Etsy Strike
etsystrike.org
etsystrike.org
one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks.
idk if this is just affecting the retro games / dice communities, or if others are also hit. ALSO you can kinda just sell semi-illegal "grey" goods on etsy? TONS of sellers just selling bootleg game boy games and rarely mentioning that in the product description.
I myself have spent weeks navigating the maze of dodgy NanoVNAs out there. Even one of the official resellers decided to cut costs and ship out poorly functioning clones and try and deny it.
Can’t win so don’t play. Eventually the markets will fall due to crap saturation.
Independent developer developed a flashcart for the Sega Dreamcast and was subsequently ripped off. After he complained on Twitter, most of the community sided with the cloners. They just want their cheap garbage and they have no idea/care regarding the massive effort it takes to develop a device like this.
Never mind the fact that the original developer will be inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen all the value.
He eventually walked away from the project from what I recall which pissed off his original buyers and now others have stepped up with their own devices(And will probably be cloned).
Luckily the one (temporary) respite you have in software/hardware is DRM. If you can implement a complex enough DRM system you can slow down the cloners from stealing your software for some period of time. It sucks but this is the world we live in.
One tactic that a Flashcart manufacturer is using is some sort of serial coded firmware updates that only operates on a specific date code of flashcart. It requires the user to log into an account and get the specific firmware update that is tied to their flashcart. It has caused some complaints from the community regarding ease of use + resale woes(transferring ownership from one legit user to another) but overall this is an interesting solution. It hasn't fully prevented clones but has slowed them down somewhat.
I wish there was some way this could be applied to the non-software world but you can't defeat the physical layer.
Yes, I know flashcarts are also commonly used for homebrew, and I use mine exclusively for homebrew. I also understand that many of the older games have become collectors items, and wanting to play backups instead of the original is another use case. This doesn't change one of it's most common use cases, which is playing illegal roms.
I watched as this high schooler got harassed for years as people did not believe such a product was even possible. After he released it, everyone forgot about all the harassment that this product was vaporware and impossible to develop and now he continued to get hounded for bug fixes to fix timing issues with specific games(he is emulating the complete CD drive and many games expected exact timings to overcome specific undocumented bugs in the system).
Now you have to throw in the threat of clones. To this day he is continuing to fully support the product despite some clones appearing in the wild. A competing product has recently appeared that takes a simpler approach to emulating the CD drive and likely has not had as extensive of a QA process. It remains a question whether this other approach is better compared to PSIO(new product only supports 3 motherboard versions out of dozens + you lose the CD drive altogether) but because the price is cheaper a large chunk of the community does not care and have moved on. The remaining community are now bashing the PSIO team for temporary slowing down development to rewrite the firmware to stop the latest round of cloners.
You can look at it as theft, but others would see it as preserving and promoting software development on a ~28 year old console. This team also gone into excruciating detail to document the system to help enable new software to be developed.
Just from the outside looking in, I don't know if it is worth the effort to spend years making something like this only to be harassed nonstop for years, getting your IP stolen by the Chinese and in end still be making a product that is a grey market item. I suspect that down the road we will have nothing but low quality Chinese made junk on the market if anything at all.
There's always going to be the originals, which will almost definitely hold value for the lifetime of millennials at least.
This is always going to be a small market driven by passion. If you can write a PlayStation flash cart you can almost defiantly make something with a higher market value.
There is an active market for extremely high quality products in this space. Look at Analogue (analogue.co) which is building FPGA reference-quality reproductions of classic consoles (NES, SNES, GENSIS, and recently GB/GBC/GBA). These machines play original carts better than original hardware, they are widely critically acclaimed, and the company keeps outputting fantastic machines. Many speed running and other competitive organizations accept plays running on analogue hardware, but not other knock-off consoles.
The gaming community just seems to suck as customers. You see this with all the hate a publisher gets when they release something that isn't perfect as well.
There are also people buying the Everdrive clones and then expecting support. I have seen these complaints on Reddit and in various forums. I don't know how rampant this is but its so silly.
You're right though, that in general the end users are very much entitled assholes in general, and there are still people buying Everdrive clones, even when the real deal was still in stock and available. But Everdrive is still successful for Krikzz, and all of the clones out there are based on a very outdated design that his newer devices are far surpassing in terms of features and support.
This seems like an opportunity in disguise. Provide paid support, possibly after upselling the crowd to genuine product if required. Then word-of-mouth will be to the original dev's benefit; few will side with the fly-by-night cloners.
DRM makes your product less "hackable" by the customer and less likely to sustain a committed community. It's a very short sighted approach.
Now, I just skip Etsy most of the time, wading through so much junk to find something original is too much work.
But I guess that would still harm the original developers of the IP :\
Had a couple run ins with what looked like good quality product only to get what was clearly just bulk garbage.
Etsy was a neat bonus where I could access handmade small makers, but now that it is a hassle/ I don’t know what I’m getting… I just don’t go there.
Potential use-case for NFTs? :thinking:
As a buyer it is a massive joy to see the price of some item go down when there’s diversity of sellers instead of a monopoly.
How does one go about getting a product made through aliexpress?
Redbubble lets you upload designs for t-shirts, phone cases, etc, and make them available in their web storefront. You only get a small slice of the sale price, but it's very easy to get your designs "out into the world."
I come up with mechanical designs as well as "artsy" things - which could be mass produced... but never like a logo-shirt or something as mentally ephemeral..
---
Right now I am modeling an 'thing' as a 3d printable (or injection molded at scale) attachment to a common house hold power tool, but can come in various grades (home|pro|industrial)...
I messed up and had a bunch of money in 2020 that I should have bought a printer with, but spent on stupid stuff like food and living expenses instead...
Other items are home-goods improvements/desires...
Think of me as the SamCo (Like RonCo) of my personal universe... but I am hoping some of that bleeds put into other universes such as xsmasherCo :-)
I bought bulk washing machine motors for millions of dollars and audio amplifier modules for a few thousands and N95 masks for a few hundred.
Also, take a look at ImportYeti.com
Low quality/durability items are not what most people want most of the time. It's sometimes all they can afford, or they think they found a good deal and feel ripped off when the item arrives and they discover that it's low quality/durability, but either way they aren't happy about it. What people want is high quality goods at prices they can afford.
I'm from the Netherlands. One of the most successful retail stores here is "Action", which in the category of low quality garbage sinks to the absolute bottom.
Everybody knows it's garbage. One may buy a pair of scissors there and have it break down in 2 months of usage. So then people just buy another one. It's not strictly a budget issue, most shoppers can afford a good pair of scissors, one that lasts 10 years, but they prefer the cheap one anyway.
"Alibaba shopping" is mainstream here. Everybody buys their small items there. One of my colleagues, whom is upper middle class, was proudly telling me how he buys a "value" pack of 10 phone chargers every year. They're all terrible and soon break down, so then he'll just move to the next one. He could just buy a single decent one, but no.
I wish you were right, but you're not. People just want the absolute cheapest thing, and they want it now.
Having that kind of an attitude with device chargers is a great way to damage your devices! Does that guy feel the same about his phone as he does his chargers?
There are times when the cheapest option is a smart way to go, and times when it's so convenient that it's worth picking up the cheap item even knowing it'll cost you later. Most of the time though I think people like having nice things. I'll confess I do know people who have money but always buy the cheapest toilet paper. There's no understanding some people.
I don't know if this extends to the US, but over here there has been a massive shift in retail. The middle is gone. There's value shopping and there's luxury shopping. Very low-end and very high-end.
Stores in the mid segment, which used to dominate retail, are falling apart. Some of these chains existed for over a century, had stores in every dutch city. They're all going bankrupt or already are.
They have no reason to exist. Their products may be of a slightly better quality, but barely so, as they too go for cheap Chinese garbage. They don't really offer better service because they can't afford to. Their staff are clueless teenagers for being cheap.
That’s generally how a race to the bottom happens. Short term narrow minded outlooks that barely consider how one action effects another. It’s terrible long run for buyers, employees, and the planet.
Which means we need to stop kidding around and call it what it is. You can't offer people a cheap unsustainable choice and a more expensive better choice and then hope and pray that this magically works out well.
There should not be an unsustainable choice. At the very least we should start pricing in externalities into unnaturally cheap products.
It isn't really possible to produce a 5$ radio, ship it across the world and still run a profit. It's possible at the cost of a livable wage, basic human rights, reasonable work conditions, proper waste management, underpricing fossil fuel usage, special tax agreements, and so much more.
The radio costs 50$, not 5$.
Plenty of industries deal with this in various ways and manage to survive and the consumer ends up winning in the end. Restaurants, fashion, heck even app stores all deal with this and the end result is better products for the consumer at cheaper prices.
No one has a monopoly on designing yet another cute bracelet or rainbow lanyard or generic pillow cover.
