Comment by morelikeborelax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morelikeborelax | Hacker News Reader

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morelikeborelax

It is 100% Etsy forcing this change. Josh Silverman is there to increase revenue and this is how they are doing it.

There was no consideration for their sellers, a large number of which cannot do free shipping. Etsy want to be "Etsy" not a platform and service for sellers.

Sure some stores won't be affected but plenty had already tried free shipping and reported it did not work, Etsy didn't care. Anyone shipping heavy items or internationally can't do free shipping properly. I know UK stores who have been told to just offer a code and discount back some of the value to their UK customers so that these stores can sell with free shipping in the US. It doesn't make sense. This is a pure revenue driver, it does not benefit stores.

Etsy do not know how to run small businesses and they are forcing people who do to make bad decisions.

You could have offered free shipping anyway if you had wanted to.

Your right, I could have offered free shipping. But it wasn't until Etsy made it nearly a requirement that I did so. I wasn't happy, but it actually turned out to be better for me. Maybe there are some small minority of sellers that truly can't offer free shipping, but I don't see how most can't offer it and simply add the cost to their items, or as it was in my case, result in more sales that more than make up for the difference.

And yes, technically it is Etsy that is implementing this change. In that sense they are "forcing" it. But a failure to do this would also have resulted in the slow demise of many of their sellers. In that sense, the market, in order to keep pace with competitors, forced this change. Etsy, acting in its own best interest, also acted in the best interests of a majority of its sellers. A failure to act might have been in the best interest of a minority of its sellers. So it was a choice of doing what's best for Etsy and most sellers or nothing, which would slowly kill Etsy and all of its sellers. Not much of a choice.

How does it work with international sales? Do you need to make shipping free to everywhere, or only to one place to get the ranking boost?

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