Etsy was a twee culture punchline, now it’s a Wall Street darling
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And so, every need met, our lives are hollow. Hollow and without objects of meaning and power - nothing that your distant offspring will inherit, that will make them think, “holy shit, my ancestors WERE INTERESTING PEOPLE!!!” No totems. Just disposable Apple ear buds with dead batteries glued forever into plastic shells. No diaries. Just tweets that were lost in the great lizard war of 2031, when the data centers were turned into lizard egg incubators.
So, people hunger for robust, interesting wares. Maybe most don’t know it, but they’ll buy those things anyway.
Based on this lizard-apocalypse thesis, I listed stuff on Etsy: custom CNC titanium pistol grips, solid metal wood keys, childproof jewel boxes milled from scrapped train knuckles, and etc. I listed all kinds of stuff I made when I wasn’t filling “normal” orders for big industry titans like Boeing. Just whatever the hell I felt like making, as long as it’s something I would be proud to own. And it all sold. Every weird thing I make eventually sells on Etsy. Etsy has featured my stuff in big advertisements, because my thesis is correct.
There is a new kind of scarcity, because of the upcoming lizard war.
That titanium switch plate is cool though.
But I also wouldn't say that shopping for cute handmade weird custom things is essentially an activity of some extreme elite. Once people in any culture have lots of disposable income they'll do it. Here's a video from a few days ago of shopping for traditional hand made jewlery in Kabul, Afghanistan. Language is Dari. Farsi/Persian speakers should understand it OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LelKUITywE&feature=emb_titl...
If there were a sufficiently large population of Afghans with a reliable, secure online payment method, and HSPA+/HSDPA/LTE data services on their android phones, I have no doubt that those products would show up on the Dari language version of Etsy. At present probably less than 1% of people nationwide have any form of credit or debit card.
Here is how Costco in China opened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UfO4gpML4g
Not to say Americans don't love to spend, I think America has exported this culture to the rest of the world which is that every holiday is an opportunity for sale, put debt on credit card and get addicted to the dopamine rush of shopping. I don't think its unique to America anymore.
The "robust" part of this is really important, and I would add "niche" to the list.
Recently I've been working on a DIY whole-home audio system, and there was nothing in the market which could meet the specs I need in terms of latency, and was sufficiently accessible at the software level. So I decided to build them myself, and in addition to getting the specs I want, I can also use high-end materials and get a design which fits in my home perfectly.
So what I'm ending up with is totally over-engineered, and quite expensive when you add up all the parts and labor, and it would make not be economically feasible for any company to produce these at scale. There are not going to be 100k people who want these, but there could potentially be a couple hundred.
I think the really cool thing about operating on that smaller scale is that the incentives really are aligned with creating the best possible user-experience from end-to-end. When the user-base you are serving is a nameless, faceless multitude, it's easier to decide to make a product which, for instance, will fall apart sooner, so the consumer has to replace it more often. But at the smaller scale, it actually is feasible to really truly prioritize making the best possible product for the user.
People are trying to make a living by crafting things, and the free market is swooping in by undercutting them with a race to the bottom.
Its kind of busy house made from wood, having tons of small trinkets to play with, ie switches, velcro, rubber bands, windows etc. All the stuff kids find in the house and spend so much time playing with compared to actual toys.
The stuff we found and ordered is hand-made in Lithuania, costs 50% of the 'original' montessori one (not sure if that's their idea though), looks much more solid since its made from much thicker actual wood.
Same for a ring I bought few years back for my wife - she found it, unique and appealing to her like no local could. Didn't cost much. I guess what you describe - something unique, that someone skilled' time and effort went into, compared to machined mass production.
This has a lot of value, ie carpenters are very well paid where I come from. If they are business savvy, they easily trump some software consulting in income.
This possibly stems from the idea that that you don't work the materials yourself, correct me if I'm wrong.
There's a huge ecommerce bubble, and to a degree a tech bubble, being driven by all that disposable income that used to go to restaurants, travel, events, etc. instead being redirected to online shopping and online activity. Compounded by the money being printed by Fed which also doesn't have a lot of places to go.
I doubt it's sustainable to expect that this is the new normal and nobody will want to go back to the way life was before. If that's the case, I can't understand how the PE ratios that imply someday the future value of these companies will be worth 100x-1000x multiples in 10-20 years are justified. But this has lead to an incredible transfer of wealth to a lot of tech companies. I just wonder when the party will end and we'll see a correction?
Feel free to refer back to this comment in a year or two.
E-commerce is sitting at 15-20% of all retail, it will almost certainly go to 50% this decade if not higher - it's inevitable.
