27 ms·

Etsy is awash with illicit products and mass produced goods (2021)

159 points by vector_spaces 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fnordian_slip 4y ago
I like to dream about changing to a four day workweek, and dedicating one day to woodworking. Originally, I wanted to sell on Etsy, but the flood of drop shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off. It seems like it has gotten a lot worse in the last decade. I know that this one day a week would decrease my overall earnings, but it would probably still be worth it. However, with the abundance of cheap, mass-produced items on Etsy I would have to price my items so cheap that I would fall below minimum wage on that day. I don't want to complain, I get to do enough woodworking as is, since my employer gives me 12 additional vacation days in exchange for 5.2% of my salary, taking me up to 47 per year. But it would still be nice if there was a platform in Europe that does what Etsy used to do.
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  You could sell your creations on Etsy. It would help to label them such that people can find your wares if one were searching for something made by hand, for instance. You can also create an external marketing site/portal that directs people to your Etsy shop. My mother was a successful fused glass artist. Her works sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars, but in the end, she made close to minimum wage per hour, as you described. Art, or anything made by hand, doesn't scale well.
  - fnordian_slip 4y ago
    The external marketing site is probably the key, as well as making the items small enough that the profit margins don't get eaten by shipping and the cost of high quality wood. I've started an Instagram account where I post some of my work, but I've found out that I'm really bad at social media for marketing purposes. I'm currently debating whether it's worth it to become better at marketing or SEO in order to promote my stuff, but even though it is a no-brainer from a business standpoint, it is the opposite of what I want to do. I originally started this plan to have a workday where I don't look at the screen for 8 hours, and now I've gotten myself in a situation where I look at a screen in my free time to learn how to promote my business. You're right, art just doesn't scale well. Maybe it's best if I continue to just do it for fun and gift it to friends and family. Not everything needs to be a business.
    - hhw3h 4y ago
      What's interesting about the online art world is that there are a number of platforms like Etsy that ostensibly take the sales and marketing off your plate, that said, all your points are true. They are often a race to the bottom where you feel a strong pressure to compete on pricing. What I've seen work instead is to charge much higher rates of $1,000 or more. Think to yourself, hypothetically speaking, if I were to charge $1,000 or more for my art or my woodworking etc. what kind of items would justify that price point and then just focus on those. Then when it comes to marketing and selling, pursue a relationship based selling approach rather than an ecommerce transactional approach. Once you start getting social proof of happy customers you can often take the same work that was selling for $1,000 and sell it for $3,000 to $5,000 or even more. That's the key to making a sustainable income with art or handcrafted work these days.
    - damascus 4y ago
      As someone with a similar side hustle: If you are going to drive your own traffic don't drive it to a platform thats going to take 20%+ of your gross product cost. Drive traffic to your own shopify or squarespace site that has really good ecomm built in. Get a shipstation account and you're pretty set. IMO.
- tpxl 4y ago
  Bespoke pieces should still fetch a pretty price. It's not gonna be a good wage by any means, but it should be far above what you'd get by undercutting dropshippers.
- sirwhinesalot 4y ago
  This isn't really a problem with Etsy dropshippers, handmade goods simply cannot compete with mass-produced goods as you can't scale your time. Without scale you need magnitude, people must be willing to pay you for a piece of work much more than it cost you to make it, and you must do so consistently. My suggestion is to put a few example woodworks you've done on your spare time for sale with no expectation of making any money from them, and then offer to make custom handmade designs for people. You can charge a lot more for those and you are basically guaranteed a sale for the time you spend on each one. The rest comes down to marketing, I have a print-on-demand shop with my own designs with 0 sales. I mostly use it as a way to leave a mark somewhere of things I've made that didn't involve coding. Burnout does that to you. Losing 20 cents for each design I make, but hey, I enjoy it.
  - gilleain 4y ago
    Heh, I do this too - create stuff, put it on Etsy and watch the 0 sales just roll in. I also see it as a way to show the world that I make stuff, dammit, and not just type code into an IDE! :)
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Yes, this is a common thing to think of e-commerce sites like Etsy as a sort of social network page where you post stuff but maybe have no intention on making any sales, it’s just another way to display your hobby.
  - zeruch 4y ago
    This is the reason I haven't started putting my original artwork on Etsy. I make a small amount annually with JIT art prints from Society6 and RedBubble (I used to do DeviantArt as well, but since their AI debacle, I've got a moratorium on that option). Originals cost much more than prints (my stuff is priced between 100-10,000 USD depending on size and complexity) and mostly come via work of mouth commission. I want to market, but the time commit seems onerous, and I like it not being "work" (that's what the day job is for)
- japanman425 4y ago
  > shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off What does handmade mean to you? My adidas are “hand made”.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Usually it means you are buying the item from the person who made it or the store you are shopping in bought it directly from the person who made it. It's low volume production with very little or no automation involved.
    - notJim 4y ago
      Elsewhere in this thread, someone describes selling lasercut items on Etsy, which is obviously highly automated. Would you argue that shouldn't be considered handmade?
      - criddell 4y ago
        Depends on the specifics. If the service is "submit a file and I'll load it into my laser machine and mail you what comes out the other end", then probably not. That feels like getting photos printed at the CVS and nobody would say CVS sells handmade prints. If there is a substantial amount of manual work to the piece after it comes out of the machine, then maybe. It would have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
- dawsoneliasen 4y ago
  FWIW I shop on Etsy quite a bit and I can definitely tell when something is actually handmade, and I shell out for it. I think you would still have a market despite the degradation in quality of Etsy generally.
- SpaceL10n 4y ago
  I work a four day workweek and have been for a full year now. I'm likely to never return to a 40hr workweek. I actually ended up interviewing at a few places a couple of months ago (Capital One, Farmers, few other smaller companies). I was pleasantly surprised by how many hiring managers and HR folks were willing to talk to me after I mentioned that I was only interested in 32hrs/wk @ 80% salary. My point of advice to anyone who is curious about a four day work week is just do it. Ask and I'm willing to bet you will receive.
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    Do you still get fulltime employment benefits? That seems to be the sticking point with many companies, as fulltime and parttime employees are treated, and cost, different, even if salary is prorated.
    - SpaceL10n 4y ago
      That's wild to me because it's my understanding that most HR departments consider anything over 30hrs a week to be full-time. I didn't encounter any of that last time around. My offer from Farmer's included a pension and full benefits. I'm a small sample size though...
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  I would focus on a more local market. Shipping real wood furniture would be an expensive hassle anyway
  - greedo 4y ago
    I made my desk out of a thick walnut slab, and it turned out great. On the woodworking FB group, people said I could sell it easily on Etsy etc for over $2K. So I looked into it. My COG was about $1k, and Etsy would take 20% of the $2K selling price, leaving me with $600 before shipping costs. Now this desk is large, weighs a lot and shipping would easily be $300-500 in the CONUS. I guess that's on the customer though. Hmm... While noodling around with this idea I did some market research on Etsy and saw that others were selling similar desks for about $2K, with FREE shipping. I reached out to one of the sellers asking if this was real or a bait and switch. Apparently if you don't ship for free, Etsy actively discriminates against your post. So my end profit would have been between $100-$300 for a week or so of work. Sometimes no matter how you slice it, physical goods don't make much sense. I'd have to charge at least 50% more to make it even worthwhile, and I doubt the market for $3K desks is that large.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  It might be cool to include some photos and a build-log of each item being made. I think I’d like this as a shopper and it would let you distinguish your products from mass-produced stuff. It wouldn’t have to be super-comprehensive, but I think it would be fun, especially if the reader could sorta track how the product evolves from the raw material: a knot being used as the focal point of a rustic table—-or hidden with an inlay for a fancy one, for example.