Etsy is for artists/creators. If you add curation to the mix one side needs to take a hit - and it ain't going to be your wallet.
Basically the reason for Etsy to exist is "direct to consumer" model, with low intermediary overhead and 0 setup hurdles.
(If you ever tried to get a product on a supermarket shelf, that's how it is to get onto a successful curated store shelf)
But if i am selling someone elses stuff, then i am in the business of curation.
They also decided to be way more lax, than some people want it to be.
I understand the desire to make sure that goods are authentic, but that is the only reasonable argument in the whole strike manifesto.
B) Are investors not allowed to make any return on their investments in form of dividends?
Because otherwise their brand is asymptotically approaching just being a more expensive Ali Express.
So no... They don't need to. And curated storefronts were many - I knew of at least 5 startups in that space - they all folded.
If they do not, many sellers will stop using them. Many buyers will stop using them. They will have competition.
Let them fail.
Whatever comes next will be small. They will lack some of the things I want for many years.
Also - monopolies are never good.
Etsy does listen to it's consumers, at least some times. The cost of complaining here is commensurate with the potential benefit.
"Why?"
"Because if they don't they'll fail."
"Now you're arguing for a monopoly."
You can't possibly be arguing in good faith at this point.
PS: And then miss our further interaction
Before manufactured goods were on the platform, you were basically browsing items that were either handmade or hand curated. It was a much better experience.
Based on my experience, curators add an extra 50%+ to the price of a product. Which is the cost of well curated storefront.
Google has zero incentive to actually win that conflict, as frequently the SEO spam serves up ads from which google directly profits.
You don't go there. They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?
Let them fail. It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...
Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past they've done a great job living up to that promise for me, and I have to assume others have had similar experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium knockoffs and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose our business.
So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer Etsy over other options.
There is no way around this in the free market. Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE. Its about making people consume. Making people want sh*t that in reality they could live without. Overloaded by stimulii, people break. People want the dream. They hear about the dream. People want the cheapest thing so they can 100x instead of 2x. People who knock things off want the most popular thing. This is competition working. Its a race to the bottom or we sacrifice infinite growth. There is no other way. You either create new markets, create new consumers, or steal other peoples cut of the pie. "Disruption".
This past weekend I noticed a Dollar General had popped up nearby. They’re like weeds in rural Indiana.
I have no doubt that within a year or two the small grocery store will be gone, and I’ll no longer have a convenient place to buy that bread I like so much.
Yes, I do want to go back to mom and pop shops.
Dollar General pops up, where people are very, very, price sensitive.
That "mom and pop" shop is either for tourists or is taking an unreasonable rent off the local economy.
I now live in a rural area and I like my local artisanal stores. But they cannot sustain the economy, due to very high overhead.
Apple is not an ad company, Tesla is not an ad company, Microsoft mostly isn’t an ad company, Netflix isn’t an ad company.
There are very few of the large companies that are ad companies.
And my experience with Etsy is that it's a crafty people selling low quality handmade stuff.
Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.
Well, that's your loss. But it may be Etsy's loss, too, if they allow chintzy crap from overseas to drive the quality sellers off their platform. Amazon has embraced the race to the bottom, so I don't see anybody else competing effectively with them without (at the very least) being all-in on Chinesium.
Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not a good reason to ignore doing something that your business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with buyers).
They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're just a shitty ebay.
If that were so - then your local supermarket is a curated store. (which would be a preposterous claim to make)
So what is the bottom line? Consumers get to enjoy products that are 2x cheaper and 4x worse. Individual makers get priced out and have to join the drone ranks. And the corporate owners of trademarks and algorithms rake in so much cash they don't know where to invest it anymore.
Sadly, this is happening across every sector, and most people seem to be just fine with it.
It's totally possible on an e-commerce platform. Just nobodies quite managed it yet.
I still occasionally find small sellers on Etsy whose stuff interests me and I always wonder why they choose to sell via Etsy and I’m sure it’s: because it works and because it’s less hassle than the other options. The traffic to your shop is worth swimming in a sea of knockoffs and doodads. And that’s what you compete with on the internet at large anyway.
Our biggest electronics chain Conrad however... oh jesus they have gone really downhill some years ago with their website design - the search is broken, metadata for parts are (sometimes completely) wrong, and to make it worse even the in-store staff has to rely on the website instead of a dedicated ERP software which means if you are searching for a part with specific specs (e.g. temperature) even the store staff can't help you any more!
I mean, I get your pain. But on the other hand I'm just sick about the Mittelstand complaining that online is eating their lunch... they have all sat on their wealth and glory and thought they had carved out their forever niche guaranteeing themselves profits without having to do anything any more, and every single one that collapses fills my heart with a bit of joy.
What the fuck!
I just left and bought something online.
(I know there are high end hifi shops that will let me try headphones. But I wasn't looking for 500€ headphones, I just wanted something that didn't sound like shit. Thomann is perfect for that.)
Record player sales are booming though, according to the shop I went to.
It still puzzles me how much of a disconnect exists between e-commerce and brick & mortar, almost 25 years from Gates's "Business at the speed of thought".
Those people who come in the store should be converted right there and then, by making it trivial to order in-store a home delivery option that is price-competitive with non-b&m-equipped businesses. Keep razor-thin local inventory that commands a premium for the fact that you get it there and then, and everything else can be ordered. This should allow you to offset a decent amount of showroom costs while still competing with web-only operations.
If the price difference is small enough and the friction low enough, making the order in-store becomes a better option than leaving, sitting down somewhere, searching again for the item on some other store, etc etc.
There are still big opportunities out there for retailers who can figure out that sweet spot.
I think that's a good thing. The business of "holding things in a building" that are occasionally purchased and don't benefit from last-mile caching should go the way of the dinosaur. It will be good to get the space back. The thing that's really needed is a community space but the economics of it are hard unless you're selling stuff. My city tries to promote this stuff with arts council grants.
This will never happen with Etsy, Amazon, or any other publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible. If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will. If you want a platform like you are describing it will have to be privately owned.
I feel like this is in semi-myth territory. Yes, there have been cases where shareholders have sued company leadership because they weren't making them as much money as they could. But it's not quite as clear-cut and well-tested in the courts as you make it sound.
Management has a ton of latitude to run the business as they see fit. The "remedy" for bad business decisions is supposed to be divesting and starting a competitor, not the courts.
Cases like Dodge v. Ford or Caremark are odd because the board was basically not running a business at all: Ford flat-out said he was doing something not for the business, but in support of his philanthropic beliefs. Caremark was so asleep at the helm that they racked up a quarter-billion dollars in silly fines.
Anyone can, of course, sue over anything, but if it's even vaguely legitimate (and the "facts" in Shlensky v. Wrigley are pretty bonkers, IMO), they won't win.
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the
benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
number, to help them build up their lives and their homes."
It's been argued that if he said less ("No, just no"), or a bit more ("And this will let us recruit the best workers/expand our customer base/etc"), he would have been fine. This commentary lays that argument out nicely: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/603
Of course. Because by definition you’ve sacrificed the short term and the long term for nothing. But I don’t think anyone here would debate that so I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at.
It isn't a straight-forward call to make. The current status-quo with resellers might be making money now, but there will be long-term brand damage in exchange. Will their business still be viable in 5 years if they develop a reputation for being Aliexpress lite?
No. Optimize for shareholder value.
Amazon shareholders, for instance, are happy to make little in way of profit because Amazon management has shown an ability to increase the value of the enterprise.
In general though, the market is legitimately skeptical of most managers which is not a bad thing.
> If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will.
This is exactly what happened at Etsy when they fired the previous CEO and installed Josh Silverman.
Etsy could certainly argue their bottom line in the long term will be helped by curating a higher quality marketplace and getting rid of junk sellers, if that's a problem.
Most managers are not Steve Jobs.
There has been this odd trend over the last few years of mischaracterizing what this means/what that duty translates to. People talk about it as if every CEO has to redline the company at all times and never think about longterm consequences for literally any reason. Every single cent that can be extracted right now must be extracted or the investors will rise up in all their anger crying out "FIDUCIARY DUTY!" as they drag the poor CEO off kicking and screaming.
Companies can think longterm. They're allowed to sacrifice short term profits for sustainability/longevity. I don't get where people get this idea that they can't. To me, "fiduciary duty" has become almost memetic - it's some weird hand wave-y line people throw out to excuse businesses being short-sighted, as if they never had a choice.
They act as if they have no choice, that there is some legal mandate to just wring out a company all day every day and damn all consideration beyond “I can make another dollar this second.”
That is not accurate. They are required to operate in a manner that is satisfactory to their owners, who delegate that responsibility to the board of directors, who then set policy for management to execute.