Value is more than revenue or profit and P/E ratios largely don't matter and haven't for a long time. Competitive positioning, long term leverage, and other things that you can't easily price matter just as much. This is about total and utter dominance in a sector - just look at the investments Shopify is making in delivering capital to small businesses or building out a fulfillment pipeline.
Amazon's P/E ratio has been at or over 100 for the last 20 years. It was at 300 in 2012 (would you have bought then?). If you looked at that and that was the basis for not investing, you are using outdated views to invest. These companies are different and it's worth figuring out why.
[2] SHOP P/S ratio is currently at ~53. [3] ZM P/S ratio has bounced between 40 and 150. Currently at 87. These meme stocks are highly speculative and we all know where speculative investing ends up.
You will see a major correction.
Feel free to refer back to this comment in a year or two.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/price-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SHOP/shopify/price... [3] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-comm...
The amount of money that's been made on bubbles in the last 30 years far exceeds what's been lost. It's strange to see that trying to call the top hasn't died as a hobby after how much sheer energy has been spent being wrong about it.
I've only ever had one grand slam bearish bet and I placed it in March of this year. I think a lot of idiots get excited by that kind of success and chase recreating it to their ruin.
It was hard to sell and admit defeat.
Edit: What I'm trying to say is most people most of the time will be better off making long bullish bets. For example I bought some deep out of the money AAPL calls in June of this year and I'm quite pleased with how that turned out. It more than paid for the mistakes I made. The way I see it is think like a venture capitalist. Place 20 bets that pay out 100-1 and try to arrange for at least one to pay out.
The idea is we live in a world of extremes today and something will happen but we don’t know what or when. So keep yourself liquid while sizing bets appropriately (Kelley Criterion in essence) and profit when the black swan event occurs. The additional, important benefit is you are liquid while almost everyone else is getting margin calls. This is an opportunity with many advantages such as buying low.
In essence lose a small amount often to win a large amount at some point. Similar to VC strategies or blackjack professionals when you could get away with counting.
Care about money a little, eh?
Alot of things to consider, 0% interest rates for over a year now, once the fed's spigot dries a bit expect to see huge drops in the market and especially alot of the speculative tech companies.
Alot of working professionals have seen huge gains in money since covid, ie. no travel, no commutes, no buying lunch/breakfast at the office, no dinner out with collegues/family, no daycare(if they are parents). Add that up and its a gigantic monthly savings, alot is going towards home stuff/renovation, its also going into the stock market.
People are forced online, with lockdowns and other restrictions people have literally been forced to find new ways to shop and entertain themselves, some may be more permanent than others. Once they are over expect large crowds in every possible way(theatres, malls, concerts etc) and drops across e-retailers.
The world is not as simple as that one liner suggests. Everyone who sat out of the market since 2011 loudly shouting about a bubble (I know more than a few of these types)....have a ton of regret and what's more... they're paralyzed by loss aversion, fear, and cling to P/E as justification they're doing the right thing.
If you can't draw out painfully obvious trends over the next decade and invest against those, I don't know what to tell you. Sure if I buy $AMZN at $3k today, it might drop to $2k next month. But I will bet a ton of money it will be far, far higher at the end of this decade. This is about network effects, the internet, scale, national security and the ability to achieve total dominance in a sector and leverage that into other sectors.
Obviously 2008 did see something of a drop in general so I guess they were right for the near term. But they were specifically ragging on companies that you'd have done very well with over the next decade+ even if you had bought in 2007.
In other words, you're betting that regulators continue to permit Amazon to continue to consolidate monopolistic (if not outright monopoly) power. If regulators were to ever decide to break up Amazon - surely the stock price, so dependent on market dominance, would crater as a result.
I'm not saying you're wrong to make that bet / assumption, but it's important to note that Amazon's dominance is not a guaranteed destiny or inevitability. There are threats to their dominance.
And the world is not as simple as your rejoinder. 2011 came after a crisis unlike anything seen since the 1930's. And the 'fixes' to the economy since then have patched over rather than resolved the debt overhangs that led to the 2008 crisis. The great 'patch' was to print money. But the real economy (the physical universe that the financial universe simulates) still has constraints. Figuring out which one we trip over next is entrail-reading, but to think that constraints are no longer an issue is dangerous.
The fundamental problem is that we are not hitting those constraints. Lots of unemployed or underemployed people mean that inflation won't bit in the short term. Effective policies that put these people to work will cause inflation as usual. Inflation is a good thing in moderation.
If you'd bought AMZN at the peak of the dotcom bubble and held it to this day you'd be a happy camper.
I used to believe this, but no more. The Fed's unstated goal these days seems to be to never allow the market to drop.