- CosmicShadow 4y ago
  1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day. 2. Etsy is flooded, true, but it doesn't mean people still don't find you and buy your stuff if it's good and unique (and you put effort into learning how to do Etsy SEO). If you make something that no one else has, you can charge a proper amount for it, people will buy it and leave you great reviews. We make nearly 6 figures on Etsy as a side-business across 3 different Etsy stores for crafts/handmade/digital goods we produce. I can tell you that we used to make a lot of money with our laser-cut wood shop when it started, it was a wonderful learning experience and trip, but after 2 years or so everyone and their dog had a laser cutter, ripped off our designs, and sold them for less than half of what we did (and they weren't making any money at those rates). We had a Chinese scam ring rip off our most expensive item featuring pictures of my wife's face in them and use them as facebook ads to try and sell our $500 item for $79.99 on pop-up stores. Nothing you can do about that, but it shows that we reached a success point to be targeted like that. There are so many niches and things you can make and sell on there it still blows our mind. People sell literal PDFs of a piece of paper with an image of a piggy bank repeated like 500 times that people buy, print out, and cross out 1 by 1 as they add $10 to their vacation fund knowing that at the end they'll have finally saved the $5k they need. These stores will have like 30k+ $3.99 sales for 20 minutes of work. It sucks that you can't report shit stores, they are frustrating, but even though they are there, the long tail is real, you can find anything from any niche, the trick is finding out what people will type in that search bar that you actually make or can make, because that will filter out most of the crap.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > 1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day. I think the huge increase in QOL is, in part, because on most weekends, 2 days is just barely enough to catch up on the shit you need to do but were deferring through the week, get things in order for the next week, take a quick breath, and then dive straight into the next work-week. It's barely even time off. It also means you can't travel anywhere (to visit family, just a short vacation, whatever) and have a whole day away that's not also a travel day, unless you leave late on Friday and aren't going far. A three-day weekend mean you can usually get at least one actual day off most weeks, versus an average of nearly zero entire or almost-entire days off with a two-day weekend. It also opens up a ton more options for short get-aways, and leaves more room for recovery and relaxation after any activities you engage in, making the whole thing far more relaxing and cutting out some of the urgency.
- patja 4y ago
  My brother in law has a successful Etsy shop where he mostly sells "charcuterie boards" he makes in his home workshop as a side gig from his job as a VP of a civil engineering firm. There isn't much to them: no joinery, just a slab with a live edge. He just fills any voids or defects with epoxy, puts it through his surface sander, and applies a nice clear durable finish. Every piece is unique. He does seek out spalted and other interesting grain features to highlight. It helps that almost all of his wood is locally salvaged at almost zero expense other than his time. He loves to hunt down recently fallen trees to make a deal with the property owner to take the wood off their hands. He gets a lot of repeat business from people like realtors who use his boards as housewarming gifts for their clients.
rtkwe 4y ago
Is there any proscription against posting subscriber only content to HN? It's annoying to have to go through archive.org or something else, and for me my work actually blocks archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20230208000215/https://www.businessinsider.com/etsy-sells-ivory-weapons-poisonous-plants-mass-produced-products-2021-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20230208000215/https://www.busin...
- kup0 4y ago
  See HN FAQ on Paywalls "Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
temporallobe 4y ago
I happen to know that Etsy is being used as a tax haven for selling “products” from an online “store”. Basically, you buy stuff, offer it for sale of Etsy, and claim all of the goods you purchased as businesses expenses for tax writeoff purposes. This of course is not limited to Etsy, but it’s an easy platform to use for this purpose. It’s similar to how movie studios will purposefully produce horrible movies in order to create a loss. Or any other tax loophole, really.
- baby-yoda 4y ago
  It sounds like you're describing a classic COGS scenario. Not sure I see the loophole, can you expand?
  - japanman425 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - voxic11 4y ago
    The loophole is that they don't actually expect anything to sell. So they are claim a tax write off when the goods depreciate, all the while actually enjoying them for personal use.
    - baby-yoda 4y ago
      I doubt many Etsy sellers are running their business on an accrual basis to be eligible for depreciation expense. Beyond that Inventory is a non-depreciable asset. If they're not generating any revenue they can't claim COGS. Any of these scenarios are obvious red flags and would be audit candidates. Now if you're suggesting people are submitting fraudulent returns thats another thing but there's no "loophole" here. EDIT - just to add, I'm sure there is a ton of attempted illicit activity on Etsy, just like any other marketplace. See this [0] for example. I don't think there is any tax "loophole" here, however. [0] https://www.etsy.com/listing/1200405951/t-shirt https://www.etsy.com/listing/1200405951/t-shirt
- toyg 4y ago
papito 4y ago
It's almost like we need a way to certify products and authentic, much like we look for the "organic" label in a store. I don't know if that's the solution, but with Amazon also going downhill rapidly, something has got to give.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  [dead]
- ghaff 4y ago
  >much like we look for the "organic" label in a store Which means very little. At some point, there is a distinction between lovingly handcrafted and mass-produced in a Chinese factory. But it's often not clear where that line is.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  I know in the 90's if something had the "Good housekeeping Seal of Approval" then it was usually a trustworthy purchase. What we need is a regulatory board that, like other people say, curate products based on their quality, not on whatever kickbacks or affiliate link profits they get. It sucks if, for instance, you go looking for a Towel Warmer for your girlfriend and you have to read through 17 different, "Top 10 tower warmers 2023" pages that all recommend the exact same items with the exact same stock photos from different sellers with alphabet soup names. What I want is an opinionated site that reviews items, has a short write up, and then keeps an updated list of their top 3 which is split between "Best overall", "Best for your dollar", and "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product, i.e. the least expensive one they've found so far that meets their minimum quality expectations for the product). Products are allowed to occupy more than a single category. Give me that site, and then let them develop a unique recommendation logo with a QR code that goes to their page so you can read the review yourself.
  - papito 4y ago
    I often go to WireCutter before I even look elsewhere, but it's a hassle. Amazon and Etsy should be at least partially responsible for policing what is being sold on their sites. They are not helpless victims.
doctoboggan 4y ago
I’ve been selling on Etsy for a few years and the problem has only been getting worse. Etsy the company seems to turn a blind eye to it since they are making money off of the cheap Alibaba junk as well. That being said etsy is still the best game in town. People searching there are very ready to buy and if you are able to stand out from the crowd it’s possible to be successful.
- docandrew 4y ago
  I started looking on Etsy specifically to get away from the cheap Alibaba junk other stores are flooded with. There are some really nice handmade products there.
- sprkwd 4y ago
  If you are UK based there is always Folksy.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.md/WM1wf https://archive.md/WM1wf
mcphage 4y ago
It's probably worth including (2021) in the title. The article described Etsy putting money to fight this problem in 2021, I wonder if it has improved? Some spot checking makes me think probably not.
- CosmicShadow 4y ago
  Definitely not, they won't even include a way to report these folks. We run multiple Etsy shops and would report all day if we could because it's not hard to identify them at all.
wgerard 4y ago