There is no difference between a publicly traded and privately owned company in terms of the responsibilities of the management and board to their shareholders.
There are numerous incentives to maximize shareholder returns (eg taxation incentives, equity value improvement, dividends), but there is nothing in law or otherwise that applies a fiduciary duty to management or the directors of a company to maximize either dividends or capital value.
Eg
*hello* there
hello there
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course, uppercase is appropriate for an acronym or initialism that actually is spelled that way, such as SEO in the comment we're replying to.
\*this\* becomes *this*.
And before you ask, to show the backslash, you add another backslash. \\*this\\* becomes \*this\*
I'm an Apple One subscriber. I only listen to Apple Music during my morning three-mile walk (45-50 minutes). The rest of the day, I'm working, and I don't listen to music, then.
I use their "Create A Station Based on This Song" feature, like Pandora. It generally works fairly well (I think Pandora works better, but they also limit skips -even for paid subscriptions).
I like to hear obscure, indie, music, from artists off the beaten path. I tend to immediately skip, when I get a song that is in my library, or that I've heard a lot (like the song used to create the station). I also tend to skip a lot, anyway, because a lot of undiscovered music is obscure for a reason.
One time, I was listening to relaxing, wordless, techno/trance, and a freaking Lady Gaga pop song plops in, like an airborne gift from a dyspeptic, incontinent, buzzard. The only possible relation to what I was listening to, was that one of her band members was maybe playing a sampler. She's a talented artist, and all that, but that was not what I wanted to hear. It was quite jarring.
Someone is selling eardrums. That was probably an AI hiccup.
In any case, my suggestion was to create "Undiscovered Music" stations, so you say "Play more songs like this one, but ones I've not heard before, and are definitely not in my library."
I would want to hear indie tracks, and songs from obscure artists. I listen to a lot of different types of music, and most of my tastes are heavily represented in the indie space. I often find it difficult to discover music that I'm not already familiar with.
I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless. They'd probably kill it, soon afterwards, because "Nobody uses this service."
The current push for "Bigger, Louder, MOAR!" is something that does not favor craftsmanship, Quality, or independence.
Why would they do that? It would be massively unpopular, per your own comment, so I can't understand why that would be a commercial move.
It's not even like an indie radio station selling out, because a radio station is at least (usually) an independent competing entity. It's more like a record shop inexplicably filling its death metal section with madrigals.
It would simply lose those customers who liked it, and not even gain any others, since pop customers want the opposite thing (and are already amply catered to) so wouldn't even click on it to begin with.
In my experience, "monetization" people Just. Can't. Bear. To. See. Anything. Not. Making. Money.
It seems to be something that causes them physical discomfort, and they regularly destroy so many good things, by trying to make money from them.
Call me a cynic.
Asking for an all-new list is akin to asking for a HIIT workout plan, but without the pauses.
I've had issues with these. There's so many spammy, garbage playlists, that it's impossible to pick out the good ones (and I have found gems, but it's a lot of work).
This is tough, as a lot of artistic items have quality control that is purely subjective. But, often these places are not much more curated than the vendor room of a convention. There will be some nice things; but claims of curation are all too often over sold.
A few years ago I also toured souvenir shops in Malmo, Sweden. I asked the proprietor of when where the merchandise came from, she said it all came from China.
With a global economy, that's just the way things are.
and they actually do prosecute it:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/owner-old-town-albuquerqu...
To be clear, not all art in Santa Fe is Native American, but a large amount of it is. And, yes, there's a large amount of junk being peddled as well that is absolutely imported. As a side note, there's a yearly Santa Fe Indian Market that's pretty fantastic and brings artists in from all over the place. None of that will be mass produced or imported and it is worth a visit.
They are not another ebay and shouldn't want to be.
So, that means no learning from what others had done, which is the entire idea of publicly posted patents vs trade secrets.
The patent system is literally causing the opposite of innovation to happen in certain technology spaces.
Even if these were prosecuted, would it really help in electronics, for example?
Since everybody has access to the same chips and creating a PCB is cheap and relatively quick, what would you even prosecute? Sure, you could prosecute the exact clones, but, most people are just following the manufacturer reference designs from the datasheet so there's nothing stopping someone else from doing that.
The problem is that once you prove there is a market for a piece of electronics, somebody in China will now pick off that market for cheaper. Is this not capitalism at its most raw?
The problem that this causes in electronics is that this trashes scaling as well as customer support. You can sell a $100 thingit, create a reddit community, and mostly tell people they're on their own with the occasional answer from somebody semi-official. Or you can sell a $10K+ thingit and actually provide excellent customer support.
In both cases, you will get cloned and ripped off--which limits the amount of money you can get from the market.
The current "solution" is to always have a cloud component which can't be cloned. This is, of course, anathema to open source, but I haven't seen anybody in open source have a good answer for this, either.
At the end of the day, any increase in sales means more revenue for Etsy. The company is following the same digital flea market model that Amazon does, and it has all of the same perverse incentives.
Some friends and I were discussing this point recently: Etsy has become Ebay, sans the auction veneer.
Truly frustrating that they can't implement some sort of quality control, but that's a hard problem to crack at scale.
I work in this space and can provide a little correction/illumination:
The folks selling printed phone cases, gameboy cases, etc are generally not shipping these over from aliexpress. They are almost all printed on demand from printers local to the country of the buyer (there's a half dozen big phone case printers just in the US). Nothing is mass produced except the blanks.
The sellers come up with the artwork and titles/tags/descriptions/etc. Software like mine creates the Etsy listings and processes orders, routing to appropriate printers which ship directly to the customer. Etsy provides an API for this.
Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property. They jealously guard their high-resolution images, but that doesn't stop the industry from having a big ripoff problem. Low-effort ripoffs copy a public low-res image, which makes a terrible print but potential customers/victims might not be able to tell from an online mockup image. High-effort ripoffs involve hiring an artist to make a new work substantially (or identically) similar to something else. Both cheat the intellectual property of the original artist, but they're using the same print companies.
Whether this stuff is "handcrafted" is somewhat ambiguous - is a book handcrafted? Is a set of patterns for a dress or a piece of furniture handcrafted? Something 3d printed? Certainly someone came up with the artwork "by hand", but printing it on a tshirt or phone case is pretty mechanical.
Well they're selling properly licensed products that use their images that are protected by copyright (and potentially trademark).
The supposedly appropriate response would be to have the ability to sue those that rip them off in exactly the same way that Nike or Chanel or any other manufacturer would.
There may be some liability to the print companies (and perhaps the other companies in the pipeline) for producing product that doesn't have a properly validated copyright on the image. Especially if they are producing in bulk/for general sale to the public.
So it should be in Etsy's interest (and yours, and the print companies) to ensure that what a seller is asking you to produce is not ripped off.
There is no such thing as "validated copyright" - you own a copyright on the content you produce and there's no official registrar. Determining ownership is an adversarial process - everyone says "this is mine, the other guy ripped me off". Small players don't have the legal resources to prosecute.
Services like mine which manage whole libraries can pretty easily weed out the bad players because they tend to be full of TM violations. But the marketplaces have it more difficult.
Nobody has come up with a good solution to this yet.
There are hundreds of online tutorials promising you how to create designs for sale on Etsy - even if you have not a shred of design talent. How? Go to Canva, find a good-looking template and slap on it on as many POD products as possible. Etsy is simply overstuffed with products like this. Many of these sellers are probably making good sales. Does this count as something being 'designed'? Does it even matter?
The perception that Etsy is a marketplace mostly of artists and "makers" is one that hasn't been true for a while.
Etsy tends to attract the more sophisticated POD merchants because it's more complicated (separate printer required) and there's a $0.20 listing fee so there's more upfront cost. Most successful POD merchants have thousands or tens of thousands of designs, so the listing fees really add up.
The most successful POD merchants have small design teams that produce content every day. That may or may not fit your mental image of an Etsy seller. But the low-effort non-artists who took a guru's "make money fast in POD" online course tend to do very poorly, and don't make up the bulk of Etsy.
I've been trying to think of a way to use blockchain to prove "who posted it first" but it's got a major network problem (nobody uses it because nobody will use it because nobody uses it).
It is very hard to find real hand craft on Etsy, if you don't have direct link for exact creator.
AI-powered bots shut down legitimate seller accounts seemingly at random, while Etsy looks the other way on resellers who undercut authentic makers by peddling sweatshop-produced junk in clear violation of the spirit of the Etsy community.
AI lockouts are a huge problem on Amazon, too, not to mention many of the sites and services used by HNers. I've said it before and I will say it again:
How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action?
No warning.
No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy."
No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative.
No recourse.
There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case.
At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone with enough power to force them to do a better job.
And then they fix that one situation and go on about their normal business. At least that is what it seems to me. I would wish for something more long term to happen but I am becoming less hopeful.