Notice that assets are conveniently not included in Central Banks' measures of inflation. Assets can inflate to infinity. It's irrelevant. The Fed's goal isn't to prevent wealth inequality. It's to keep CONSUMER prices steadily increasing and people employed. House prices, bitcoin, and meme stocks aren't in the consumer price index. It doesn't matter if they're appreciating rapidly.
Mortgage payments are included in the price indexes, though! They happen to make up a big chunk of the ratio, too. And guess what? Central Banks are making them cheaper for 90% of home owners (now ~67% of the population) by artificially manipulating rates to make their payments lower.
What does that mean? The more central banks lower rates and the higher home prices climb, the more likely "inflation will continue to be stubbornly low".
Central banks aren't normalizing rates any time soon. They're much more likely to print a ton more money because people AREN'T spending more money on airplane tickets, gasoline, bananas, and (importantly) their mortgages.
The solution to the problem is a bigger problem. When all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.
Yeah it's surprising that many people don't understand this.
>I don't understand how anyone thinks this plan can involve lowering rates, which would crash asset prices, and trigger a wave of defaults leading to a recession (lower income, less spending, lower prices, and less jobs).
It can involve lowering interest rates because the old assumption is that there is basically an endless amount of profitable work to be done in the country (or economic union) the central bank is in. It conveniently ignores that doing the endless amount of work elsewhere (developing countries) can actually be even more profitable.
>Notice that assets are conveniently not included in Central Banks' measures of inflation. Assets can inflate to infinity. It's irrelevant.
Yeah it's true, consumer prices are the real target. The irony of course is that if you keep inflating assets your economy will rot from the inside. Companies can just drink straight from the money faucet. There is no need to actually employ anyone in the country the central bank is operating in.
>Mortgage payments are included in the price indexes, though! They happen to make up a big chunk of the ratio, too. And guess what? Central Banks are making them cheaper for 90% of home owners (now ~67% of the population) by artificially manipulating rates to make their payments lower.
Payments tend to stay the same though because the housing market is competitive in a lot of locations. Housing values keep increasing instead. One could argue that real estate will indirectly employ construction workers but the fundamental problem is that many places simply are not willing to build more housing. It's almost criminally insane but that's how it is, unfortunately. In places where there is little competition it is possible to get good deals but not everyone is willing to do that. Those deals are also disappearing now that remote work is forced upon everyone.
>What does that mean? The more central banks lower rates and the higher home prices climb, the more likely "inflation will continue to be stubbornly low".
Well, yes because the money isn't reaching the right places. A lot of it is sitting in some random bank account. The money that is actually put to use is just going back to asset owners (remember we want it in the hands of consumers) because a lot of the hard labor is done abroad but the profits are collected at home. Despite the surplus of money companies are not willing to spend money on training even though it will make more profitable work available domestically. College often doesn't work because it's not actually based on what companies want. Students chase their own dreams which is fine in principle but it means the training problem is still unsolved.
>Central banks aren't normalizing rates any time soon. They're much more likely to print a ton more money because people AREN'T spending more money on airplane tickets, gasoline, bananas, and (importantly) their mortgages.
And as you said, they keep spending it on the wrong things.
>The solution to the problem is a bigger problem. When all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.
The reason for that is that the central bank does not have the power to solve all the problems it's responsible for. It's almost comical. It has to make sure the economy is not broken but it only has one lever. That lever can fix the economy with the right timing and correct usage. However, that lever can only go so low and opportunities in which it makes sense to pull the lever grow more scarce as you keep overusing it. At this point it's time to recognize that the rest of the government is failing to do it's part through fiscal policy. The central bank has already done far more than it's share of the work.
- Europe lowered interest rates on loans by a lot, going into the negative [1] - This allowed mortgage interest rates to be lowered by a lot as well, because competition. - Mortgage interest rates are linked to savings account rates, so their interest went way down as well - going into 0% or negative rates here and there. - This de-incentivized saving money; that plus low mortgage interest rates mean people are buying houses or putting their money into the stock market. - Low mortgage interest rates + people buying houses as investment = rising housing prices. Housing prices in NL have gone up by a lot. Brexit, international companies and expats didn't help (mainly around the big cities). - The pandemic and pressure / encouragement to work from home more has caused a lot of people who live in the big cities (in shit circumstances because of the ridiculous cost of living) to scratch their head and consider moving to the countryside, raising housing prices there as well.
[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/html/ecb.sp200...
What would cause this?
Sure doesn't feel like inflation is slow to me.
They try not to re-weight items in the CPI year by year. Motor fuel is still 2.9% of the index. Transportation, including air travel is still 5% of the index. Demand and price for these has crashed this year. They still keep the same weighting year in year out since the items in the CPI aren't meant to be changed and re-weighted every year. (See the Oct 2019 vs Oct 2020 column)
What inflation "feels like" and the CPI are completely different things. This is becoming more problematic if you're on the wrong side of the trade (i.e. saving cash instead of swimming in a mountain of mortgage debt).
