ePacket loophole that made shipping from China extremely cheap has been closed already
  • jiveturkey 5y ago
    The US subsidizes it actually. (but the program has ended now)
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    But people want cheap trinkets.
  • julienb_sea 5y ago
    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.
• ilamont 5y ago
  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.
  • noneeeed 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      >>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.
    • banannaise 5y ago
      The scammers seem to do just fine despite all these systems, yet legitimate sellers can get completely hosed by them. Hm.
  • 5y ago
• nonamenoslogan 5y ago
  Let us know how it works out. ~signed, an ebay seller.
• JaggedJax 5y ago
  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.
• blintz 5y ago
  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'.
• artursapek 5y ago
  I recently bought something on Etsy and received a package from Amazon. I felt sort of cheated.
  • dangrossman 5y ago
    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.
• rkalla 5y ago
  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.
• mcdonje 5y ago
  >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.
  • JAlexoid 5y ago
    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.
  • giarc 5y ago
    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.
    • KarlKemp 5y ago
      Something to keep in mind now that workplaces are going remote-first.
    • hayd 5y ago
      There's always a (short-term) financial incentive not to strike.
• 0wx 5y ago
  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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• calflegal 5y ago
  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.
• imwillofficial 5y ago
• lg 5y ago
  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.
• MassiveOwl 5y ago
  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
• llamataboot 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    The "Law of Marginal Nostalgica"?
• oriettaxx 5y ago
  Super! I will join!
• paxys 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
• jnmandal 5y ago
  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.
• tomatowurst 5y ago
  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.
• fleddr 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
      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.
• kyletns 5y ago
  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-status-maintain-corporate-structure/ https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2017/11/30/etsy-gives-b-corp-...
• throwaway-jim 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Planet Money did a podcast on the subject: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/episode-857-the-postal-illuminati 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.
  • ganoushoreilly 5y ago
    Here's an older article ePacket shipping / the Universal Postal Union. The last administration was pretty adamant about closing the one sided deal that we somehow got ourselves into. Regardless of political affiliations, I think we all agree that an American shouldn't pay more to ship in America than someone from outside of the country. The economic advantage hurts users and small businesses. https://archive.ph/ojVUp https://archive.ph/ojVUp I've been pretty bummed with the Etsy changes to Reverb.com (they acquired a few years ago). It was great and I regularly shopped there, now it's hit or miss and feels more like ebay / wish.com
• 97s 5y ago
  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.
• status200 5y ago
  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.
• einpoklum 5y ago
  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.
• kixiQu 5y ago
  Etsy can target incredibly well to show me things I want to buy....when I'm looking at one of their ads on Instagram. Their actual site recommendations? Deeply mediocre. The difference, given that I sign over a bunch of data to them either way? I might guess: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21155193/etsy-advertising-program-angers-sellers-cut-of-sales https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21155193/etsy-advertising...
  • BadCookie 5y ago
    The difference is that Meta is doing the targeting on Instagram.
    • kixiQu 5y ago
      I don't totally buy that -- that they're in charge of the integration with Etsy's catalog? That there's no device ID fed back from the referrer links I click that Etsy could be using to pull over my computed advertisement characteristics, given that I've logged in there with Facebook? Etsy knows I've been clicking on those Instagram ads run to certain groups -- surely they could use that to improve my onsite recommendations.
• rootsudo 5y ago
  Ironically this is the best time to be a seller on etsy. But regardless of platform, ebay, amazon, etsy, shopify - you are always at mercy of the platform and being deplatformed. Sellers should use the platforms as a funnel and then once they verify their idea works, pop it onto a private hosted website within their full control - ofcourse this is a bit complicated, but not really, even something as silly as wordpress + woocommerce + stripe would work, and if you get big enough spend, can get a better rate on credit card gateways. Or, go full crypto.
• sn00tz00t 5y ago
  Worst thing about Etsy is it doesn't let you use it if you're using a known proxy. I just get error 429.
• herbst 5y ago
  I already closed my shop, years ago. It doesn't make sense to offer hand made products if you compete directly with AliExpress and the users has no way of telling that 90% of the platform is China resell. You can claim whatever you want, no control, no warnings, nobody from Etsy actually cares. The reason I finally stopped was because they did not accept my new credit card and I had no way to contact anyone to clear this up. I made several thousand dollars a month on Etsy yet nobody actually helped. With no credit card attached I couldn't use any paid features anymore and my shop was dying either way. I contacted every email, every support forum and never got any kind of response more than a link to the faq that didn't help. I may still recommend it to test the waters for cheap (if you are lucky and have a credit card that actually works for them), but I wouldnt recommend anyone to build a business around this shady platform
• gw67 5y ago
  Why not switching to Amazon Handmade program?
• langsoul-com 5y ago
  Strike will do nothing without an alternative, which would eventually have the same problems.