I bought a couple of things on their site a while ago, but have never been a seller.
Somehow I keep getting emails intended for sellers in France and other places, trying to coordinate shipments or orders, or complaining about issues with orders. This has been going on for at least 4 years and I've reported it to Etsy multiple times with no follow-up at all on their side.
Manufacturing has moved to these places in some cases because many customers just can't tell the difference or couldn't care less about the difference
Are the people organized under that website all wearing leather shoes hand sewn in Maine cottages? Or are they wearing more sweatshop produced junk
Your argument does not hold in this case, because Etsy was established and sustained as a marketplace for handmade goods. This is true also for customers, who visited Etsy to support independent artists and artisans and to purchase unique and limited items.
Many of the sellers of cheap knock-offs are engaged in blatant theft of IP and misrepresentation as independent artists.
> Are the people organized under that website all wearing leather shoes hand sewn in Maine cottages? Or are they wearing more sweatshop produced junk
I don’t see what this has to do with anything. But, yes, many sellers try hard to support other artisans. Etsy is but one part of a culture and economy of handmade goods that includes in-person shows and other off-Etsy venues.
As the previous poster said though, why would I care about the distinction? Are handmade goods supposed to be better? Seems like a ludicrous proposition. Machines are more precise and faster, and so they make things cheaper. The quality depends on the processes used, and materials, not on whether machines are used.
I've noticed kitchen goods are usually the same. And it's not just Etsy... I've even seen Kickstarters that haven't finished, yet the product can already be purchased on AliExpress :D
Here are a few quick examples I found on Etsy. I just searched for "toys" and these were in the top results. Some of these even use the same photo as AliExpress:
1) https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1173294523/baby-bath-toys-di...
https://a.aliexpress.com/_v1syYw
2) https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1082197084/silicone-stacking...
https://a.aliexpress.com/_vD7zYA
3) https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1036245657/rainbow-stacking-...
https://a.aliexpress.com/_vDw2AA
As far as I am concerned Etsy is not a place for home made goods, it's a place to learn how marketing and drop shipping works.
I did not know exactly what the star seller program was. It requires that in the last three months of shop data [1]:
> 95%+ of first messages in a thread are responded to within 24 hours.
> 95%+ of orders ship on time with tracking
> 95%+ of orders receive 5 star reviews
> minimum of 10 orders and $300 in sales
In the petition [2] they explain the Star Seller Program as:
>Passive aggressive efforts to influence seller behavior are counter-productive and result in a worse customer experience. Rather than making us mad at buyers who leave glowing 4-Star reviews, or making us feel that we can no longer offer letter class shipping on items like cards and stickers, Etsy should leave us to individually do the best we can for each and every customer in each and every situation.
[1] https://www.etsy.com/starseller
[2] https://www.coworker.org/petitions/cancel-the-fee-increase-w...
Also note that it says "95% of orders" not "95% of ratings." We get feedback, maybe, like 40% of the time if we're lucky. If you're not begging for ratings, you won't hit that number.
They aren't overtly doing much with the Star Seller program yet, but I can almost guarantee that they will in the future. I'm 99% sure it's already influencing search rankings (since they influence them in other ways already, such as prioritizing listings with free shipping). I understand some of that is to promote sales which benefits the seller and Etsy, but if they are or start using Star Seller to tweak results, that's not really benefiting anyone that I can see.
Maybe for average of ratings, not for average of all things that could be rated, whether rated or not. Those are very different things.
eBay has had super sellers for 20 years now. Not as stringent but it is beneficial to customers.
Meanwhile, Amazon continues to dilute their store with no control over review authenticity. Not saying Etsy isn’t prone to that but Amazon’s entire business model is to let these things slide. Etsy is at least doing something.
I really don’t care about sellers. I want a place for high quality products. Period.
The petition does make a good point that some products may be better just shipped dirt-cheap without paying for tracking, but overall Etsy is pushing sellers to provide better service and do things that bring in more revenue, both for them and the seller.
It's hard to really gauge the size of something from just measurements. One thing that often annoys me about product pages is that have a bazillion images of the thingymabob, but don't actually have a bunch of images where it shows the thingymabob in perspective; e.g. somehow actually holding it, a wider-angle picture of it in regular context (e.g. a painting actually framed on a wall in a regular living room or whatnot), and that kind of stuff.
Anyway, just an aside.
I also see a 4-star review as "excellent", but many of these platforms seem to see anything less than 5 stars as "bad".
So what review do you leave? 5-star because the product is "as advertised" and otherwise good? Or 4-star because it's not quite what you were looking for? I think both options are reasonable.
The Real Problem™ here is thinking you can automate these sort of things without any human judgement and expect to somehow end up with a reasonable response. There will always be outliers that any human would judge as "yeah, that's just silly" but computers don't care.
My ex was a clothing Seller on Etsy. A 4-star review because something didn't fit right was super stressful for her, because it meant her average rating went down and her seller status might be demoted.
I think a better option is to contact the seller directly if you are dissatisfied with the product. That way you aren't transferring your problem to them.
That’s exactly the type of person I was before I became a dev and learned about these insane algorithms. As someone else on this post said 3 star - good 4 star - great 5 star - absolutely amazing perfect service! went above and beyond
- The product is as advertised, built well, shipped on time and with appropriate packaging, and all these other objective things.
- My personal opinion of the product.
AirBnB kind of does that, although it still aggregates in a single score at the end.
I know some folks already hinted at this in the comments, but it's beyond bizarre to me to read this quote on HN. The size of something is literally the measurements. If the measurements are wrong, that's one thing... I'll sometimes cut out cardboard or mask things off in painters tape if I want to know how they fit in a space. Accurately reported measurements should never be hard to "really gauge."
https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/your-star-selle...
https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/introducing-sta...
Indeed, Etsy even helps you with that; from their FAQ:
> What happens if I can’t respond to messages on weekends and bank holidays?
> If you’re having a difficult time responding to messages during certain time periods, consider setting up an auto-reply, which counts as a response.
They actually hide some stuff in there. Tracking is expensive, if you add tracking to all your orders than someone else will offer a lower price and out-compete you.
Buuut, if you buy your shipping labels directly from etsy that counts as having tracking, even when there isn't any tracking.
So the actual effect of this is just to force people to buy their shipping labels through etsy directly. I presume etsy gets a bulk discount and keeps the difference.
Yes. A lot of ecommerce companies (Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Shopify, etc) have a labels side-business that works in this way. Volume-based discounts from carriers.
This is going to be subject to Goodhart's law[1]. As soon as buyers are aware their favourite sellers on Etsy are evaluated like this many of them will always leave 5 star reviews, while others will try to use the threat of a < 5 star review to get special consideration from the vendor.
This is the same reason many people leave automatic 5 star reviews for gig workers unless something goes grotesquely wrong.
small, handcrafted goods -> larger scale production -> mass-market aliexpress/ebay
Even as our businesses have grown, the ease of use and convenience are hard to beat if you want to keep them to something casual. Sure, we could pop up a Shopify, ramp up advertising, really grind to get it "out there," but then we're spending more time and money to end up at the same spot.
A smaller marketplace won't have that sort of network effect. The only way I'd see it succeeding is if they really blitz on marketing and making themselves a real outlet for makers (and make sure they're perceived that way over Etsy). Their brand recognition and entrenchment would be super hard to overcome.
They know they provide value and that their fees can be higher.
If you think that the value of their service is too low - then you will leave. If you leave. - then they'll have to address it. Original Etsy sellers have the leverage.
"The artist and gift will be a surprise"
Hey, if it works for them, great. I just can't see using it.
98/100 will support the idea. 2/100 will pay 2x for something because it isn't a Chinese knockoff.
They aren't compatible markets, but a company who values profit above all else will start to cater to the lowest common denominator and push out people who care about quality, locally sourced, handcrafted etc. and become another generic retailer.
There are two sites in the UK that do this, with slightly different emphasis on each:
I think that is sort of the point, if someone were to niche down to actual makers of things. One could make it an exclusive club and spend money to get exclusive items for launch, for example get specially made pieces from well known makers and they can number them if they want, like 1/100 special thing-a-mabob.
Have actual interviews with artisans/makers, slowly ramping up sellers. Take customer complaints seriously. Like if its reported that artisan_maker_27 started shipping cheapo shit from where-ever then they are kicked off the platform.
I think the idea is to do as much as you can without scaling. No AI. No ads on the platform (certainly advertise for it).
There were a bunch of them. Most failed...
> The argument against it is likely, "it won't scale", but I think and argument could be made that it could.
A curated and authenticated store is a very expensive endeavour. They're complaining about hike in fees now, imagine how many would be able to accept hundreds of dollars in standing fees and cut from sales on top of that.