But every year a dollar seems to buy less of what I need, and I can’t imagine how people who earn far less than me can deal with it. If you don’t keep investing, you certainly are falling further and further behind, but how can you invest if you’re just making ends meet as it is.
Succinctly? [Under/un]treated mental illness due to the maladaptive coping skills needed to survive as a poor American. Poor people make sacrifices to live another day. Whether it's (healthy) food, exercise, healthcare (who can afford insulin or an epipen these days?), or their time. Some people pay the doctors to go to them, others pay for people to do the tediousstuff like cooking or cleaning or laundry or fighting the bank over a $40 overdraft fee that ate that weeks food budget.
That said, I'd be surprised if there is not long term growth in the sector, especially as shipping becomes "solved" by drones etc.
That said, our "regular" SKUs (cart only Super Mario 64, PS2 Consoles etc.) are generating maybe 20% more revenue compared to this time last year. Earlier in the year, this was as high as 2-3x normal revenue.
> restaurants, travel, events, etc.
You think those things are moving online? I don't see online vacations getting much traction.
> It's not just Etsy's stock that's up, but also the stock of Shopify, Amazon, Overstock, Walmart, Ebay, etc. And all the tech infra companies that support these ecommerce sites.
You really think they're not talking retail?
Not to mention the fact that no one claimed any of those things are moving online:
> disposable income that used to go to restaurants, travel, events, etc. instead going to... [aforementioned companies
All other discussions about whether ecommerce is taking away from retail are not entirely addressing the point I was trying to make.
If you figure out why then you would be engaging in value investing.
>you are using outdated views to invest
Business is much older than tech. It already had enough time for all the stupid ideas to die out. If those stupid ideas come back they will just die again.
Expected future growth. Some stocks get overpriced or underpriced, corrections to share price happen when information is taken in by the market.
> There's a huge ecommerce bubble, and to a degree a tech bubble, being driven by all that disposable income that used to go to restaurants, travel, events, etc. instead being redirected to online shopping and online activity. Compounded by the money being printed by Fed which also doesn't have a lot of places to go.
This is not a bubble. There is an expectation of 0% rates for the foreseeable future. The dollar has fallen in value since the March bottom and assets are being repriced higher to account for this. We aren’t even at February highs yet if you take the dollar decline into account, here’s an SPX chart adjusted for $DXY (SPX*DXY/100): https://tradingview.com/x/lyDLUewb/
I'm grateful for it, but at the same time I know this is at the expense of many small companies in the restaurant and travel space, and all the labor they employ too, so that's pretty depressing. And I don't think it's sustainable so I expect my own luck to turn around eventually.
I don't think things will change much in the next 6 months though with another potential stimulus check on the horizon and at least until some of the state-level measures to reduce the spread of COVID are reversed (possibly with vaccines widely available?)
I do think the pandemic has set a new normal for ecommerce, but I very much doubt it will be at the levels we see today.
Will buying habits correct post-COVID? Sure, but factors have already been clamping down. If anything, you may see a boost in e-commerce in certain sectors.
I think HN commenters aren't your typical shopper, so I'd be wary of believing the echo chamber. I bet the average HN commenter also doesn't fall for "luxury" brands or the related "mating displays" which seem to be so important to many people. But there are a lot of people who do like those things. They like to dress up and show off among other members of their species. Retail may shrink, but it isn't going away unless human psychology suddenly undergoes a fundamental change.
Now, how many retail businesses won't ever open again is the real question. Plenty of small businesses closed and won't re-open and there might be strong hesitation for new businesses to spring up in their place. Sure, target will be fine, but the mom and pops could potentially never come back to the same level. They were already barely making it.
IMO anyone who isn’t investing in the stock market right now is going to be on the wrong side of inequality. The dollar will depreciate, and though we will be seeing people make massive gains in 2020 and 2021, the buying power of those gains will not be the same as the buying power they would have in say 2019. There’s just too much money being printed out now and spent. If you’ve just been sitting in cash and have missed those gains you’ll be in a world of hurt when the day comes that your cash can’t really buy what it used to, while all the stock investors are out living their life as usual comfortable with inflated prices.
You cannot afford to be sitting on the sidelines. If you’re extra paranoid, put your money where your mouth is and buy put options as insurance to protect yourself from downside risk, or if you’re happy with the gains you have now put a collar on your positions.
But do not sit around doing nothing or reposting memes about how the Fed can’t keep printing money forever or how PE ratios are insane.