This was a constant complaint about Etsy 10 years ago when I worked there. This was a complaint that predated my time working there, even. At one point we even had to ban people selling spells (yes, as in the seller would offer to do a magical incantation on your behalf). The exact details might've changed, but the symptoms look the exact same. I remember we had to deal with a lot of people trying to skirt OFAC regulations, for example, by doing all sorts of things to hide the country of origin for something. Optimistically I will say this is a very hard problem to solve. Pessimistically of course the company benefits from it, so I'm sure it's not a problem anyone besides maybe a few diehard advocates look too deeply into.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  Low key, I would buy a spell for my friend, as long as I got a video or certificate or something proving the spell was actually "cast" Sounds like a great sibling gift tbh
  - wgerard 4y ago
    I mean sure, I think that's why it flew under the radar for so long. The dark underbelly of it was people buying love spells and the like, which starts to feel a lot like preying on peoples' desperation.
    - Loughla 4y ago
      I find that genuinely fascinating from an ethical standpoint. What if the people really believe spells work? Does it matter that they don't? Is it just the ephemeral nature of spells? What if I were to ship a complete spell in a bottle to the person? (not to be too much of an edgelord) What about religious iconography or religious paraphernalia? I would argue that anything related to that is just a more accepted version of magic spells. Would prayer be banned?
      - wgerard 4y ago
        > Does it matter that they don't? For an e-commerce platform that allows returns: Yeah that's kind of an important sticking point and was a big part of the problem. The other problem was that spells were effectively a service and you can imagine that we didn't want to get involved in determining the validity or accuracy of services being performed virtually that had zero tangible artifacts. > What if I were to ship a complete spell in a bottle to the person? This is probably what people actually do now to get around it, since there's an actual item being sold now.
jason-phillips 4y ago
Etsy is one of the only places where one can buy quality handmade works. It certainly is the most concentrated market for those items, but you have to know how to dig deeper past the mass-produced crap. It helps to know a little about art or the medium first. That provides a launch point from which your queries can become more focused as one learns. I've discovered entirely new categories (to me) of arts and crafts in that way, from 19th century American coverlets to Welsh stick chairs, eventually learning about the nascent Arts and Crafts movement's evolution in the 19th century in response to the soulless factory-produced goods of that age.[0] As a result, today I probably have some of the largest context-specific art collections in Texas, if not the United States, which includes Japanese Takatori ware, Ukrainian art, handmade Windsor chairs, and Anagama (dragon kiln) wood-fired pottery. All discovered through Etsy. In some respects, I am under the impression that most people simply don't know what they're looking for, i.e., they don't know how things are made and therefore don't know how to search for it. The genuine real McCoy is there, behind the first page of mass-produced imposters, you just have to dig for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement
- toss1 4y ago
  That's awesome to hear that you have developed the expert knowledge needed to search out such unique finds and successfully acquired them! Except that the entire core selling point of Etsy was that we would be able to search, and artists/artisans would be able to surface their works, WITHOUT the searchers having to sort through all the crap. Merely coming to Etsy was supposed to bypass the crap and get to the good stuff. Clearly the VCs and Etsy management are happy with lying for profit. I hope an honest competitor comes up.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >Clearly the VCs and Etsy management are happy with lying for profit. replace the specific Etsy reference with pretty much any VC funded company, and you'll have summarized vast majority of VC funded companies.
    - 4y ago
tablespoon 4y ago
Yeah, I've gotten burned by this. We bought some wooden toys for a friend's child that said they'd be shipped from Poland, assuming they were made in Poland at least. It turned out the toys were made in China, and they even shipped them in the retail packaging (which was nowhere to be seen in the listing's pictures). Everything else I've gotten there has been basically someone with a decal machine making custom decals or applying a customization to a (likely) mass produced product.
- shrikant 4y ago
  This happened to me last week, but with Wayfair instead. We ordered something from Wayfair by a seller called "Williston Forge", and the item that arrived was in packaging branded as "VASAGLE". I looked up the corresponding VASAGLE item and the exact same thing was available on Amazon for one-third of the price. I ended up returning the Wayfair SKU and getting the Amazon one instead. Something about the branding just screams Alibaba drop-shipper to me, but the product itself was fine so I stuck with it. Left a (politely worded) bad review on the Wayfair SKU page, and surprise surprise, it's not been approved for display. Since then, I've also been wary of stuff on Wayfair.
  - wmeredith 4y ago
    Wayfair is notorious for hawking goods under faux brand names that can be had for cheaper elsewhere.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Is a vendor obligated to charge a price similar to another vendor? Wayfair did the work to show you a product you couldn't find elsewhere first, and charged you a price you found fair.
- the_doctah 4y ago
  Report it. If they claimed anything otherwise, that's fraud.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  That's the xenophobia tax -- pay extra for a preferred country name on the label.
boringg 4y ago
Etsy in its purest form was great. Its been diluted to almost trash with all the people gaming the system. Same with almost all other tech platforms. Humanity defaults to greedy (ie optimize for search results etc). Worse yet is the big companies pretending to be little companies to cash in on indie buyers.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Yeah the same way with Kickstarter that was first overrun with scams and now mainly used for commercial products dumping a few early bird discounts for cheap marketing. The platform doesn't care because they still make money. The only one that still seems to work is crowdsupply, I think because they are really in a niche market.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Humanity doesn't default to greedy, but the humans who are greedy are the ones motivated to flood these market places. For every 1000 small creators hand-chiseling marble effigies there's someone who is greedy and can sell the entire catalogue of some niche factory in Guangdong. The net effect is a flooded market, despite only 1 in 1000 people being greedy.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Exactly. The tech bubble worships at the altar of sacred, almighty "scale," and then wonders why things like this happen. Not everything scales. And almost every time tech tries to reinvent the wheel at scale, it fails, or makes things worse.
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      I always figured the endgame is to get the scalers into industries that scale well, and then build the non-scaling factors as peripherals. For example, I could imagine a hyper-scale firm selling exceptionally generic standardized clothes, or furnishings, and that feeds an ecosystem of artisans who do alterations and customizations. The scale business avoids the risk of dead stock and having to discount unsellable goods, since its primary drive is price/quality ratio, and the customizers don't have to directly compete with a behemoth that has economies of scale.
taylorius 4y ago
I like how they mention mass-produced goods alongside ivory and illegal weapons.
oldstrangers 4y ago
Kind of related, I'm trying to build something for an 'equitable curation' of Etsy. https://lilbetsy.com/ https://lilbetsy.com/
- lukeasrodgers 4y ago
  This looks neat, if you had a way for people without an etsy store to get notified when this launched, I'd sign up.
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    Good idea! I'll create a user signup notification thingy.
  - hhw3h 4y ago
    Yes I'm curious to sign up but don't have an Etsy store either. Are you looking to build a more of a competitive intel product for existing Etsy store owners or something more for end users of Etsy like a weekly curation email newsletter?
    - oldstrangers 4y ago
      It's essentially an end user service that benefits the creators by reducing the noise and finding actually compelling creators. When a creator signs up, I'm able to filter their store info and automatically scrape all the info I'd need. From there it's just a manual vetting process (although quickly filtering out the stuff I don't want is kind of hidden in the sign up).
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    Added!
motohagiography 4y ago