I wish things were more like in the physical world, where you might have hundreds or thousands of "etsys". Each having a unique vibe, products on offer, and so on. Each of these individual stores would have a reasonable and stable margin and relatively stable group of customers. They can all co-exist.
No such thing on the internet though. Inevitably you always end up with one place to rule them all. Easy for buyers, no need to browse many websites. Easy for sellers, reach the maximum audience with the least effort.
The model always breaks, and the platform facilitating the exchange turns "evil".
The conclusion is primitive. We're all responsible for this. Consumers always pick convenience over any alternative, and they do buy knock-offs. Buyers will always be attracted to singular platforms, want to pay the lowest fee for the largest reach.
We all want "something for nothing", and this is what we end up with. It is the accumulated outcome of billions of tiny selfish decisions.
For digital products, say "content", it has been there since the early beginnings. When people had their "independent" blog, already then they had blog rolls linking to other bloggers and over time a class of top bloggers emerged. A handful getting all traffic, the other 99.99% gets nothing.
Before search engines, we had directories. Lists of links. But there's only so much space, so a few sites get all traffic, the rest none.
We democratized it with things like Digg, but in reality 3 people decided what gets on the homepage.
So yes, it seems to me that centralization of attention is built-in. Or rather, it's a human condition. A centralized service offers more convenience and people tend to do the most convenient thing. Creators do the exact same thing.
...and then we blame the platform. My point is that WE did it. WE created the situation, not the platform.
As for physical goods, I consider that to be somewhat of a separate topic. The internet in itself does not magically produce and ship ultra cheap goods. Such a thing is only possible due to very specific international trade circumstances.
The place where these physical world "etsys" live is usually Shopify
Can it though? Even in the physical world, larger firms tend to buy up the smaller unique firms and turn them into monotonous big business. Eventually everything becomes McDonalds and Wal-Mart-- also easy for buyers because they only have to go to one familiar place. As much as people hate that, it does appeal to the natural desire for simplicity and repetition. Even though you can find obscure and out of the way stores to shop, most of the time people just go to the big box store they know already
But this made me wonder (since I'm not an Etsy buyer or seller myself), who is their primary market/customer persona? Based on it being heavily craft-focused my naive guess would be stay-at-home/homemaker/caretaker people?
I've tried to use it a few times to shop for used or handmade shelves/lights/tables but always ended up going with Ebay or AptDeco. I found the UI too confusing and there were too many low-quality and super-high-quality pieces when I just wanted something decent but not too expensive.
Edit: My method is something like, search for what I'm looking for, flip through items to try to find things that actually look like a person made them (i.e. not made of metal or plastic, unless the shop specifically specializes in those; not identical to five hundred other listings), then look over reviews and search for the creator online. Most creators maintain their own web presence outside of Etsy, too. It doesn't seem that onerous to me, you'd want to do that research anyway for a nice, hand-made item, wouldn't you? I don't really understand how people get scammed by drop-shippers on Etsy. Do you just click "Buy Now" on the first listed item you like the picture of?
I found this clarification interesting. If a headline said “Uber Strike”, I think most of us would assume it was the drivers (rather than Uber’s in-house employees) striking. I naturally thought the exact same thing here.
It's difficult, though. What is hand made? Can you use a CNC? 3D printer? What percent must be hand made? I use a table saw and mitered joints instead of truly hand made dovetail joints.
In my view, go to town! Craftsmen in the past might have done a lot by hand but they used every tool they could!
But I understand other opinions may differ.
Unless a specific term is regulated by law, it's just marketing
But with a little bit of effort I could find some pretty neat art to decorate my walls with.
I'm not sure how this could ever continue to have the best interests of artisanal crafters and sellers in mind when that market is clearly smaller than the one needed to grow the business to successful after-IPO public company. Someone should make a competitor with no aims to go public and you'll probably wind up with a rather large successful business not beholden to anyone except artisanal sellers and more in line with benefiting artisans long term.
Not everything needs to be a public company and not everyone needs to take on VC money. You have to know your goals and then assess different monetary avenues to accomplish them, you can have a large private company without diluting the vision, just not maybe a multibillion dollar organization but that's okay, not everything needs to be that either -- but it will be what your forced into an attempt at making if you take on outside capital.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I very much agree that it does tend to play out like that but from the strike it seems like some vocal segment of Etsy's market is no longer actually served by Etsy -- and more importantly (all speculation) Etsy has determined it's not in the best interest of Etsy to serve them so there is some niche to now be captured.
I'm sure any serious seller has considered running their own site, or maybe they have one already, and they know the sales are nowhere near what they get on Etsy because of the built-in audience. If that wasn't the case they would've left Etsy already and not have to deal with Etsy telling them what to do.
A "strike" for a few days accomplishes nothing if people just go back and continue buying and selling. The simple answer for them is to start their own site but that will involve doing everything themselves at significant cost. The fact they don't want to do that should be proof enough for them that Etsy is worth the fees
That is to say, I find it hard to think of how this problem could be avoided as long as companies are rules by profit motive.
If I design a t-shirt, and then farm out the manufacturing and shipping, is that okay? How about if I also hire a designer?
What if I'm just clicking "go" on a laser cutter etching things onto other things that I ordered on aliexpress? Or 3D printing designs that I bought somewhere else?
Are these handmade goods?
This isn't just a problem at etsy, btw. Every single craft fair is also dealing with this. Just endless seas of people selling what looks mostly like MLM "nutrition" and "lifestyle" products.
Nothing really. Most people do not pay attention to how the sausage is made. They don't care if the car service they use was a total toxic fratbro culture using unsustainable pricing to lure in users. They just wanted "cheap" rides without caring about why they were cheap. Just as another comment on this topic suggested they don't care about original as long as the thing they want is cheaper.
So no, I don't really think that educated populace will stop supporting shit practices because they can't be bothered.
Like one possible story is that Etsy does this and it's shitty for sellers and maybe a lot of buyers too, but it ends up making Etsy successful in the long-run so they don't care.
That's not the story I'm telling though, it's one where Etsy chases medium-term revenue at the cost of their long-term niche and thus their long-term success. If me and GP are right, in theory Etsy itself ought to not want this to happen.
Like what if you had a fine dining restaurant where things are going okay, and someone comes in and is like "Hey guys, I noticed we're spending a lot of time washing plates. We'd be able to serve X% more customers if we just like scraped off the food and did a quick rinse." The restaurant tries it, it works for a bit until diners see specs of old food on their plates, the restaurant's reputation tanks, they lose all their customers, and they go out of business.
I think most restaurants are structured such that this does not happen. The restaurants correctly see that even though it seems like doing this might make some graphs go up in the short-term, it will actually make everything terrible in the long-term, and so they don't do it.
And again, this isn't about like, benevolent restaurant owners valuing the custom experience even if it's bad for the bottom line. Washing the plates thoroughly is good for the bottom line; any sufficiently intelligent restaurant owner shouldn't listen to the bean counter even if the owner's just a greedy capitalist.
(This reads enough like a Scott Alexander post that I'm pretty sure I might just actually be copying one; I think he wrote something along these lines once.)
[0]: Again, all of this is precipitated on the idea that actually Etsy will fail once it loses its niche, since it'll just get beaten by Amazon/eBay/etc. when it's just like any other seller of goods. If what's really going to happen is that Etsy will do fine as a company, then this becomes a totally different shape of problem: "the market rewards things that we actually maybe don't want for society".
Fail means different things to different people, but to the stockholders that the bean counters are beholden to determine fail/success by stock price and profits. What definition the original users of the site expecting handmade/small batch type of items have of fail/success means nothing to those in charge. It's not really a hard subject to understand is it? You have to accept that the "leadership" of Etsy is different now than when it was created. Their ethos has changed. It happens. You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality. People still use Google now that "don't be evil" is no longer their ethos.
If Etsy can fit in just becoming another giant generic undifferentiated seller of things, then yeah, this all checks out.[0] But my question is how much room the market has for those kinds of businesses. If Etsy does become just another big generic seller of things, why keep using them over Amazon, eBay, or Walmart? What are they going to compete with them on?
It's true Amazon used to be more niche (books), but I think they were early enough that they didn't have to worry too much about someone crushing them.
Walmart was always a giant seller of things, just a physical one that went online, but I don't think they were ever really niche.
Did eBay have a niche? I thought they were also pretty much just selling generic stuff from the beginning.
[0]:
> You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality.
I think you're confusing not thinking this is likely with some kind of denialism/not wanting it to be true. I don't especially care a whole lot if Etsy ends up being a giant generic seller of things, I'm just not sure that'll work. At the point where Etsy is just re-skinned Amazon, what stops Amazon from crushing them?
OR
They remain a private business that keeps that long term aim in spite of the volatility they are bound to experience over time.