I guess we're all really screwed then :)
How many of these tech companies are actually accumulating wealth due to high stock prices? When stocks change hands in the market, the company doesn't see any of the profit. The company revenue doesn't change unless they have treasury stock they are selling. As far as I know, very few are issuing new stock, aside from Tesla (which is genius).
I generally agree with your comment about the potential for a structural change in where disposable income is going, but this statement isn't technically correct. I would check out this podcast for a great explanation of it: https://www.macrovoices.com/921-macrovoices-248-jeff-snider-...
Some investors are so desperate for something to buy, they're making up new fake companies called "blank check IPOs". Fake companies that promise to make money some day. It's insane.
For stuff like my 401k, I just buy into the market every month, I play a bit in the market personally, I got out of half of it a few months ago. I would love to buy TSLA, but the price is totally bonkers right now.
Also you might be interested in PE ratios alongside interest rates. You are so close to putting it together on your own, but keep detouring into permabear territory.
As you point out, there is more money in the system and less places for it to go, so not only is the consumption piling into these services, people are also willing to pay a higher ratio for the shares.
This means that PE ratios in isolation cannot tell you anything, a PE ratio to interest rate ratio will tell you everything. As long as confidence isn't shaken in the currency, more of that currency in the system will push interest rates lower. So all you are seeing is where the money goes.
The difference in 2020 is that by now everyone has decades of very strong evidence that the Fed won't allow markets to fall very far or for very long. They've created a one-way bet which they must keep supporting, because the moment that market participants believe the Fed Put is dead, there will be a major crash across all asset classes. And most importantly, the Fed will rightly get the blame and may be restructured as a result... which means the Fed will avoid this outcome at all costs.
Everyone knows this, and everyone knows the Fed knows, and the Fed knows that everyone knows that they know. Which means there can be no escape except via something externally-imposed which allows the Fed to avoid the blame. COVID was an opportunity for this but they did exactly the wrong thing and doubled down, giving people even stronger evidence that they are trapped.
It's a problem.
I agree with you that the Fed has dug a hole I’m not sure they can get out of without some pain. The market nearly melted down 2 years ago when interest rates went up to just barely above historic lows.
It’s hard to raise interest rates when money is being printed.
Lots of crap shops with Chinese production, which they are supposed to list as a "production partner", but they make it really hard for the customer to find.
It IS a great place to open a shop and make money though, you can pay zero dollars and start selling if you figure out their internal SEO system well enough and have the right products. Even without knowing the SEO, if you have the right niches, people will just buy your shit out of the blue, it's crazy!
We've been growing our laser cut wood art shop for over a year, got up to like 432 sales by November and now we are over 1000 sales a few weeks later, which has been insane.
My other shop I started in the summer grew slow, but is now up to like 5-6 sales a day and I think I can get it much higher as I add more and more products, it's also 100 times easier, cheaper, and faster to do than the laser cut stuff.
If we can figure out digital stuff, we'll be laughing.
My one friend pays for his monthly Tesla 3 bills with his Etsy shop.
Will you save more money if you just use Shopify and co? Yes, but you will have to market and bring your own people in, which is the tough part until you've built a huge brand, email list, social strategy and figured out ads, which you can avoid almost entirely for a long time with Etsy and still see success.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/the-twe...
" Twee’s core values include “a healthy suspicion of adulthood”; “a steadfast focus on our essential goodness”; “the cultivation of a passion project” (T-shirt company, organic food truck); and “the utter dispensing with of ‘cool’ as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.”"
But then I didn't know that there was a "twee culture".
> twee, a. (and n. 3) colloq.
> 1. Originally: `sweet', dainty, chic. Now only in depreciatory use: affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish.
> 1905: Punch 8 Mar. 178/1, “`I call him perfectly twee!' persisted Phyllis.”
> 1917: M. T. Hainsselin Grand Fleet Days xv. 91 “Girl: Oh, here's another little gun; isn't it a darling! Isn't it just too twee for words!”
> 1947: E. Hyams William Medium viii. 164 “`Isn't he twee!' said Mary, and pinched his cheek.”
> 1956: G. Durrell Drunken Forest x. 193 “`What twee individuals?' `Those knowledgeable sentimentalists who are forever telling me that it's cruel to lock up the poor wild creatures in little wooden boxes.'”
> 1962: Observer 25 Mar. 25/3 “She has a small and, it must be said, pretty twee cottage.”
> 1967: E. Short Embroidery & Fabric Collage iv. 102 “The best of our designers who have abandoned the rather `twee' decorative type of embroidered picture.”
> 1973: G. Robyns Wimbledon xxix. 192 “There is..a twee Arcadian outdoor studio complete with white trellis and plastic flowers.”