Governing whose products are cooperative and defective within the market seems like a hard problem, and the same problem that forum moderators have, but mostly because the people doing it are adopting the wrong principles. If a defective participant can make an appeal to external/exogenous market principles, there's nothing the regulator can do. The artists markets (and forums) that do thrive are the ones ruled by direct curation to enforce sanctions on defective and noncooperative parties. This is a general problem with any artisanal market, where artists who have made an investment in their craft attract crowds, and crowds attract opportunists who defect from the rule of cooperation that makes the artists market viable. The whole principle of competition is that it's only competition if you are playing by the same rules. Imo, artist markets resemble more of a co-operate/defect game theory model than a simple economic market competition model. In an artisanal market, the co-operation rules are unfortunately, tacit, and rubes will reward the honest players and defective/dishonest ones alike. That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon. Honest signals of quality and cooperation are necessarily discriminatory, and dishonest/defective parties (ones who do not cooperate) have the aggregate effect of increasing these signalling costs on quality goods to where the signalling out-prices its utility. Regulation comes into play when dishonest parties increase the signalling costs so much that it destroys the market for the products, and parties have to decide whether the regulatory/moderation costs are lower than the signalling costs, or to abandon the market altogether, which in the case of Etsy, they often do. This is why Etsy is full of scammy junk. They have a curation and moderation problem they are not equipped to solve. Ironically, what makes curation and moderation good is that it doesn't scale well at all, even negatively, but that's what makes it scarce and valuable - unlike anything available on Etsy. Maybe that's the lesson.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  Excellent post! I particularly appreciate that you highlighted that the "fatal flaw" of curation's lack of scalability is also its strength. >That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon. I think this opportunity is applicable to content as well as products.
leashless 4y ago
I work on a fairly high-end solution to this problem: works for art authentication, real estate transactions, that sort of thing. The only way this gets fixed is through liability: if they ship you a mass-produced thing, you get your money back. But if buyers are happy with the goods (and they seem to be, generally speaking) it's hard to say anybody's been defrauded -- making window shopping boring because most of the stuff is mass produced crap is not a crime, as it were. No harm, no foul. As for the "illicit" products, same applies: if the buyers don't care, it's hard to make the "system" care.
newsclues 4y ago
How do we break or slow the cycle of... New great thing is awesome, new thing gets popular, new thing turns to shit... Seems like scalable systems tend to fail with this problem. Governments, the internet, social networks, online market places. WTF?
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >Seems like scalable systems tend to fail with this problem. Yes, and the solution is curation, but nobody wants to hear that because it likely means paying people to curate vs. coding an algorithm that makes a founder rich.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    But does it? Can you have cells of people that can behave and network them at scale? It might be impossible, but there could be ways to do better.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  It's called, or at least very closely related to, the tragedy of the commons. It's a problem as old as society itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
hhw3h 4y ago
In my experience if you want to make a sustainable living from selling arts or crafts online, you want to go up market. Charge $1,000 or more per work. Use a relationship based sales process starting with one focused social media presence, typically Instagram. Not everyone will be afford your work, but if your marketing and customer service is solid, a plenty large market will exist. Once you start collecting social proof from happy customers, flow that back into your marketing and getting your next client becomes easier and easier. You can then often charge $3,000 to $5,000 for the same exact work because of the social proof and the brand you are building with it. Making an art business work is similar to making a bootstrapped software business work, in the sense that software bootstrappers again and again go through the personal realization that writing software is typically only 20% to 30% of what they need to focus on in order to be successful. They realize they need to bite the bullet and learn sales and marketing too and only if they do so can they overtime shift more and more of their time to just the areas of their software business they want to spend the most time in.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with this. I've watched someone start by making small macrame wall hangings and selling them for $60 on Etsy take this direction. Now they're posting professional level photos of large ($1,000+) custom ordered pieces hanging in client's homes on Instagram. They don't bother with the small stuff or Etsy anymore.
  - hhw3h 4y ago
    Love to hear this, exactly what I'm talking about!
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      It's great to see but also a bit heart breaking. Those XL sized pieces are beautiful but I can't justify buying one.
      - hhw3h 4y ago
hitpointdrew 4y ago
Here is headline for you: Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget was charged with securities fraud by the SEC and is permanently banned from the securities industry, yet he runs a publishing platform dedicated to trading and securities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget Business Insider is not a reputable source. EDIT: And this story, when it was originally published by Business Insider, just happened to break 3 business days before ETSY's May 5, 2021 earnings call. What a coincidence!
casenmgreen 4y ago
I may be wrong, but I believe Etsy have a hidden charge of 4% for currency conversion. Normal banks charge about 3%, FinTechs 0.5%. It listed absolutely nowhere when you buy; it occurs when you pay in a currency different to the native currency of the shop. Etsy I recall decide which currency you will pay in, according to the country of your bank - which does not work for multi-currency FinTechs; in fact, you can end up paying Etsy their excessive conversion fee, and then a second conversion fee to the FinTech - that is, if you didn't know any better, and Etsy are completely silent about this. Regarding pricing, looking at Etsy prices, and the prices on the web-sites of the sellers, I believe Etsy charge 20%. This is monopoly pricing.
b0x68 4y ago
The modern web is insufferable. I can't click on a link without seeing a paywall and/or popups. ugh. Thank goodness for the wayback machine.
logicalmonster 4y ago
What should Etsy do to combat this? I'm not sure if they're trying, but even Amazon can't figure out some way to verify genuine products from big brands.
- CosmicShadow 4y ago
  They make farrrrrrrr more money by actively not-trying.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    Probably this is the case overall. But I know I'd actually buy a lot of stuff from Etsy if I was guaranteed to get quality handmade goods by a devoted craftsman rather than a strong chance of something made in some Chinese factory.
    - CosmicShadow 4y ago
      Yeah, you have to put in the work, read all the descriptions, look at the images, see their bio, look at their location, and the tricky, yet most obvious thing, is if they have a "production partner", which you are supposed to specify if you don't make the thing yourself. Even if people fill it in, Etsy makes it purposely hard to find that info and anyone not using Etsy as a seller wouldn't even know it's a thing to look for. If something looks too good or too produced in images, and the cost seems too good, it probably is to good to be true. You can Google image search their main picture and find where else it's being sold. If they have a lot of sales (like thousands), look much more closely as most artisans don't get that high unless they are pretty good. Clothing is nearly impossible to find anything that isn't just a drop shipper. Anything from a country that you think would be sketchy is 90% of the time, which sucks for the amazing people there, but it's such an easy signal to see. Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, almost always all scams, dropship or ripoff factories. It's sad and frustrating just how much worse Etsy gets year after year. We've got 5 shops on there and see all the BS and how it hurts us. My wife can't even shop on the platform anymore because it's too hard to find actual handcrafted type stuff and we know what we are doing. If they'd let people report shops it would get cleaned up fast, but they'd lose so much money they'd rather kill themselves first, they are incredibly greed oriented.
ryanisnan 4y ago
What I don't understand is why Etsy doesn't seem to be doing anything measurable about improving this. This reason is pretty much the sole one that prevents me from shopping at Etsy.
Bjorkbat 4y ago
Looking forward to when Etsy becomes the new Silk Road. I can shop for hand-crafted gifts for friends and family, and a little black tar heroin for myself, all in one go.
kashunstva 4y ago
> mass produced goods I volunteer for a youth symphony and we were just looking to replace one of our timpani. First link was to Etsy. It was clear this was not some handcrafted bespoke instrument; it was just a used drum. Basically just another Ebay.
diogenescynic 4y ago
I've had a few issues with recently. 1. Seller listed an item they had already sold on another platform. I had to wait several days for a refund. 2. Item was sent, but not properly packaged and damaged. They re-sent the item but it was also damaged. 3. Ordered an antique from Europe that didn't ship for 4 months and now they're sending me letters from FedEx and asking me to return the item I never received... I miss what Etsy used to be. It's definitely degraded as it expanded.