Etsy buys them to prevent a viable alternative to taking hold.
At the end of the day, there is typically a number that can be written on a check that will persuade.
I bought from Etsy once, but even then the items were recommended to me via Instagram. Etsy in 2014 was already filled with poorly made "artsy" crap at double the price.
No idea why people are so excited about it.
I've sold on Etsy for a while as a hobby side business. The change seems to happen after their IPO. It felt like pretty quickly after that there began a trickle of incremental changes. A rule that allowed "manufacturing partners" really opened a huge loophole though, and in general things went down hill rapidly over the last 2-3 years.
There's only so much you can get from handcrafting.
I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale outsourcing of production is the only way.
These days you can outsource original product manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't mean that you're not the artist behind them.
I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
I don't have a problem with "manufacturing partners" in this sense. It's when that loophole is used to justify or hide countless sellers simply white labelling items that is the problem. If I make a design and have a manufacture stamp out copies in the thousands, but then offer customization that I add JIT for each order (a hallmark of etsy) then that's fine. But if I take a $0.50 beaded necklace bought in bulk on Alibaba and resell then at $10 with not other value added, that does not fit the supposed mission of Etsy. Take that to Amazon, Ebay, & it's okay. But it's absolutely not within the handcrafted marketplace, even when "handcrafted" is loosely defined, that Etsy is supposed to be.
Credit where it's do though, the tools I bought from Romania are amazing, unique, top quality. For some reason there's a few countries in Eastern Europe (Ukraine actually is one of them) where leather crafting has become somewhat popular and there are a few Etsy stores with fantastic items. They don't use the absolute best quality leather, but it's good: orders of magnitude above what you'd find in stores, and the construction is solid
(also leather is an area where price increases near exponentially with quality. Cheap junk like PU leather is maybe $0.25 per square foot in large bulk. Lowest quality real leather is about $1, and is actually still a fine choice for certain type of items if used carefully. Okay leather might run about $5 a sqft, good to very good will be $10, $20, $50, and the absolute best can be $100 to $200 per sqft. Although it's important to know that not all leather is suited to ever task. And sometimes the price:quality ratio is about product consistency. You might pay $20/sqft for a side of leather that has near perfect consistency in thickness and lack of surface defects. Very important if you're making large items, and they have a usable portion of 80 or 90%. But you can also buy miss-split that are uneven thickness and have some surface defects for $3. The usable portion may only be 60%, but if you're making small items you're still getting the same very high quality leather, you just have more scrap left over. You can even find a use for that too: some people really like the "character" that natural imperfections add to an item. Or I use it as practice pieces testing out new designs, no Sorry, more than you probably were looking for on leather detail. But it's HN so I figured there's often people interested in the minutiae of non-tech fields)
Keep in mind Etsy only takes a cut, and it's close to 8%. If I sell a $100 item they take about 7% in transaction fees. Then there's merchant fees for payment processing. I'm sure Etsy take a cut of them, and they are about 3%, so assuming they get 1 point of that their total take is 8%.
In comparison Ebay w/ PayPal merchant fees is a few points higher at about 14%. Which if you're selling high volume low margin race-to-bottom Alibaba junk then the extra 3-4% profit explains why Etsy's loosing of seller restrictions has attracted so much junk. The bank payment processing probably isn't doing an even split, so I would guess that Etsy's take really is right about 8% of seller revenue.
On the other hand, if you consider "scale" to be > $300k/year, then yes it's hard to do it without a manufacturing partner. And that can be a legitimate route even within the traditional Etsy framework! Design something, punch out countless copies w/ the "partner", and do final finishing/customization yourself. Or a few other similar models. The problem is this opened the door for sellers & etsy to rationalize keeping all sorts of definitively not handcrafted items in the marketplace. At best it's handmade by the "partner" through mass cheap 3rd world labor. At worse it's white labelled junk.
Anyway, the entire point of Etsy is that, even if "there's only so much you can get from handcrafting", that was what Etsy was for. The place where true, actual, real handcrafters were selling their items. Sure, it represents a cap on scale, but that was Etsy's mission. Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Scale is value and the potential to sales increase. Software license sales have infinite scale, Gwyneth Paltrow egg sales is high scale and $200 hand crafted in spare time earing sales is no scale.
> Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Yes, it was intended a storefront for handmade junk for 2x the price... With occasional interesting things.
For my part, a fair number of my items are non trivial to duplicate without a distinct loss in quality, so I still get reasonable sales and could probably ramp things up of I wanted/needed to.
However some things I sell have been SEO squated with crap quality items that don't even look remotely the same quality, but I don't have the energy or need for additional sales to optimize my own SEO. So, right now, I sell items that mostly average out to $40/hour profit, which isn't too bad for a hobby I enjoy.
About 80% are items that are pretty routine but still fun to make knowing the recipient will like them. The other 20% are truly unique items that I love making as more of an artistic endeavor, even though the time:cost ratio is much less in my favor than the other 80%. But that's also why mass producers can't poach my sales -- the market is way too small for these niche items to create a production line to copy them.
I'm working in a medium (leather tooling) where you really can't reproduce handmade quality at a mass scale. At least not economically: custom die cuts w/ embossing plates and personalization aren't economical for unique designs where I can offer 50 variations even though some of them might only sell 1 every 3 months, and the handmade version looks better than the mass produced stamped-out design anyway.
It's very hard to find a niche like this though. A lot of things are easier to replicate in exact detail than hand-carved leather.
My cloud computing has moved to GCP, DO, and my homelab (built from eBay stuff!).
I still use Amazon if I have no other option. I just pay for shipping, but surprise… it’s usually still free over $25.
#cancelprime
It's crazy how these 2 platforms seemed to have switched places. Several years ago, Amazon would have been the place to do for scam-free purchasing, and eBay was the shady site that you had to do your due diligence on before buying.
More and more it's the opposite. I have to wrangle with searches and filters on Amazon to try and avoid the "fake" brands and knockoff goods. eBay is easier and often cheaper to boot.
Amazon, on the other hand, has nearly done the opposite. They don't do anything about scammers and have created an environment where even when you buy something directly from amazon you might get a knock off. You can't trust anything there.
Everyone knows the amazon reviews are garbage, even amazon. Yet they keep them because having 1000 garbage reviews looks better than having 10 legitimate reviews (and many of them negative).
Amazon has optimized for moving any and everything.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmkyq/heres-the-file-clearv...
We don't live in ancapistan.
I mean that's obviously not true. Otherwise they wouldn't have security cameras.
I'm not saying Target's implementation is justified, but surely there's a middle ground for scaling anti-theft ops and using technology responsibly?
Amazing how Amazon wants to push me back into prime, heavy handed or subtile.
Seems like the free shipping and 2nd day shipping is all but a thing of the past.
A bunch of brands officially sell through Amazon and super fast shipping.
If you're in a metropolis - you get a lot of benefits, including 1 hour groceries.
It's interesting how without prime they tell me it takes one week to be sent (or some days), but then always after ordering correcting shipping date down, most often to the same as prime (which makes sense, holding back my order would only create costs to them).
Why'd you say free and 2-day shipping is a thing of the past? All my shipping from Amazon is free, and 2 day is the slowest it arrives usually. Mostly I get things next day, sometimes within 12 hours
Turns out my old PayPal account had a minor issue, and that meant I couldn't use ebay even if I didn't even have my PayPal account linked to ebay anymore and I was using a new credit card. I had to figure that out by myself, ebay was completely useless and unhelpful.
All of this is to say I’m trying various ways to limit my participation with dubious companies but I’ve had to pick my battles for myself and my family as we all do. Not using Prime has been a relatively convenient and painless change that I was able to do.
I invested heavily for years in getting various AWS certs. Leaving it behind for my personal cloud computing wasn’t easy to do, but my side projects and day job have recently lined up around GCP so I’ve been putting energy there.
I’m not convinced my choices are going to make much of a difference, but I would make them again at this point.
There's still a few items that are really hard to find elsewhere though, but that was Amazon's core value prop originally with rare books.
Somebody sent me an Amazon gift card a while back, and I still haven't found reason to use it. The only thing I still find Amazon useful for is to buy small amounts of industrial supplies and parts that are usually sold directly from suppliers to businesses in large amounts, who often have terrible web storefronts (or only use Amazon for ecommerce) because they usually deal with their (buy-by-the-case, repeat) customers by phone or in person. If I only need two specialized bolts or two feet of tubing, I'll go to Amazon.
Unless Ebay has overhauled their reputation system recently, you will buy counterfeit/mislabeled goods from a merchant, and then either receive a bribe (as a partial return) to keep a five star rating or you have to open an incident to get a full refund, in which you can't leave a rating and tell other people to beware.
This allows terrible merchants from all parts of the world to push crap on unsuspecting customers.
