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Comment by jzl | Hacker News Reader

"With sales up, Etsy is highlighting successful sellers with a series of videos. But not all users are happy. For years, sellers and buyers have complained that as Etsy has grown more popular, mass-produced goods have flooded the site, making it harder to find handmade items, and harder for sellers to make a living."

This. I went on Etsy recently for the first time in a few years looking for a few different handmade items. They were nearly impossible to find amid a flood of mass-produced commercial items. Etsy is nearly indistinguishable from Michael's or Joann's art supply stores, or worse. I have no intention of shopping there again.

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Yuck. :(

Sellers need a “Maker Strike” like YouTube channels to keep folks honest. Also, raise the bar such that sellers have to put in mental, creative and time investment and are cut out if they repeatedly sell junk. Can’t just sign up as a seller the same day and spam stuff from AliBaba and say it’s “handmade” or “vintage.”

Next, have a buyer to seller/creator feedback method that influences item ranking so junk is pushed down and out.

Maybe use AI/ML/DL to spot product descriptions and images that are copied or similar to determine if items are new, mass-manufactured products... and, sure have an appeals process.

PS: My disabled mom makes handmade jewelry that people beg to pay money for, but I’m hesitant to recommend Etsy considering the diluted execution of the original business model.

Based on my experience with Etsy, I believe you are both correct. What needs to happen as a directive and embraced as a cultural value at Etsy is for the people now running the company to drop a massive, crushing hammer on low-quality, Alibaba-sourced crap. Turn the entire place upside down. I can't predict what would happen, but it couldn't possibly be worse than what's going on there now and it could very well get some of the consumer goodwill back.

100% agree!

Also, raise the bar such that sellers have to put in mental, creative and time investment and are cut out if they repeatedly sell junk.

This train left the station years ago:

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-etsys-future-depends-on-le...

> PS: My disabled mom makes handmade jewelry that people beg to pay money for, but I’m hesitant to recommend Etsy considering the diluted execution of the original business model.

Wut. You think it's a good thing to cut her off from the best venue on the web for her work because of an altered business model?

Have you looked into Etsy alternatives like Shopify or storenvy?

Yeah, this is a real problem. My wife sells via Etsy (leather handbags, all handmade), and this is something we've seen happen. But it's disheartening to hear from potential customers that they won't shop on the site because of this reputation. Unfortunately, this is not new, and not the first time this has been discussed. This has been going on for years now. And frankly, Etsy is still the best place for this sort of thing.

So my wife sticks to marketing and directing people directly to her Etsy store.

Just a question: would you not buy something via Etsy (as in, found something you liked some other method but had to buy it through Etsy), or just not shop using Etsy?

I would definitely buy there if I found myself there directly from an artist/crafter, like if I first saw something in person at a fair. I have nothing against the site. But most mass produced items I would rather just get from Amazon or go to a brick and mortar to see in person, if possible. When I said "I have no intention of shopping there again," I guess I really meant "I have no intent to go browsing for items there again, like I used to."

It's hard to see how you scale what Etsy was originally. See also eBay's transformation away from "the world's biggest flea market." Given globalization and cheap Asian manufacturing, the only way to keep things relatively "pure" is human curation--and even that will be gamed and doesn't scale anyway.

Of course, there's a lot of mass produced knicknacks even among "crafts" sold at fairs and stores. But it tends to not be quite so much mass-produced and crappy.

This is why the expectation of infinite growth is not a good thing. Lack of scalability was Etsy’s unique value proposition and competitive advantage. They gave it up in order to grow and as a result have become indistinguishable from many chain art supply stores.

>Lack of scalability was Etsy’s unique value proposition and competitive advantage.

In the same way that many small-scale sites/stores that curate contents can be said to have unique value proposition and competitive advantage. That's not a knock on them by the way. Many are good at what they do and add value. Not everything needs to be Internet-scale but you sort of have to be one or the other.