> 1983: Listener 21 July 33/1 “Mike Nichols's thriller-fantasy about dolphins should be as nauseatingly twee as the worst Disney—but it isn't.”
Chambers 11th (because they give an origin)
> twee
> twee /twē/ ( informal)
> adjective
> 1. Small and sweet
> 2. Affectedly or sentimentally pretty or quaint
> ORIGIN: tweet for ‘sweet’, and later tiny and wee
It’s interesting though as it’s the complete opposite of previous generations where kids wanted to be treated as adults as soon as possible (request for responsibility), focused on improving their lot in life, and their passion project was raising a family.
“Cool” was something previous generations also dispensed with in very early adulthood and maybe replaced it with “respect” as something more useful than fetishizing a personality trope.
Not sure if the shift is good or bad but if it is bad you can’t really blame the kids.
https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Bein%27_Quirky_with_Zooey_Descha...
I recently shopped Etsy for a handmade lamp. I filtered to US-only, handmade goods. I waded through pages of junk and finally found a lamp that was being billed as handmade with a design I liked, shipped from the US.
No tracking info to speak of (red flag of drop-shipping!) and when it finally arrived, it was a drop shipped special. From AMAZON. Another cheap, Chinese piece of junk being dubiously billed as "handmade". The seller just tacked on a $15 premium (I found the original product listing on Amazon) and on they went.
There are actual small producers still on Etsy, but recently more and more of my purchasing is shifting away from the Amazon/Etsy/Wayfair world back to eBay, of all places.
All Etsy listings have a flag for "I made this" vs "I designed this and someone else made it", and if the later, the seller is required to specify the production partner. This seller is almost certainly lying about who made it, and you can get them banned for this kind of activity.
My business is a dropshipper for artists that sell custom-print apparel on Etsy and Shopify. This sort of thing is allowed on Etsy, but we're careful to create the listings in a way that Etsy approves. Etsy sells a lot of tshirts.
It's knock-offs all the way down
When it first started out, I had a lot of friends in distant states that had shops on Etsy and I would find really cool, inexpensive stuff from theirs and other shops. I really like the eclectic feel of the stuff people were making and it was original and I have always gotten compliments on the stuff I was buying from their shops.
Last couple years, you really have to search to find stuff that isn't being mass produced in China or overseas. Looking back, thinking of other "eclectic" online shops, it seems to be a pattern. You get the people who set up their shops with their hand made goods, then it gets popular, then it gets overrun with China knockoffs and other people just reselling China goods for a markup.
Even with the requirements in place, I'm not sure how you eradicate it once it gets a foothold like it has now.
I guess the silver lining here is that Etsy is effectively acting as a (closer) competitor to Amazon by letting people resell and drop-ship. Considering how Amazon treats sellers and the inventory commingling issues that arise, it's good to have another similar option.
I think the money they're earning makes it hard to stick with principled rules against the mass-produced items. It's a sad cycle for the early customers who gravitated toward Etsy and similar shops because they were looking for an escape from the cheap products found elsewhere. Not sure how to structure the business model or incentives to prevent this, other than just being small and staying small. (i.e. not taking VC money, not going public, not inviting outside pressure to grow).
I think you're right though, stay small, maybe have two or three smaller platforms to generate the revenue you want, while still making it exclusive to small businesses. I think that approach might keep you under the radar for a longer stretch.
One thing I'll say is that there are a number of business that I use (both B2B and B2C) that are highly specialized but manage to be successful because they are not interested in growth. I suspect there's lots of these out there that are maintaining their own platform or using an out of the box solution, but that most of us never know about them because we don't need to interact.
But yeah, overall there seems to be lots of shops reselling stuff. For example, I recently bought a little dollhouse kit, and I noticed that multiple sellers were selling it. And I've watched youtube vids on how to make money on Etsy, and while the examples I found don't explicitly say to buy stuff from aliexpress, it's clear that they weren't making and packaging those bath bombs themselves.
To be fair it isn't always low quality or terrible, but it's clearly not all made by some lone artisan chiselling away in their workshop either.
Anyway Etsy appears to have a much worse problem with this than even Amazon. The cynic in me suspects that given how much revenue these factories generate for Etsy, they probably aren't too interested in cracking down on it anytime soon.
Which honestly works really well and is one of the most effective filters on the internet. I wish I could similarly filter eBay by "real/old/unique" items.
Or Google images by "real photos" vs. stock/professional photos.
Maybe I was late to Etsy, but it was never this while I was shopping there. There are some people selling handmade goods, for sure, but there's a low signal to noise ratio if that's what you're trying to tune into.
It's just become another avenue for drop shippers, and it seems like Etsy is happy to look the other way & continue with their false marketing, as long as they get their cut.