The way to differentiate in my experience is the Chinese sellers often won’t have a city or post code in their ships from address shown on the listing, and more obviously the postage times are twice as long (or more) than an actually local seller.
Most users of etsy do not care about source or authenticity. They just want what they see for the price listed.
Losing the handmade trinket shops is meaningless compared to the full scale China operation doing 100x more business. Customers by and large cannot tell the difference nor do they actually care too much.
Market for cheap Chinese goods.
Market for handmade trinkets.
I have a pretty good feeling that I know which one is more profitable. I'm sure investors know too.
The websites that function as clearinghouses (Amazon, Etsy, etc.) could figure out ways to prevent it but they have incentives to play along with obfuscation as to which market the consumer is shopping in.
In their niche, they had a smaller addressable market, but they had a moat from their brand within said niche. Outside of the niche, that moat doesn't exist, and they are competing against Amazon, Ebay, and many others.
However, there's not enough to demand to keep the shareholders of an IPO'ed company happy.
And there's the problem.
Is Etsy such a good aggregator, that setting up a storefront with Square is that hard?
These Etsy people sound like entitled brats.
They can raise short-term profits this way. The problem is that there's only so much rent you can seek before it becomes unprofitable for sellers. It turns out that "industrial-scale" sellers, copycats and outright scammers have lower operating costs which means they can stick around and replace the independent creators that have essentially been priced out of the market. Of course, in the long-term it will be the death of the company, but by that time, bonuses would've been paid, raises would've been awarded, stock would've vested and lots of "shareholder value" would've been created.
They've also recently bought Depop for a significant amount of money and I'm not sure if it's profitable, so they might be intentionally cannibalizing their earlier product to make money to prop up the next one.
What means is that these craftspeople don't produce enough value for the markets they are targeting.
In a different context, someone made a great point that your first million users don't necessarily need to be included in your next 20 million. Maybe Etsy has or will cycle through all their early buyers & sellers. But that doesn't matter if the group cycling in is more valuable.
That's essentially what old-school furniture & home stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce and margins are low.
I also suspect that a lot of the industrial-scale producers & copycats use the artisans as their R&D department and only copy their successful designs. In this case, the innovation still comes from the small-scale independent sellers, which if they are driven off the platform would eventually kill off the industrial-scale sellers and copycats as they'd no longer have anything to copy (and designing in-house might make them unprofitable).
Eh, I can't think of a directly comparable site. The closest would be something like Pier 1, but there's no customization there and it's all sold by Pier 1.
Etsy cannot charge AirBnB commissions, to verify every single seller and keep them in check
That’s what Etsy’s board chose when they appointed ex-eBay executive Josh Silverman to be Etsy’s CEO: https://www.etsy.com/team/member/jsilverman (2017)
More background: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/8/1... (2018), https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/9/4/20841475/etsy-free-sh... (2019).
Chad Dickerson ran Etsy. Josh Silverman turned it into eBay.
Probably not great if you want the actual thing, in hand. No one spending 3x the price of a Steam Deck right now will want that price going towards launching it into orbit instead of having it in hand, playing games. Still, maybe there's a market for "owning" orbiting space debris contributing to Kessler Syndrome? Sort of like buying & burning an item to make an artificial scarcity NFT? Only this way you get to contribute to the destruction of mankind's ability to easily launch anything into orbit.
* resellers - I see lots of sellers with thousands or tens of thousands of products. These sellers are obviously not making craft items. Etsy does nothing to limit this from what I've seen and experienced. And come on, I'm sure Etsy makes more money from these sellers, so what's their incentive to stop them (other than killing their platform).
* extreme AI actions - If you build an app to connect to Etsy's API, you'll need to test it of course. Except that Etsy's AI will ban your account for performing any testing. I hope you don't use that app to support hundreds of Etsy sellers, because they all get screwed. Wait several days to hear back, and then they tell you some silly tricks to avoid getting caught by their AI when testing next time. No real test environment and no promise they won't turn around and ban you again tomorrow for the same thing.
It feels like they're slowly building another Amazon, and haven't learned any lessons other than that's where the money is.
The reality that many (most?) sellers can't afford to strike will significantly limit the scope and impact of the exercise.
This is exactly why unions have strike funds.
It may seem weird for a bunch of small business owners to form or join a union, but that's what they should do.
If their complaints are true, then Etsy is already unusable and using Instagram ads is clearly a simpler way of doing business.
The reason why workplace strikes work is because you are visibly seen 'crossing the picket' line and so majority of workers comply. Other Etsy sellers can see you continue to sell, but what does it matter, you don't work with them. They are all independent of each other.
Pretty ironic that if you replace "Etsy" with "eBay" in that statement, you have the original value prop for Etsy. The circle of life, I suppose.
This could be very easily fixed for every website like this by the US government adopting a small tariff on low-cost goods shipped from China to cancel out that subsidy. Just enough that it is no longer profitable. Something to think about.
This is exactly what happened to eBay for anyone that remembers when it was garage-sale mania, then it became publicly traded and effectively became Target.com with < 1% of personal things sprinkled in.
No one messing with quarterly earnings.
Those two, and this example has me wondering why these companies continue to side with the buyers?
Isn't it obvious though? The buyers are the ones transferring their money from their account into the coffers of Etsy. If they piss off one seller, 2 more will pop up in its place.
Because the customer sets the demands. If the demands aren't met - customer doesn't give you the money.
Funny thing, I totally filter by free shipping too when I buy on ebay. It's just easier.
> Don’t change the price of your product on your landing page based on a user’s location. Ensure that users can purchase the product online for the price that you submit, regardless of their location.
Which means that (if you don't want your Google ads account deactivated) you can't bake in a variable shipping cost into the product cost; you can only select one amortized shipping cost.
So sellers who want to offer free shipping are really between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time in terms of not losing money on shipping vs not overcharging buyers.
[1] https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324371?hl=en&re...
Also, shipping rates within a single country can still vary pretty dramatically based on distance traveled, whether you're shipping to a remote area postal code, etc.
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2017/11/30/etsy-gives-b-corp-...
I sell seeds that are collected from my own garden, but I often see other sellers reselling seeds from established farm/ag operations. Its also clear that some of these sellers are selling seeds as a loss leader.
There's no point of a small scale operation like mine even being on etsy when I have to compete against such stuff. I assume if they continue down this path a new marketplace will spring up for handcrafted/original products but it would be nice if we didn't have to go through that cycle.
Even if something is born as a small batch small creation, if it sells well, then Chinese will copy it and sell it.
And guess what? If the quality is decent enough, majority of buyers will not care.
The problem is also on the buyer/demand side.
No thanks.
You can claim whatever you want, no control, no warnings, nobody from Etsy actually cares.
The reason I finally stopped was because they did not accept my new credit card and I had no way to contact anyone to clear this up. I made several thousand dollars a month on Etsy yet nobody actually helped. With no credit card attached I couldn't use any paid features anymore and my shop was dying either way. I contacted every email, every support forum and never got any kind of response more than a link to the faq that didn't help.
I may still recommend it to test the waters for cheap (if you are lucky and have a credit card that actually works for them), but I wouldnt recommend anyone to build a business around this shady platform
Etsy was absolutely overrun with corporations plastering the Ukrainian flag onto everything. Quickly gave up - there's absolutely no way to cut through that garbage.
A cooperative of altruistic software developers could build marketplace software. Open source exists after all. Then someone will need to run this as a company. Perhaps as a non-profit?
It sounds possible. But I haven't seen a single marketplace run like this yet.
Etsy's value isn't the tech, it's the brand giving easy access to potential customers.
Even if we kept the original 5% fee, and kept it there - and kicked out the stupid resellers - we’d be making a lot of people happy. It really wouldn’t be hard to whip up something basic. It would be much harder to attract people to it and keep a user base, of course.
Basically, the ones who try to compete on price with the mass manufacturers (aka already low-balling their prices). The ones who make a living already have the etsy fees in their product prices so will just bump up accordingly and likely not loose customers.
That said, the demands listed are all ones she agrees with. The user experience of having to tell if a product is really hand made is bad for buyers and sellers alike.
I don't even see how things like the AI-powered "trust and safety" garbage they implemented or the "Star Seller" thing benefit Etsy in the slightest. The T&S bots have nabbed our shops a few times and every time it wasn't even anything they should have been concerned about. One time they shut us down completely for a week because they _thought_ we got too many orders (even though we filled them in a day). Like, what? And Star Seller basically makes you a slave to unreasonable customers. It's almost Uber-esque in the degree of perfection it expects in turnaround and ratings, and in a world where "I didn't read the listing" ends up in a three-star review, it's just untenable (and again, what's even the benefit??).