159 points by vector_spaces 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I like to dream about changing to a four day workweek, and dedicating one day to woodworking. Originally, I wanted to sell on Etsy, but the flood of drop shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off. It seems like it has gotten a lot worse in the last decade. I know that this one day a week would decrease my overall earnings, but it would probably still be worth it. However, with the abundance of cheap, mass-produced items on Etsy I would have to price my items so cheap that I would fall below minimum wage on that day. I don't want to complain, I get to do enough woodworking as is, since my employer gives me 12 additional vacation days in exchange for 5.2% of my salary, taking me up to 47 per year. But it would still be nice if there was a platform in Europe that does what Etsy used to do.

jason-phillips 4y ago
You could sell your creations on Etsy. It would help to label them such that people can find your wares if one were searching for something made by hand, for instance. You can also create an external marketing site/portal that directs people to your Etsy shop. My mother was a successful fused glass artist. Her works sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars, but in the end, she made close to minimum wage per hour, as you described. Art, or anything made by hand, doesn't scale well.
- fnordian_slip 4y ago
  The external marketing site is probably the key, as well as making the items small enough that the profit margins don't get eaten by shipping and the cost of high quality wood. I've started an Instagram account where I post some of my work, but I've found out that I'm really bad at social media for marketing purposes. I'm currently debating whether it's worth it to become better at marketing or SEO in order to promote my stuff, but even though it is a no-brainer from a business standpoint, it is the opposite of what I want to do. I originally started this plan to have a workday where I don't look at the screen for 8 hours, and now I've gotten myself in a situation where I look at a screen in my free time to learn how to promote my business. You're right, art just doesn't scale well. Maybe it's best if I continue to just do it for fun and gift it to friends and family. Not everything needs to be a business.
  - hhw3h 4y ago
    What's interesting about the online art world is that there are a number of platforms like Etsy that ostensibly take the sales and marketing off your plate, that said, all your points are true. They are often a race to the bottom where you feel a strong pressure to compete on pricing. What I've seen work instead is to charge much higher rates of $1,000 or more. Think to yourself, hypothetically speaking, if I were to charge $1,000 or more for my art or my woodworking etc. what kind of items would justify that price point and then just focus on those. Then when it comes to marketing and selling, pursue a relationship based selling approach rather than an ecommerce transactional approach. Once you start getting social proof of happy customers you can often take the same work that was selling for $1,000 and sell it for $3,000 to $5,000 or even more. That's the key to making a sustainable income with art or handcrafted work these days.
  - damascus 4y ago
    As someone with a similar side hustle: If you are going to drive your own traffic don't drive it to a platform thats going to take 20%+ of your gross product cost. Drive traffic to your own shopify or squarespace site that has really good ecomm built in. Get a shipstation account and you're pretty set. IMO.
tpxl 4y ago
Bespoke pieces should still fetch a pretty price. It's not gonna be a good wage by any means, but it should be far above what you'd get by undercutting dropshippers.
sirwhinesalot 4y ago
This isn't really a problem with Etsy dropshippers, handmade goods simply cannot compete with mass-produced goods as you can't scale your time. Without scale you need magnitude, people must be willing to pay you for a piece of work much more than it cost you to make it, and you must do so consistently. My suggestion is to put a few example woodworks you've done on your spare time for sale with no expectation of making any money from them, and then offer to make custom handmade designs for people. You can charge a lot more for those and you are basically guaranteed a sale for the time you spend on each one. The rest comes down to marketing, I have a print-on-demand shop with my own designs with 0 sales. I mostly use it as a way to leave a mark somewhere of things I've made that didn't involve coding. Burnout does that to you. Losing 20 cents for each design I make, but hey, I enjoy it.
- gilleain 4y ago
  Heh, I do this too - create stuff, put it on Etsy and watch the 0 sales just roll in. I also see it as a way to show the world that I make stuff, dammit, and not just type code into an IDE! :)
- xwdv 4y ago
  Yes, this is a common thing to think of e-commerce sites like Etsy as a sort of social network page where you post stuff but maybe have no intention on making any sales, it’s just another way to display your hobby.
- zeruch 4y ago
  This is the reason I haven't started putting my original artwork on Etsy. I make a small amount annually with JIT art prints from Society6 and RedBubble (I used to do DeviantArt as well, but since their AI debacle, I've got a moratorium on that option). Originals cost much more than prints (my stuff is priced between 100-10,000 USD depending on size and complexity) and mostly come via work of mouth commission. I want to market, but the time commit seems onerous, and I like it not being "work" (that's what the day job is for)
japanman425 4y ago
> shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off What does handmade mean to you? My adidas are “hand made”.
- criddell 4y ago
  Usually it means you are buying the item from the person who made it or the store you are shopping in bought it directly from the person who made it. It's low volume production with very little or no automation involved.
  - notJim 4y ago
    Elsewhere in this thread, someone describes selling lasercut items on Etsy, which is obviously highly automated. Would you argue that shouldn't be considered handmade?
    - criddell 4y ago
      Depends on the specifics. If the service is "submit a file and I'll load it into my laser machine and mail you what comes out the other end", then probably not. That feels like getting photos printed at the CVS and nobody would say CVS sells handmade prints. If there is a substantial amount of manual work to the piece after it comes out of the machine, then maybe. It would have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
dawsoneliasen 4y ago
FWIW I shop on Etsy quite a bit and I can definitely tell when something is actually handmade, and I shell out for it. I think you would still have a market despite the degradation in quality of Etsy generally.
SpaceL10n 4y ago
I work a four day workweek and have been for a full year now. I'm likely to never return to a 40hr workweek. I actually ended up interviewing at a few places a couple of months ago (Capital One, Farmers, few other smaller companies). I was pleasantly surprised by how many hiring managers and HR folks were willing to talk to me after I mentioned that I was only interested in 32hrs/wk @ 80% salary. My point of advice to anyone who is curious about a four day work week is just do it. Ask and I'm willing to bet you will receive.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Do you still get fulltime employment benefits? That seems to be the sticking point with many companies, as fulltime and parttime employees are treated, and cost, different, even if salary is prorated.
  - SpaceL10n 4y ago
    That's wild to me because it's my understanding that most HR departments consider anything over 30hrs a week to be full-time. I didn't encounter any of that last time around. My offer from Farmer's included a pension and full benefits. I'm a small sample size though...
coffeebeqn 4y ago
I would focus on a more local market. Shipping real wood furniture would be an expensive hassle anyway
- greedo 4y ago
  I made my desk out of a thick walnut slab, and it turned out great. On the woodworking FB group, people said I could sell it easily on Etsy etc for over $2K. So I looked into it. My COG was about $1k, and Etsy would take 20% of the $2K selling price, leaving me with $600 before shipping costs. Now this desk is large, weighs a lot and shipping would easily be $300-500 in the CONUS. I guess that's on the customer though. Hmm... While noodling around with this idea I did some market research on Etsy and saw that others were selling similar desks for about $2K, with FREE shipping. I reached out to one of the sellers asking if this was real or a bait and switch. Apparently if you don't ship for free, Etsy actively discriminates against your post. So my end profit would have been between $100-$300 for a week or so of work. Sometimes no matter how you slice it, physical goods don't make much sense. I'd have to charge at least 50% more to make it even worthwhile, and I doubt the market for $3K desks is that large.
mattkrause 4y ago
It might be cool to include some photos and a build-log of each item being made. I think I’d like this as a shopper and it would let you distinguish your products from mass-produced stuff. It wouldn’t have to be super-comprehensive, but I think it would be fun, especially if the reader could sorta track how the product evolves from the raw material: a knot being used as the focal point of a rustic table—-or hidden with an inlay for a fancy one, for example.
CosmicShadow 4y ago
1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day. 2. Etsy is flooded, true, but it doesn't mean people still don't find you and buy your stuff if it's good and unique (and you put effort into learning how to do Etsy SEO). If you make something that no one else has, you can charge a proper amount for it, people will buy it and leave you great reviews. We make nearly 6 figures on Etsy as a side-business across 3 different Etsy stores for crafts/handmade/digital goods we produce. I can tell you that we used to make a lot of money with our laser-cut wood shop when it started, it was a wonderful learning experience and trip, but after 2 years or so everyone and their dog had a laser cutter, ripped off our designs, and sold them for less than half of what we did (and they weren't making any money at those rates). We had a Chinese scam ring rip off our most expensive item featuring pictures of my wife's face in them and use them as facebook ads to try and sell our $500 item for $79.99 on pop-up stores. Nothing you can do about that, but it shows that we reached a success point to be targeted like that. There are so many niches and things you can make and sell on there it still blows our mind. People sell literal PDFs of a piece of paper with an image of a piggy bank repeated like 500 times that people buy, print out, and cross out 1 by 1 as they add $10 to their vacation fund knowing that at the end they'll have finally saved the $5k they need. These stores will have like 30k+ $3.99 sales for 20 minutes of work. It sucks that you can't report shit stores, they are frustrating, but even though they are there, the long tail is real, you can find anything from any niche, the trick is finding out what people will type in that search bar that you actually make or can make, because that will filter out most of the crap.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > 1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day. I think the huge increase in QOL is, in part, because on most weekends, 2 days is just barely enough to catch up on the shit you need to do but were deferring through the week, get things in order for the next week, take a quick breath, and then dive straight into the next work-week. It's barely even time off. It also means you can't travel anywhere (to visit family, just a short vacation, whatever) and have a whole day away that's not also a travel day, unless you leave late on Friday and aren't going far. A three-day weekend mean you can usually get at least one actual day off most weeks, versus an average of nearly zero entire or almost-entire days off with a two-day weekend. It also opens up a ton more options for short get-aways, and leaves more room for recovery and relaxation after any activities you engage in, making the whole thing far more relaxing and cutting out some of the urgency.
patja 4y ago
My brother in law has a successful Etsy shop where he mostly sells "charcuterie boards" he makes in his home workshop as a side gig from his job as a VP of a civil engineering firm. There isn't much to them: no joinery, just a slab with a live edge. He just fills any voids or defects with epoxy, puts it through his surface sander, and applies a nice clear durable finish. Every piece is unique. He does seek out spalted and other interesting grain features to highlight. It helps that almost all of his wood is locally salvaged at almost zero expense other than his time. He loves to hunt down recently fallen trees to make a deal with the property owner to take the wood off their hands. He gets a lot of repeat business from people like realtors who use his boards as housewarming gifts for their clients.