That is not what I wanted. I wound up buying from an Amazon shop because... well :shrug:
Now, 3 years ago it was not even close to that. Maybe 10%, 20% of sellers. Today it seems like 95% of it is drop-shipped goods.
If I wanted that, I'd go to Aliexpress.
I think, tbh, Etsy will have to kick these shippers out, or rebrand. I know it used to be real rough to move goods in enough volume to have substantial success, but this is wildly different.
There's a lot of money to be made in the expansion, so I expect the trend to continue. There are still a lot of handcrafted items, though, and it might still be the best marketplace for those sellers too.
1. https://www.etsy.com/legal/policy/harmful-misinformation/938...
This policy does not seem to make any statements about political slogans unless you're including within that categorization; harmful miss-information such as anti-vaccine claims and holocaust denial.
"Harmful misinformation" is cancel culture.
Libel and slander are easy limitations for us to agree on. It seems pretty clear to me that we should offer protections to individuals on truthfulness of others speech.
What about package labeling? Company's are required to post truthful listings of their ingredients and labels if their products are shown to do harm. Is this an appropriate limitation of speech?
I suspect we could also agree that there are missinformation and disinformations that if distributed at a wide scales can also be seen go cause harm to individuals. Holocaust denial for instance is a fairly obvious rhetorical tool used to discredit the Jewish experience, promote anti-semitism, and recruit people into organizations seeking to do harm to Jewish people.
Anti Vaccine propaganda also does harm to members of our society as it reduces the efficacy of our public health programs and promotes the spread of deadly disease.
So my last question is only to ask what is the appropriate line for us as a society to draw? It appears Etsy has landed on "harmful falsehoods". This seems relatively sane to me, and I would expect most of the argument to lie in the word harmful rather than falsehood. I worry however that you're implying we might also be arguing about falsehoods.
As a Jew who lost some family in the Holocaust, and whose father and his parents barely got out of eastern Europe in time, I absolutely despise those who just flatly deny historical truths like the number of people tortured and killed by the Nazis. But I'm very mixed about silencing them. Sometimes silencing people has a way of amplifying their voices ever more.
But I also despise Big Tech and Big Media for obviously pushing people to vote against Trump. There's plenty of evidence of this, ranging from suppressing and distorting his speeches to literally suppressing any good news during his tenure.
And by the way, Facebook and Youtube host thousands of Muslim "scholars" who deny or belittle the Holocaust, who accuse Jews of nasty behavior, etc. They are not suppressed or silenced. However, watchdogs like MEMRI and PalWatch that expose these louts are frequently suppressed, their material removed as "hate speech", ironically. Why? Because a cancel mob is constantly trying to take them down, for being supposedly islamophobic which is a trigger word. These same mobs seem to have no problem with the widespread belief across the Muslim world that the Holocaust was a hoax, that 9/11 was perpetrated by Mossad, and similar conspiracy theories.
The same entities that suppress anti-vaxers also suppressed most information about hcq. Why? Because Trump advocated it. Even a group of medical doctors, who have treated thousands of patients with hcq and seen positive results versus covid19, were silenced and their video taken down from Youtube and other mainstream outlets.
Freedom of speech is a fragile thing, easily broken. It's too bad so few young people have studied Voltaire and others who originated the concept that "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."
Voultair's works predate successful democracies, large scale propaganda campaigns, and the internet. I choose these three examples because I believe these are at the heart of the current crisis.
Now I can see from your comment that you have a specific viewpoint of our current political climate. I empathise with your experience, and the feeling that the world is moving in a way that seems counter to your own understanding.
But, I worry that you are finding yourself in the position that I'm most concerned for. You are acting in a small way as a network repeater for exactly the kind of missinformation I'm worried about spreading.
And while I think a widespread doctoral conspiracy is far less likely than the possibility that HCQ is a bad drug to combat Covid-19. I'm far more concerned about the harm that we're doing to our democracy by rejecting the outcomes of what, by nearly all accounts, appears to be a successful election. One that again, for it to be a false narrative would require a huge conspiracy including members of both parties across numerous states. And it's not even so much the faith in the election but the deep resentment afterwards that scares me. How do we repair the divide in the country when truth is being questioned as subjective. What is the shared ground we work from?
Regarding "false narrative" of election fraud: the U.S. has had election fraud and general irregularities and inaccuracies almost from the beginning. It's only when the electorate is split this evenly and the stakes are this high that people begin to pay attention.
The voices that are being suppressed for example on Youtube are not fringe radical conspiracists; they're more mainstream conservatives (who are nonetheless tarred unfairly as "fringe"), people like Mark Dice, Anthony Brian Logan, Candace Owens, Tim Pool, and many others.
