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Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

I tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made.

I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.

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I used to work at Etsy. We buried our heads in the sand and tried to tell ourselves anything to believe that fake shit from China wasn't a real problem. We looked at numbers, we looked at trends and graphs, and we kept telling ourselves the same story: our sellers are delusional - we have the numbers and fake things from China aren't a big deal.

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 area I see the only real defence coming from employing the users to build graphs and small knit communities. If you empowered your users with data and suggestions you can leave it up to them to build a web of trust for the users that are providing the stated service or at least goals of the community. This leaves an open hole for the community of cheapest made knockoff products a place to grow as well.

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.

hah similar thing happened to me. I provided them with my renderings that I made and everything showing they were home made. What I thought was crazy was quite a few months later I wanted to buy something on etsy. I couldn't log in so I emailed etsy staff. They told me my account was disabled. I asked them if that was only from selling things and they said that nope, I couldn't buy anything either.

""" Please do not open any new accounts on Etsy; they will be closed immediately and without notice. """

That's really messed up.

I also sell 3D printed items and they did the exact same thing to my account. I just emailed them and they had me send pictures of my workspace and process to prove my items are "handmade" and my account was restored within 48 hours.

I did email them but when I pointed out the Chinese knockoffs, that didn't go over too well. I guess I could have handled my response differently but come on!

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.

It sounds like you were rude to the support staff and that made them unwilling to investigate further. Something about honey and vinegar.

Wasn't rude in my initial reply. Just the opposite actually.

*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.

I think a certain amount of anger is justified in that situation.

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...

You should try setting out a bowl of each sometime.

zensplain

Then their support staff sucks. I've worked support for years and I'll be the first to admit that I gave the 'nice' users better and faster service, but even the most belligerent of users got their issues resolved (eventually) because that was my fucking job.

> They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made.

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?

>That seems illegal.

Just curious but based on what?

In Etsy's interpretation, the seller violated the terms of service.

In what was does violating the terms of service of the platform mean that the platform gets to keep the money but not return the goods? You don't get to keep someone's money just because you decided so. That's theft.

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(?).

Contracts are power stuff that overrides most things. If you agree to something then people, and courts, will hold you to it.

I expect it is in the agreement they require you to use before you join Etsy.

Contracts aren't as powerful as you think. Lots of people are signed up to unlawful contracts (NDAs being a prime example).

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 called deep pockets.

Amazon does it too.

It's standard practice.

Most likely, it was held for the period in which customers could get returns. This is sane.

Held for 180-day period. Far longer than needed for customers to get returns and far from sane imo.

180-day holds are generally standard if you're worried about chargebacks.

Where should we go? I make little things frequently and friends have been telling me to start an etsy shop, but stories like this keep me away.

Sounds like an opportunity.

https://www.amazon.com/Handmade

I love Amazon, but they will not be in any better situation there then it was at Etsy. New platform is needed.

Handmade is actually worse than Etsy for this. I tried creating a Handmade account with the same products I sell on Etsy and Amazon basically said they weren't handmade enough. If you're not making jewelry or textiles, don't get your hopes up.

I used to work for a company called Tictail (https://tictail.com) that promotes upcoming brands. If you're anywhere in the fashion, home, jewelry and accessories kind of space, it might be a good fit. Check it out.

I buy 3d prints off shapeways.com. It's been a great experience.

Thanks! I will check them out.

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