rtkwe 4y ago

Is there any proscription against posting subscriber only content to HN? It's annoying to have to go through archive.org or something else, and for me my work actually blocks archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20230208000215/https://www.businessinsider.com/etsy-sells-ivory-weapons-poisonous-plants-mass-produced-products-2021-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20230208000215/https://www.busin...

kup0 4y ago
See HN FAQ on Paywalls "Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."

temporallobe 4y ago

I happen to know that Etsy is being used as a tax haven for selling “products” from an online “store”. Basically, you buy stuff, offer it for sale of Etsy, and claim all of the goods you purchased as businesses expenses for tax writeoff purposes. This of course is not limited to Etsy, but it’s an easy platform to use for this purpose. It’s similar to how movie studios will purposefully produce horrible movies in order to create a loss. Or any other tax loophole, really.

baby-yoda 4y ago
It sounds like you're describing a classic COGS scenario. Not sure I see the loophole, can you expand?
- japanman425 4y ago
  [flagged]
- voxic11 4y ago
  The loophole is that they don't actually expect anything to sell. So they are claim a tax write off when the goods depreciate, all the while actually enjoying them for personal use.
  - baby-yoda 4y ago
    I doubt many Etsy sellers are running their business on an accrual basis to be eligible for depreciation expense. Beyond that Inventory is a non-depreciable asset. If they're not generating any revenue they can't claim COGS. Any of these scenarios are obvious red flags and would be audit candidates. Now if you're suggesting people are submitting fraudulent returns thats another thing but there's no "loophole" here. EDIT - just to add, I'm sure there is a ton of attempted illicit activity on Etsy, just like any other marketplace. See this [0] for example. I don't think there is any tax "loophole" here, however. [0] https://www.etsy.com/listing/1200405951/t-shirt https://www.etsy.com/listing/1200405951/t-shirt
toyg 4y ago

papito 4y ago

It's almost like we need a way to certify products and authentic, much like we look for the "organic" label in a store. I don't know if that's the solution, but with Amazon also going downhill rapidly, something has got to give.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
[dead]
ghaff 4y ago
>much like we look for the "organic" label in a store Which means very little. At some point, there is a distinction between lovingly handcrafted and mass-produced in a Chinese factory. But it's often not clear where that line is.
BizarroLand 4y ago
I know in the 90's if something had the "Good housekeeping Seal of Approval" then it was usually a trustworthy purchase. What we need is a regulatory board that, like other people say, curate products based on their quality, not on whatever kickbacks or affiliate link profits they get. It sucks if, for instance, you go looking for a Towel Warmer for your girlfriend and you have to read through 17 different, "Top 10 tower warmers 2023" pages that all recommend the exact same items with the exact same stock photos from different sellers with alphabet soup names. What I want is an opinionated site that reviews items, has a short write up, and then keeps an updated list of their top 3 which is split between "Best overall", "Best for your dollar", and "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product, i.e. the least expensive one they've found so far that meets their minimum quality expectations for the product). Products are allowed to occupy more than a single category. Give me that site, and then let them develop a unique recommendation logo with a QR code that goes to their page so you can read the review yourself.
- papito 4y ago
  I often go to WireCutter before I even look elsewhere, but it's a hassle. Amazon and Etsy should be at least partially responsible for policing what is being sold on their sites. They are not helpless victims.

doctoboggan 4y ago

I’ve been selling on Etsy for a few years and the problem has only been getting worse. Etsy the company seems to turn a blind eye to it since they are making money off of the cheap Alibaba junk as well. That being said etsy is still the best game in town. People searching there are very ready to buy and if you are able to stand out from the crowd it’s possible to be successful.

docandrew 4y ago
I started looking on Etsy specifically to get away from the cheap Alibaba junk other stores are flooded with. There are some really nice handmade products there.
sprkwd 4y ago
If you are UK based there is always Folksy.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.md/WM1wf https://archive.md/WM1wf

mcphage 4y ago

It's probably worth including (2021) in the title. The article described Etsy putting money to fight this problem in 2021, I wonder if it has improved? Some spot checking makes me think probably not.