I suppose when a platform gets a billion views a day, it can afford to piss off some elements and the bottom line will not be affected. But it is creating ill will, calls for boycott, and eventually an echo chamber effect that does not bode well for dialogue and tolerance.
Look what Reddit did, for example: they shut down TheDonald which was the largest, or one of the largest, subreds with 800,000 participants. The participants dumped Reddit and forked their own reddit-like site, TheDonald.win which began small but has grown enormously.
I'm not a doctor, I'm not an export, but in my searches I can find no, reputable, peer reviewed studies that support HCQ.
I can't think of any reason there would be to suppress HCQ.
I think that if HCQ was a realistic cure we would have substantial reports of it's deployment in tbe rest of the world.
This seems to me to be largely a fantasy that is being used to attempt to put some pretty paint on the current administrations failures during this pandemic.
Is there something I'm missing? Why is this abuse of platform?
The bottom line is, if all of this discussion is suppressed, then the truth will never come out and we are in an Orwellian "1984" situation.
You have to allow expression of ideas, even when it's infuriating. "He's so obviously wrong, he is harming society with his misinformation. People could die!" It's not your place to decide this, nor is it mine. Let the ideas flow, and the good ones will eventually predominate.
HCQ - Discussion on HCQ are not being suppressed broadly. We are proving that right now. The drug continues to be studied, I bet we could find recent publications. What's being suppressed is the broadcasting of health missinformation on places like youtube.
If you go on YouTube and tell people that arsenic cures headaches and people subsequently dig out their rat poison and die. We would hold you accountable for that missinformation.
HCQ does not cure Covid-19 based on numerous studies. Videos and posts saying it does poses an urgent health risk to the population in at least two ways. First it's a powerful and potentially dangerous drug that people should not be administering themselves. People who seek out the drug on their own, through the grey market, or via other pathways certainly out themselves at risk. Second, it is actively disruptive to the attempts at corralling this pandemic. People who have followed this advice after infection might reasonably believe they are cured, going on to spread covid-19.
I can't figure out 1: what is the slippery slope that's being applied here? Doctors don't need youtube to figure out real cures. Scientist arent having their work suppressed. All we have is some dangerous medic advice ... Which is exactly the kind of thing youtube can and I say should consider removing. If these folks believe they have great ideas there are many journals to publish them in. Or they could attempt to convince the NIH.
Unrestricted Freedom - Your position seems to imply all freedoms are at play but I just want to make it clear that all rights imply restrictions of freedom on behalf of others to protect those rights. If I have a right to life, we restrict someone's freedom to shoot me, etc. So hopefully we can focus on unrestricted free speech.
Within free speech we have a number of restrictions at the state and federal level. Libel, slander, giving medical advice, etc. And I'll assume this is also not the argument.
Finally we have free speech on platforms like facebook, youtube, and Etsy. These are not protected in the constitution of the united states but I believe we're discussing the ethical choices these platforms make on their own behalf.
What do you currently see as tbe risk? What is the harm being done? Who is suffering from the removal of these messages?
Because I can tell you what I see on the other side, the risks to leaving them up. I outlined the harm with HCQ, that people will believe that HCQ cures covid-19, people with no medical training of their own. That this will potentially harm them and their country people. And that by pushing these conversations to happen in other domains does no harm to their merit as ideas
But I think the much bigger risk right now is that our social platforms are enabling fringe groups to form and grow like a cult. Where the folks inside start to lose perspective and the group think empowers ideas that are dangerous to our society. There is no good evidence of wide spread voter manipulation in this presidential election, HCQ does not cure covid-19. But there is a faction of the United States today getting advice from randoms on the internet, being fed lies from pod cast.
Our new social platforms seem to be enabling a wide spread cult in a way that we don't understand. Where inside the cult there's been a domain sheer from reality. I worry that like successful propaganda campaigns used on other nations this could end up radicalizing enough of our population to cause meaningful and irepareable harm to our society.
How do we respond to that?
Hcq is safer than Tylenol. Read up on it.
Good talking. :)
Fascinating.
Some people have similar reactions to words like "moist" or "juicy". (Those would be context-dependent for me)
But "yummy" is just hard to hear for some reason. Except when it's a small child expressing their like for cookies or candy. Then it's totally fine.
Anyway, just thought you'd like to hear there are more of us out there :)
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Why are so many people concern with how others should or shouldn't express themselves? Why would anyone care if I want to wear a pink tshirt with a flower. Or use yummy in a sentence.
Sure there are people who are eccentric for sake of being eccentric. I just dont hang with them and that's as much though I will waste on that topic.
Wall Street is not a friend of Trump.
https://reclaimthenet.org/etsy-stop-the-steal-beanies-banned...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/business/wall-street-trump-bi...