Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
engadget.com
engadget.com
I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.
That seems illegal. Then again, Etsy does its own payment processing now, and Paypal's been using that same tactic for years. I wonder if Etsy could get in trouble for doing both, since they have more info and can generally confirm shipment, given you print labels from them, and the problem is not that your items were misleading or fraud, but that they prefer you not sell those types of items on their platform?
Just curious but based on what?
In Etsy's interpretation, the seller violated the terms of service.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think there are probably fairly clear laws on exactly what you can and can't do an an intermediary of payment. I doubt "we decided to deliver your goods but keep your money" is one of the things they are allowed to do, at least for longer than a very well defined period of time. I imagine suspected fraud might supersede this to some degree and have its own rules, but that's what I was pointing out, this isn't a case of suspected fraud, it's a TOS violation, and since Etsy has more insight than paypal into the situation as the marketplace and should know this, treating it like fraud when it's not might be something that could land them in trouble(?).
I expect it is in the agreement they require you to use before you join Etsy.
The threat of a contract is powerful though, because to challenge it you have to go through courts, and a company like test had far deeer pockets than you do.
It's standard practice.
The fact that they closed my shop without pre-warning when I had sales along with pending orders really made me lose complete trust in them. Especially considering the endless Chinese products on there that are obviously not handmade.
If they had contacted me inquiring about my products before closing my shop, that would have been a different story but that is not what happened. I refuse to do business with reckless providers.
*Edit - It was the 3rd go around with their support before I started to get rude and pointed out a ton of Chinese products. By this time it was a week after they closed my shop and I was done with even trying with them.
If somebody's spent the time, money, and effort to create stuff and then put it on Etsy, it's pretty shitty to shut them down arbitrarily.
If they treat people like crap, they're going to get a lot of rude and angry support calls...
""" Please do not open any new accounts on Etsy; they will be closed immediately and without notice. """
We never shared these numbers with people, and we just took a kind of dismissive attitude to people's (very) legitimate concerns. The people that carried Etsy forward on their backs.
In this environment new sellers are handed nothing with a mountain to climb, but you could offer a series of incentives to encourage the sellers within the webs of trust to review and verify new sellers. You could encourage sellers to meeing within meatspace as well to build these webs of trust. This would allow new users to join communities of trusted sellers/makers and then be given the proper showcasing and search placements to the buyers.
The TL:DR use your real community and encourage it to grow outside the site and within meatspace to build webs of trusted sellers and makers.
After spending thousands of dollars on furniture, waiting a month for the guy to make it, and another two weeks to ship, I had maybe a few days to leave a review for something I spent a lot of money on. With this policy, reviews are for first impressions only. And I won't be coming back.
Maybe it's in place to prevent review extortion, but a time limit (especially for goods made on demand) isn't the way to do it.
Seems like a strange decision. I don’t understand how that is helping buyers or sellers.
The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud.
Which may be the actual intended consequence.
You have to basically keep it at perfect feedback in some goods marketplaces or you're considered a fuckup, and while that's easier than it sounds because people don't know how to rate effectively so almost all feedback is perfect, you also have to deal with people that leave negative feedback because of issues that have nothing to do with what they ordered (tracking shows USPS lost he package for a week or two in delivery, or shows it delivered to correct address but customer did not receive it).
I gain a little bit of hope for humanity whenever I see a low-star review like "arrived 2 days late" or "wouldn't accept my visa card but I just bought gas with it yesterday and it worked fine" followed by "0 of 19 people found this review helpful".
3 stars
"I haven't read it yet but looks interesting. I'll try to get to it this summer."
This was the worst review of the book.
Amazon's product questions are like that. It seems people get the emailed question and think a person has reached out to them, they respond "sorry i haven't used it yet", or whatever, and that fits in with the other 20 useless answers.
They don't appear to have user rating on answers, only on reviews?
Its a shame, because it was such a good idea to have a marketplace for people to sell stuff without the pain of setting up an online website/shop. Though some independents are now are using the squarespace/shoppify....etc.
Your strategy would be to get full steam becoming a front for Alibaba, fooling your users for long enough so that eventually Alibaba buys you.
Problem is why would Alibaba do that ? By that stage you have a toxic brand: at any time, if a enough ripped off users make some noise, you are done forever.
The best move for Alibaba, assuming they are interesting in building a Chinese artisan store, is to simply destroy Etsy with "Cut out the middle man, buy Etsy chinese mass market stuff cheap directly at the source on Alibaba. Or if you are interested in the genuine chinese art, check out our new dedicated store. Click on the following link to see all the process and check we put in place to make sure it is genuine handmade, not found in a super market good."
what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds.
To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks.
[1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX
Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.
I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".
Yes.
"schadenfreude"
No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue.
Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the questions I'm interested in.
You are acting like the whole company is just an amorphous blob that chooses to siphon 'focus' into buckets. That is just not how companies work.