CosmicShadow 4y ago
Definitely not, they won't even include a way to report these folks. We run multiple Etsy shops and would report all day if we could because it's not hard to identify them at all.

wgerard 4y ago

This was a constant complaint about Etsy 10 years ago when I worked there. This was a complaint that predated my time working there, even. At one point we even had to ban people selling spells (yes, as in the seller would offer to do a magical incantation on your behalf). The exact details might've changed, but the symptoms look the exact same. I remember we had to deal with a lot of people trying to skirt OFAC regulations, for example, by doing all sorts of things to hide the country of origin for something. Optimistically I will say this is a very hard problem to solve. Pessimistically of course the company benefits from it, so I'm sure it's not a problem anyone besides maybe a few diehard advocates look too deeply into.

curiousllama 4y ago
Low key, I would buy a spell for my friend, as long as I got a video or certificate or something proving the spell was actually "cast" Sounds like a great sibling gift tbh
- wgerard 4y ago
  I mean sure, I think that's why it flew under the radar for so long. The dark underbelly of it was people buying love spells and the like, which starts to feel a lot like preying on peoples' desperation.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    I find that genuinely fascinating from an ethical standpoint. What if the people really believe spells work? Does it matter that they don't? Is it just the ephemeral nature of spells? What if I were to ship a complete spell in a bottle to the person? (not to be too much of an edgelord) What about religious iconography or religious paraphernalia? I would argue that anything related to that is just a more accepted version of magic spells. Would prayer be banned?
    - wgerard 4y ago
      > Does it matter that they don't? For an e-commerce platform that allows returns: Yeah that's kind of an important sticking point and was a big part of the problem. The other problem was that spells were effectively a service and you can imagine that we didn't want to get involved in determining the validity or accuracy of services being performed virtually that had zero tangible artifacts. > What if I were to ship a complete spell in a bottle to the person? This is probably what people actually do now to get around it, since there's an actual item being sold now.

jason-phillips 4y ago

Etsy is one of the only places where one can buy quality handmade works. It certainly is the most concentrated market for those items, but you have to know how to dig deeper past the mass-produced crap. It helps to know a little about art or the medium first. That provides a launch point from which your queries can become more focused as one learns. I've discovered entirely new categories (to me) of arts and crafts in that way, from 19th century American coverlets to Welsh stick chairs, eventually learning about the nascent Arts and Crafts movement's evolution in the 19th century in response to the soulless factory-produced goods of that age.[0] As a result, today I probably have some of the largest context-specific art collections in Texas, if not the United States, which includes Japanese Takatori ware, Ukrainian art, handmade Windsor chairs, and Anagama (dragon kiln) wood-fired pottery. All discovered through Etsy. In some respects, I am under the impression that most people simply don't know what they're looking for, i.e., they don't know how things are made and therefore don't know how to search for it. The genuine real McCoy is there, behind the first page of mass-produced imposters, you just have to dig for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement

toss1 4y ago
That's awesome to hear that you have developed the expert knowledge needed to search out such unique finds and successfully acquired them! Except that the entire core selling point of Etsy was that we would be able to search, and artists/artisans would be able to surface their works, WITHOUT the searchers having to sort through all the crap. Merely coming to Etsy was supposed to bypass the crap and get to the good stuff. Clearly the VCs and Etsy management are happy with lying for profit. I hope an honest competitor comes up.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Clearly the VCs and Etsy management are happy with lying for profit. replace the specific Etsy reference with pretty much any VC funded company, and you'll have summarized vast majority of VC funded companies.
  - 4y ago

tablespoon 4y ago

Yeah, I've gotten burned by this. We bought some wooden toys for a friend's child that said they'd be shipped from Poland, assuming they were made in Poland at least. It turned out the toys were made in China, and they even shipped them in the retail packaging (which was nowhere to be seen in the listing's pictures). Everything else I've gotten there has been basically someone with a decal machine making custom decals or applying a customization to a (likely) mass produced product.

shrikant 4y ago
This happened to me last week, but with Wayfair instead. We ordered something from Wayfair by a seller called "Williston Forge", and the item that arrived was in packaging branded as "VASAGLE". I looked up the corresponding VASAGLE item and the exact same thing was available on Amazon for one-third of the price. I ended up returning the Wayfair SKU and getting the Amazon one instead. Something about the branding just screams Alibaba drop-shipper to me, but the product itself was fine so I stuck with it. Left a (politely worded) bad review on the Wayfair SKU page, and surprise surprise, it's not been approved for display. Since then, I've also been wary of stuff on Wayfair.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  Wayfair is notorious for hawking goods under faux brand names that can be had for cheaper elsewhere.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Is a vendor obligated to charge a price similar to another vendor? Wayfair did the work to show you a product you couldn't find elsewhere first, and charged you a price you found fair.
the_doctah 4y ago
Report it. If they claimed anything otherwise, that's fraud.
hgsgm 4y ago
That's the xenophobia tax -- pay extra for a preferred country name on the label.

boringg 4y ago

Etsy in its purest form was great. Its been diluted to almost trash with all the people gaming the system. Same with almost all other tech platforms. Humanity defaults to greedy (ie optimize for search results etc). Worse yet is the big companies pretending to be little companies to cash in on indie buyers.

wkat4242 4y ago
Yeah the same way with Kickstarter that was first overrun with scams and now mainly used for commercial products dumping a few early bird discounts for cheap marketing. The platform doesn't care because they still make money. The only one that still seems to work is crowdsupply, I think because they are really in a niche market.
SilverBirch 4y ago
Humanity doesn't default to greedy, but the humans who are greedy are the ones motivated to flood these market places. For every 1000 small creators hand-chiseling marble effigies there's someone who is greedy and can sell the entire catalogue of some niche factory in Guangdong. The net effect is a flooded market, despite only 1 in 1000 people being greedy.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Exactly. The tech bubble worships at the altar of sacred, almighty "scale," and then wonders why things like this happen. Not everything scales. And almost every time tech tries to reinvent the wheel at scale, it fails, or makes things worse.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I always figured the endgame is to get the scalers into industries that scale well, and then build the non-scaling factors as peripherals. For example, I could imagine a hyper-scale firm selling exceptionally generic standardized clothes, or furnishings, and that feeds an ecosystem of artisans who do alterations and customizations. The scale business avoids the risk of dead stock and having to discount unsellable goods, since its primary drive is price/quality ratio, and the customizers don't have to directly compete with a behemoth that has economies of scale.

taylorius 4y ago

I like how they mention mass-produced goods alongside ivory and illegal weapons.

oldstrangers 4y ago

Kind of related, I'm trying to build something for an 'equitable curation' of Etsy. https://lilbetsy.com/ https://lilbetsy.com/

lukeasrodgers 4y ago
This looks neat, if you had a way for people without an etsy store to get notified when this launched, I'd sign up.
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  Good idea! I'll create a user signup notification thingy.
- hhw3h 4y ago
  Yes I'm curious to sign up but don't have an Etsy store either. Are you looking to build a more of a competitive intel product for existing Etsy store owners or something more for end users of Etsy like a weekly curation email newsletter?
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    It's essentially an end user service that benefits the creators by reducing the noise and finding actually compelling creators. When a creator signs up, I'm able to filter their store info and automatically scrape all the info I'd need. From there it's just a manual vetting process (although quickly filtering out the stuff I don't want is kind of hidden in the sign up).
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  Added!

