The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment, having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually work for the person who makes the stuff, and can only hit the "refund" button.
Etsy has every reason in the world to want to get away from small sellers and move to high volume manufacturers, (who have actual QA and customer service departments, which a guy hand carving chess pieces in his basement doesn't have) and nothing to stop them. So the obvious thing happens.
(Except then you're competing directly with Amazon in its area of greatest strength, which historically has been corporate suicide...)
Etsy should also mandate the inclusion of a scan code in the package, which the customer can use to show they received the shipment but it wasn't as advertised. This would catch people lying about the contents, when the creators take a photo of the item & code in the box (and send it to Etsy before shipping.) Creators taking a photo and then changing the item will be caught because of the number of complaints, and customers can be refunded long after the transactions using the bond.
Etsy already charges fees, even just to LIST items, regardless of whether they sell or not.
I've been wanting to sell some of my 3D printed designs, but I'm not paying a buck a piece for a listing that will earn me 5 to 10 bucks if I manage to sell.
etsy should vet their sellers, simple as
• Re: fulfillment — why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-to-order to a fulfillment center first, where it'll be inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment center — with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a charge, on it until the seller's goods are inspected by the fulfillment center as good? (In other words: turn the process into a goods-for-money mediated escrow.)
• Re: quality / drop-shipping — I feel like a lot of this could by solved just through simple semi-automated verification. Require for a product to be listed, for the seller to upload a video of themselves making the thing. Then pass those videos to MTurk workers to evaluate them for tricks.
> Etsy has every reason in the world to want to get away from small sellers and move to high volume manufacturers
Except that... that's their whole niche.
Specifically, 90% of Etsy's value at this point is in the market of buyers they have slowly marketed and engaged and cultivated brand recognition with over decades — and those buyers are people looking for low-volume goods. They don't want to buy high-volume goods from Etsy. That's not the association they've been painstakingly educated to have.
If Etsy wanted to get into Amazon's business, they'd have to create a new brand to do it with, because that's just not the business that people associate with the Etsy brand. And that would mean starting from scratch.
Because that costs money and most Etsy sellers sell very few things. We're not talking thousands or hundreds or even dozens per months. We're talking single digits per month. Per store. Not per item. With 7 million stores.
> Re: quality / drop-shipping — I feel like a lot of this could by solved just through simple semi-automated verification. Require for a product to be listed, for the seller to upload a video of themselves making the thing. Then pass those videos to MTurk workers to evaluate them for tricks.
See the previous point. No one would use Etsy if they had to make a whole video and go through an automated process for an item that might sell once per year.
edit: Amazon sells something like 350m products including the marketplace and 12 million directly. Etsy sells over 100m. Amazon has 40x the sales revenue. The economists are so different between them it's not even the same universe.
Why not take a hint from Darknet markets[0] and require escrow for all transactions[1], with funds only being released to the seller after the buyer has confirmed receipt of the goods as advertised, along with seller (and buyer) ratings as well as dispute resolution services?
In many ways, darknet markets are much better than the "legit" online marketplaces. And more's the pity -- because the "legit" players know better and should act accordingly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_market
[1] And since Etsy is a publicly traded corporation and their sellers are presumably "legit" (i.e., selling stuff that doesn't run afoul of nation-state dicta), an exit scam[2] is unlikely.
And even then, many people on Etsy sold antiques and vintage clothes. Maybe they even designed them and had them manufactured in small batches?
Forcing fulfillment center usage would only benefit stores who do a lot of volume. They can afford to take the risk on producing a lot of inventory up front.
Amazon can't un-crappify themselves, it's not in their DNA.
Except Ebay and Amazon already existing.
Jeff Bezos used to say, "Your margin is my opportunity", but I'm not sure he even cares anymore.
Then a small maker can quickly establish a good reputation, and cautious buyers can only buy from such, while more adventurous might take a punt on someone new. The open market needs information to be efficient; it looks like lack of reliable information is the root of this.
What that means is that any artists/makers that are doing volumes that represent anything even close to a full time wage are totally shafted. If I were an artist selling stuff, I would strongly consider a switch to something like Shopify, especially as you then aren't on a storefront sitting next to a whole bunch of drop shipped garbage.
That seems to assume a very very unrealistic 100% of orders being from offsite ads. In reality it's probably 10% for most shops if even that many.
The fees are still astronomically high even without the ads program.
Plenty of public companies promise low growth but decent returns. (Some promise wind-downs amidst payouts.)
They also pay low multiples. If you want a high multiple, you have to grow. Etsy’s saga isn’t a problem of public markets, it’s one of a company choosing a particular cohort of investors.
This is increasingly impossible under capitalism for fundamental reasons, which are illustrated most clearly in modern financialized capitalism by shareholder interests.
Your desires (and mine) will require a reorganization of society as we know it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...
So far every attempt to do this has done the exact opposite.
Most of capitalism, historically and today, is about preserving capital and making a small return. High-growth ventures are a minority, despite how it feels in tech.
You can also see if your local arts centre/university/whatever has some kind of market. There's also usually different kinds of conventions for specific industries where people will set up booths.
In my experience, on commission. Hire a carpenter or artist to make what you want and pay them for their materials up front and time on delivery.
When I saw "spy.com," I was hoping that Spy Magazine[0] had risen from the ashes.
No such luck. :'(
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_(magazine) (It was the only dead-tree magazine that I have ever personally subscribed to).
Etsy used to be a place to check out artisanal craft goods. Not necessarily antiques, but the sort of small-batch stuff that was hard to find elsewhere on the internet. Exotic jewelry, one-off wooden carvings, semi-custom knives, etc.
Now it's a place to check out mass-produced Indian and Pakistani merchandise. It has become worse even than eBay in that regard. It's superficially the same stuff it has always been -- exotic jewelry, wooden carvings, knives, etc. -- but the quality is much lower and the value just isn't there. And it could well be that you buy something on Etsy only to see it later on Amazon.com.
Also I feel like prices on Etsy have risen in an unusual and remarkable way over the past few years. Could be because of higher platform costs to vendors & the forced advertising scheme mentioned in the article.
Whether you can turn that into a profitable public company... eh.
And there are certainly some blogspammy listings in all those venues (Amazon and AliExpress probably the worst for that), but good luck solving that without human curation - and then you're an even worse investment as a business.
Is there tons of non-customized stuff that's drop-shipped from somewhere else? Yes. But you can ignore if what you want is the old-school Etsy stuff. I'm sure some sellers have bailed as they've been edged out by big sellers. But for me, it's still a useful platform that I enjoy using.
2. Etsy also look to be charging 4% for currency conversion (which occurs if you view the Etsy site in a currency different to the currency the store issues its prices in). Esty I think are deliberately hiding this charge; it is listed _nowhere_ in the invoice or in billing. Furthermore, Etsy base their conversion choice on the country the bank card comes from, which is not correct for multi-currency cards, and so you can end up paying Etsy 4% and the 0.5% to the multi-currency FinTech as well (when you should be paying only the 0.5% to the FinTech).
That used to be called "pulling a Myspace". Myspace pioneered that way to screw up.
Can anyone name a company that went down this road and came back?
Someone should do a tracking site for companies which fail in this way. Something like "deadmalls.com", or "fuckedcompany.com".
YC idea: develop a LLM model to detect early signs of enshittification and generate sell signals.
> First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Nowadays it's just used as a catch-all for "made worse".
Enshittification.
Next.