It simply makes no sense to infer anything negative about the company due to them having a good ops image.
Their reluctance to crack down on Chinese crap along with being very unhelpful to it's creators are the two biggest issues.
I mean, I get that a tech company would struggle with service to it's sellors, that's pretty normal, but if your brand is "handmade quality", then why the hell would you allow Chinese trash?
It's hard to resist a stream of very easy money (in the short term at least).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377
The items that jumped out at me:
> The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter.
> The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers.
> It wanted to know how Hadoop worked, and the only way to do that was to bring it in-house and figure it out.
As a means to an end, this is a _really_ expensive way of operating nowadays. And when the business isn't rolling, these costs become magnified (and the associated operation vulnerable.)
Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago that very likely wasn't the case.
I'm not saying Etsy doesn't have somewhat higher system costs than others but I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
Skills -- yes. Scale? That's kind of the point, nowadays. You don't need a large staff to accomplish scale.
> I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
Their eng/ops approach wasn't the cause of any business issues, AFAIK. That's why my comment is directed around what happens when business performance suffers -- you start looking for cost reductions.
But every time I asked about the tech, I was disappointed. They wanted me to come in and work on a bunch of PHP code. When I asked about the details, from the hiring manager, I was told that it was, basically, a big monolithic PHP thing. I've no idea if they later moved to microservices, but I have been traumatized by a few too many encounters with horrendous blobs of PHP. For me, its become a bit of a heuristic. If a company is apparently working with a big blob of PHP, I am wary. I need to hear very good things about that company, to offset that wariness.
More recently I've read criticisms of their search system. At the risk of indulging in "confirmation bias", I'll say this (bad search) is exactly what I would have predicted, based on what I'd heard 3 to 5 years ago.
With the former using "old, boring" tools, as they have been battle-proven time and again, and the latter using $dailyhype, as that's the thing that looks best on your CV right now.
I guess this comes down to personal preferences, and whether you value the tech environment, or the business environment. I'd rather do unexciting work in a profitable company, than exciting work in a company with a writing on the wall.
this is a very good point
https://blog.etsy.com/news/2012/office-ecology-composting-at...
But didn't they have a layoff a month ago? Isn't there a management saying that goes something like "If you're going to eat shit, eat enough so you only have to do it once", specifically about layoffs?
Etsy engineers (and other workers) reading this, I wish you good luck! May you survive and thrive through tough times.
I also read that they were also hiring a lot of bootcamp grads. It would be interesting to see the percentage of layoffs coming from bootcamps.
if they need to cut cost, they should start firing males, if anything, right?
> ... the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women."
I'm using "equal work" in an informal sense. (In the legal sense, yes, equal pay for equal work is the law, but also in the legal sense, you can't give an immigrant worker a green-card-path visa unless you can't find anyone in the States to do the same job, and we all know how creatively "the same job" gets defined.)
In the absence of strong evidence, I personally err on the side of caution.
I don't know what these mythical places are that vastly prefer men over women - every place I've ever worked at, everyone preferred people who are good at their job and are easy to get along with - mostly the easy to get along with part by the way.
Women who manage to stay in tech for a long time tend to have a level of passion that let them put up with the amount of bullshit that they have been given in the past (and present).
Find me a woman, who does engineering, who has been doing it for 10+ years (15 even better) and odds are you have someone who LOVES what they do! Odds are this is going to show up in quality of work product and better general understanding.
I would personally argue that it's a lot more common of a luxury to promote okay-but-not-great men into management instead of letting them go, and a company motivated by capitalist concerns should focus more on eliminating those sinecures than eliminating bootcamp grads, who often can't command a high salary anyway. But then again, Etsy did cancel their entire summer internship program with two weeks' notice, which can't have saved them much money at all, so I'm not sure how responsible/rational they're being in their capitalist motivations.
As for Etsy, did they actually have 'diversity initiatives' within the company? What doe that even mean?
Not so much a bang, more of a fizzle as "the big kids" come in and cut deeply.
That and investors keeping out of seed-stage funding because it has gotten so bloated by everyone wanting their own startup.
I've seen Genius, Etsy, Uber... etc. It seems like a lot more startups are getting shook up and cut down.
They appear to have a very nice business that's trading for a reasonable four times sales and likely heading toward profitability. What's the problem? Cutting bloat is exactly what they should be doing, it'll drive them to profitability faster.
I know this is a dead horse here but Etsy needs to go back to it's roots or die. I would use eBay or alibaba before Etsy if they want to sell cheaply manufactured goods.
What would be concerning is if they see it as anything more than a way to pay the bills.
But I would warn them, based on prior experience, that having a pile of cash can turn you into a target for takeover from someone who wants your cash. Once the companies merge, all that cash becomes 'our' cash and they can use it to buy themselves a couple extra years of burn rate.