motohagiography 4y ago

Governing whose products are cooperative and defective within the market seems like a hard problem, and the same problem that forum moderators have, but mostly because the people doing it are adopting the wrong principles. If a defective participant can make an appeal to external/exogenous market principles, there's nothing the regulator can do. The artists markets (and forums) that do thrive are the ones ruled by direct curation to enforce sanctions on defective and noncooperative parties. This is a general problem with any artisanal market, where artists who have made an investment in their craft attract crowds, and crowds attract opportunists who defect from the rule of cooperation that makes the artists market viable. The whole principle of competition is that it's only competition if you are playing by the same rules. Imo, artist markets resemble more of a co-operate/defect game theory model than a simple economic market competition model. In an artisanal market, the co-operation rules are unfortunately, tacit, and rubes will reward the honest players and defective/dishonest ones alike. That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon. Honest signals of quality and cooperation are necessarily discriminatory, and dishonest/defective parties (ones who do not cooperate) have the aggregate effect of increasing these signalling costs on quality goods to where the signalling out-prices its utility. Regulation comes into play when dishonest parties increase the signalling costs so much that it destroys the market for the products, and parties have to decide whether the regulatory/moderation costs are lower than the signalling costs, or to abandon the market altogether, which in the case of Etsy, they often do. This is why Etsy is full of scammy junk. They have a curation and moderation problem they are not equipped to solve. Ironically, what makes curation and moderation good is that it doesn't scale well at all, even negatively, but that's what makes it scarce and valuable - unlike anything available on Etsy. Maybe that's the lesson.

wintermutestwin 4y ago
Excellent post! I particularly appreciate that you highlighted that the "fatal flaw" of curation's lack of scalability is also its strength. >That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon. I think this opportunity is applicable to content as well as products.

leashless 4y ago

I work on a fairly high-end solution to this problem: works for art authentication, real estate transactions, that sort of thing. The only way this gets fixed is through liability: if they ship you a mass-produced thing, you get your money back. But if buyers are happy with the goods (and they seem to be, generally speaking) it's hard to say anybody's been defrauded -- making window shopping boring because most of the stuff is mass produced crap is not a crime, as it were. No harm, no foul. As for the "illicit" products, same applies: if the buyers don't care, it's hard to make the "system" care.

newsclues 4y ago

How do we break or slow the cycle of... New great thing is awesome, new thing gets popular, new thing turns to shit... Seems like scalable systems tend to fail with this problem. Governments, the internet, social networks, online market places. WTF?

wintermutestwin 4y ago
>Seems like scalable systems tend to fail with this problem. Yes, and the solution is curation, but nobody wants to hear that because it likely means paying people to curate vs. coding an algorithm that makes a founder rich.
- newsclues 4y ago
  But does it? Can you have cells of people that can behave and network them at scale? It might be impossible, but there could be ways to do better.
wmeredith 4y ago
It's called, or at least very closely related to, the tragedy of the commons. It's a problem as old as society itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

hhw3h 4y ago

In my experience if you want to make a sustainable living from selling arts or crafts online, you want to go up market. Charge $1,000 or more per work. Use a relationship based sales process starting with one focused social media presence, typically Instagram. Not everyone will be afford your work, but if your marketing and customer service is solid, a plenty large market will exist. Once you start collecting social proof from happy customers, flow that back into your marketing and getting your next client becomes easier and easier. You can then often charge $3,000 to $5,000 for the same exact work because of the social proof and the brand you are building with it. Making an art business work is similar to making a bootstrapped software business work, in the sense that software bootstrappers again and again go through the personal realization that writing software is typically only 20% to 30% of what they need to focus on in order to be successful. They realize they need to bite the bullet and learn sales and marketing too and only if they do so can they overtime shift more and more of their time to just the areas of their software business they want to spend the most time in.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I'm inclined to agree with this. I've watched someone start by making small macrame wall hangings and selling them for $60 on Etsy take this direction. Now they're posting professional level photos of large ($1,000+) custom ordered pieces hanging in client's homes on Instagram. They don't bother with the small stuff or Etsy anymore.
- hhw3h 4y ago
  Love to hear this, exactly what I'm talking about!
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    It's great to see but also a bit heart breaking. Those XL sized pieces are beautiful but I can't justify buying one.
    - hhw3h 4y ago

hitpointdrew 4y ago

Here is headline for you: Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget was charged with securities fraud by the SEC and is permanently banned from the securities industry, yet he runs a publishing platform dedicated to trading and securities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget Business Insider is not a reputable source. EDIT: And this story, when it was originally published by Business Insider, just happened to break 3 business days before ETSY's May 5, 2021 earnings call. What a coincidence!

casenmgreen 4y ago

I may be wrong, but I believe Etsy have a hidden charge of 4% for currency conversion. Normal banks charge about 3%, FinTechs 0.5%. It listed absolutely nowhere when you buy; it occurs when you pay in a currency different to the native currency of the shop. Etsy I recall decide which currency you will pay in, according to the country of your bank - which does not work for multi-currency FinTechs; in fact, you can end up paying Etsy their excessive conversion fee, and then a second conversion fee to the FinTech - that is, if you didn't know any better, and Etsy are completely silent about this. Regarding pricing, looking at Etsy prices, and the prices on the web-sites of the sellers, I believe Etsy charge 20%. This is monopoly pricing.

b0x68 4y ago

The modern web is insufferable. I can't click on a link without seeing a paywall and/or popups. ugh. Thank goodness for the wayback machine.

logicalmonster 4y ago

What should Etsy do to combat this? I'm not sure if they're trying, but even Amazon can't figure out some way to verify genuine products from big brands.

CosmicShadow 4y ago
They make farrrrrrrr more money by actively not-trying.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  Probably this is the case overall. But I know I'd actually buy a lot of stuff from Etsy if I was guaranteed to get quality handmade goods by a devoted craftsman rather than a strong chance of something made in some Chinese factory.
  - CosmicShadow 4y ago
    Yeah, you have to put in the work, read all the descriptions, look at the images, see their bio, look at their location, and the tricky, yet most obvious thing, is if they have a "production partner", which you are supposed to specify if you don't make the thing yourself. Even if people fill it in, Etsy makes it purposely hard to find that info and anyone not using Etsy as a seller wouldn't even know it's a thing to look for. If something looks too good or too produced in images, and the cost seems too good, it probably is to good to be true. You can Google image search their main picture and find where else it's being sold. If they have a lot of sales (like thousands), look much more closely as most artisans don't get that high unless they are pretty good. Clothing is nearly impossible to find anything that isn't just a drop shipper. Anything from a country that you think would be sketchy is 90% of the time, which sucks for the amazing people there, but it's such an easy signal to see. Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, almost always all scams, dropship or ripoff factories. It's sad and frustrating just how much worse Etsy gets year after year. We've got 5 shops on there and see all the BS and how it hurts us. My wife can't even shop on the platform anymore because it's too hard to find actual handcrafted type stuff and we know what we are doing. If they'd let people report shops it would get cleaned up fast, but they'd lose so much money they'd rather kill themselves first, they are incredibly greed oriented.

ryanisnan 4y ago

What I don't understand is why Etsy doesn't seem to be doing anything measurable about improving this. This reason is pretty much the sole one that prevents me from shopping at Etsy.

Bjorkbat 4y ago

Looking forward to when Etsy becomes the new Silk Road. I can shop for hand-crafted gifts for friends and family, and a little black tar heroin for myself, all in one go.

kashunstva 4y ago

> mass produced goods I volunteer for a youth symphony and we were just looking to replace one of our timpani. First link was to Etsy. It was clear this was not some handcrafted bespoke instrument; it was just a used drum. Basically just another Ebay.

diogenescynic 4y ago

I've had a few issues with recently. 1. Seller listed an item they had already sold on another platform. I had to wait several days for a refund. 2. Item was sent, but not properly packaged and damaged. They re-sent the item but it was also damaged. 3. Ordered an antique from Europe that didn't ship for 4 months and now they're sending me letters from FedEx and asking me to return the item I never received... I miss what Etsy used to be. It's definitely degraded as it expanded.