If you IPO, you have no choice but to achieve and increase Internet scale. Your share price will suffer if you don't because when you IPO, your investors matter more than your other stakeholders. If you don't want to be a slave to an insatiable hunger for growth by investors, don't IPO. For that matter, don't get investors who expect an exit either. Yeah, you miss out on the big get rich exit, but at least you get to stay true to your original values. Be content to stay a larger than usual lifestyle business. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Then you have an interesting challenge. Businesses are never at equilibrium. So if you're not growing, you're shrinking. There may be lulls where things are flat, but you never want to be flat.

Likewise, if you resist growing and have competition, they will see the opening you leave, continue growing, and then look to use that leverage to buy or kill your business.

> Businesses are never at equilibrium

Many small businesses are. It's a key insight to serving that community as a b2b provider that growth and new business aren't the selling points they are to larger businesses. What most small businesses we talked to wanted was quality customers who will bring dependable, repeat business. They want to operate as close to capacity as possible with as little uncertainty as possible. Too much business overwhelms them. Too little starves them. Helping them keep to the sweet spot at the upper end of their capacity made them much happier than just trying to drive as much business to them as possible.

> Then you have an interesting challenge. Businesses are never at equilibrium. So if you're not growing, you're shrinking. There may be lulls where things are flat, but you never want to be flat.

Is this true? I suspect that a majority of small business are at equilibrium, providing income to the owner/operator. I just don't have the data to prove it.

If you find any supporting data, I'd love to see it because I dearly hope this to be true.

Unfortunately, I suspect most of these businesses are vulnerable to larger competitors, market fluctuations and other risk factors that one would want a growing business to protect against.

However I'm sure many businesses have managed to keep things fairly stable with modest growth and loyal customers for the lifespan of their owners relationship with the business. I'm just not sure if that is enough to support the fact that there is in fact a state of equilibrium for a business.

It still works depending on what kind of item you’re looking for. Specific tea blends, cold process soaps, incense dipped to order, and specific kinda of pottery have all been successful in my getting handmade stuff I want. What kind of stuff are you looking for?

I was gift shopping, and was just browsing topic by topic. In the past I had done so and stumbled across all sorts of amazing handmade items without much digging at all.

Look at the landing page for "Home & Living" and you'll see what I mean: https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living?ref=catnav-891

I could see how some specific topics might still have more handmade items than not.

To my eye, most of the items on that page look pretty mass-produced or mass-produced + a personalization step. There's nothing wrong with that. I sometimes buy mass-produced "craftwork." Just because a wind chime (or whatever) is produced in a factory at some scale doesn't suddenly make it ugly. And it's not like the average thing being sold at a genuine craft fair is attractive.

That said, I have too much stuff and I just tend to be uninterested in buying more even if there's nothing wrong per se with individual pieces.

I hear this every time Etsy comes up, and I’ll admit the attitude confuses me.

1) without etsy, you really would be stuck with Michaels quality crafts. I’m pretty sure I can’t buy a solid oak spice rack from michaels of any decent quality. Or a retro pipe box, or a certain type of mens jewelry... you get the picture.

2. Nobody else is trying to corner the market Etsy originally carved out for itself. Amazon, Jet, Ebay, and Alibaba all are terrible for showing craftwork rather than a mass produced consumer piece with significant stock. If amazon had an etsy clone that improved on it at all, I would totally split my patronage, but there’s realistically no competitor online.

3. You can actually buy locally and keep your money mostly local. Places like amazon make this extremely difficult to figure out and prioritize.

4. Many etsy shop owners use etsy as a shop front, not as a sales driver. Assuming the main point of etsy is to buy a great product directly from the buyer will probably lead to shitty experiences. This is much more like a flea market, complete with regret purchases. It is not a convenient online shop for avoiding regret.

Am I asking you to excuse etsy’s issues? Hell no. But you’re also not addressing massive parts about how the site functions for both its sellers and consumers.

Everything you just said is exactly what I used to love about Etsy. And I'm sure that there is still some amount of love to be had for it, for those reasons. But finding the kinds of items you just described is exactly the problem. Sure, if there is something really specific I want, I would consider checking Etsy first and if I found a locally crafted item, I'd be a happy camper. But I used to love browsing it, and the browsing experience is ruined or at least heavily degraded (depending on the category) thanks to all the mass produced items.

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