Etsy basically tripled its user base in the past 2 years, to something like 100 million active buyers and sellers. This happened during the pandemic, when Etsy's offices were locked down, everyone had to learn to run the business remotely, and the labor market tightened up making it harder to hire (and then to train remotely).
Almost every change Etsy's made in the last two years is about reducing the burden on their staff, which now has a much higher user to staff ratio to deal with. Requiring sellers respond to messages within 24 hours reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring sellers resolve issues to customers' satisfaction to maintain their standing reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring customers contact sellers before they can open a case reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Implementing AI-powered review of new sellers and listings is the only realistic answer to having ANY review of new sellers and listings when there are hundreds of thousands of them being added every month for each employee in charge of enforcing policy on them.
The truly annoying thing is that when it is reviewed by a real person, they have strict policies about how long things have to be a certain way before they will reverse what is obviously a flaw in their algorithm. We ran into "well yeah obviously you didn't do anything wrong but bans like this are a week long so you have two more days to wait" a couple of times. I'm guessing they had someone new take over their T&S team who feels like strict enforcement across the board regardless makes things more fair (which I can see from one angle), but given that Etsy's whole pitch is making commerce more personal, it'd be nice if things like that were also more personal.
I have some etsy sellers I know and love bookmarked, and some of the more niche areas (like hand built midi controllers) are still remarkably free of cruft, but the bigger categories are just dropship knockoffs
Is there room for a federated or coop model, where the sellers own+govern their own marketplace?
Sellers are artisans, to think they are going to handle setting up an actual clud hosted marketplace and hire a savvy tech staff with devps, eng, support, cloud arch etc...
Nope.
I don’t understand why people put their entire livelihood in random sites that can change their rules at a whim.
It’s easier than ever in internet history to host your own site and take payments and basically do the entire thing yourself.
Of course you don’t get the visibility Etsy provides, but isn’t that what you sacrifice?
Why don't the buyers just make their own art? Because they're a different set of skills.
From Etsy's point of view the etsy sellers are like the buyers from the etsy sellers point of view. Ultimately everyone is going to do what they can to maximize revenue from their end.
If this strike has any level of critical mass they'd just all leave and create their own thing. This is literally how Etsy itself came to be to begin with. It's just the nature of things. eBay sellers went on strike and all migrated over to Etsy. If this is that big of a deal, it's time to do it again.
But also - there are multiple easy alternatives to Etsy storefront.
You should look up the history of etsy, it literally began by a mass exodus away from eBay. I'll never understand why people handcuff themselves and then complain about it. The question in the end if whether etsy is worth it to them after all of the fees, restrictions, etc. If so, continue, if not, move. Both the etsy sellers and etsy itself aim to maximize profit.
> The question in the end if whether etsy is worth it to them after all of the fees, restrictions, etc. If so, continue, if not, move
It seems you do understand after all, unless you are making the questionable claim that Etsy provides literally no value.
I think the crux of the matter here is that these sellers were previously happy with the tradeoff, and then Etsy changed the terms and they don't think it's worth it anymore. Getting angry and yelling about it in hopes of changing it rather than just shrugging and moving their whole business to another platform seems perfectly logical to me. The stuff with garbage resellers does seem like a really good point: Etsy is going to devalue themselves into the toilet if they don't do something about it and there is a mass exodus.
Businesses understand a hit to the bottom line, not some abstract strike manifest. So exodus is exactly the most efficient way of voicing your opinion to a profit seeking operation
It's a statement trying to get the attention of the company. Nobody is claiming it's guaranteed to work. It's a desperate act for before you bail entirely.
It's interesting to see a strike organized against the marketplace. Perhaps this will be an ultimately more successful way to apply downward pressure on the fees? I wonder if consumers will read this and also participate, ramping up the bad PR for Etsy and putting more pressure on lowering fees. One challenge is that, unlike a labor union, I don't think there are really any legal protections for a 'seller strike'.
The unique value proposition of etsy is almost invisible at this point. Just like shopping Amazon these days...
https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/542366240/fix-your-hearts-or...
There's a lot of cosplay items, etc - Etsy is an incredibly unique market that looks like it needs a replacement with accountability towards it's community.
Sounds like maybe my next project, tbh. :)
This is very reasonable. Etsy is diluting it's brand and becoming a flea-market where I don't trust it.
If they had a separate site the consequences of cracking down harder would simply be that sellers need to move their products to this other site, not shutdown altogether. This is particularly important for the fuzzy definition of used (sorry "antique") goods. Thus there would be less push-back and gaming from the sellers, and less financial incentives for Etsy Inc to be lax with the rules. It would improve the experience for both buyers and sellers of handmade goods, without harming buyers and seller of used goods.
I think the main objection to this would be handmade goods sellers complaining that Etsy Inc is supporting knock-off sellers. While true, it isn't within Etsy's power to remove these off the internet altogether, and as long as the buyer is aware that what they are purchasing isn't handmade, I don't think Etsy has any obligation to avoid this market.
Etsy began as a service to a niche market, and was a good platform for small sellers. But they're a public company, and their purpose is to create more and more returns... ultimately, diluting their brand and flooding their site with slop might be a money-making proposition.
But regardless of platform, ebay, amazon, etsy, shopify - you are always at mercy of the platform and being deplatformed.
Sellers should use the platforms as a funnel and then once they verify their idea works, pop it onto a private hosted website within their full control - ofcourse this is a bit complicated, but not really, even something as silly as wordpress + woocommerce + stripe would work, and if you get big enough spend, can get a better rate on credit card gateways. Or, go full crypto.
The other items make more sense about not wanting ads and wanting fairer representation between creators and resellers. I just don't follow why fee increases are such a big deal for sellers since they can be transparently passed along to buyers.
~signed, an ebay seller.
There is a fixed rate between postal offices to ship overseas, and it may make the shipping cheaper when coming from China.
I've been pretty bummed with the Etsy changes to Reverb.com (they acquired a few years ago). It was great and I regularly shopped there, now it's hit or miss and feels more like ebay / wish.com
then he listed those existing listings and they were removed but not all, just the ones he pointed out.
I just get error 429.
A little more education and a little less snark and vitriol, please.
As for it "hurts the environment", that depends on your blockchain. PoS, nope. PoW/PoST, maybe but it depends.
Edit: Also for non-mom/pop shops NFTs are probably huge. Getting a provable NFT w/ your shoes for example will raise the level of difficulty for mass-producing knock offs substantially.
It’s much closer to cartel conduct, and a flagrant antitrust/competition law violation.
While the “number of small labourers team up against large employer” narrative sounds superficially like the actions of a labour union, what this appears to be is actually a number of small businesses forming a cartel to influence the prices for their goods. Probably blatantly illegal in much of the developed world.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Quote:
Example: A group of competing optometrists agreed not to participate in a vision care network unless the network raised reimbursement rates for patients covered by its plan. The optometrists refused to treat patients covered by the network plan, and, eventually, the company raised reimbursement rates. The FTC said that the optometrists' agreement was illegal price fixing, and that its leaders had organized an effort to make sure other optometrists knew about and complied with the agreement.
Why do you say that, just because things sold by Etsy merchants aren't sufficiently substitutable for each other?
I think Etsy sellers are certainly less in competition with each other than say, idk, oil sellers, but I do think there is some degree of substitution between the kinds of things sold on Etsy, and so to a degree they are competitors.
> etsy is not 'the market'
So? It's a significant part of the market. A cartel influencing just one seller doesn't necessarily make it not-a-cartel.
> sellers have not agreed anything to each other
Have they not? Isn't that the whole point of the strike? Communicating to other sellers "hey how about we all do this thing together? if only a few of us do it nothing will happen, but if all of us do it we can influence Etsy".
----
If you replace the many small Etsy sellers with a smaller number of larger sellers, this starts to look very much like a cartel "bullying" a buyer. Like OPEC refusing to sell to the US unless they abide by certain policies, or something.
Like GP I don't think this is bad or anything, but it's interesting to note that cartels and strikes are kinda similar in shape, and it's more "sliding" properties (how many sellers? how big are they? how strong is the competition between them?) that differentiate them.
So, let's say you are right. Would that make it illegal for all Uber drivers or strippers to strike? They are independent contractors, not employees. It also seems to me that these laws are created specifically to protect the consumer. Without damages, where is the crime? Even the example of the optometrists includes some theoretical damage to the consumer as the prices of their insurance could go up or the consumers had less access to eye care.
In the case of Etsy sellers though, I can not see how this could hurt consumers. Sellers are striking to lower the price of fees, which should help consumers and only hurt Etsy. I don't know the law, but I do feel like the law should be written in a way that these government agencies only act to prevent non-competitive activities that could hurt consumers.
Though, many Etsy businesses are sole proprietorships or family businesses, in which case capital and labour are the same, and it's also a labour strike.
These are small businesses with no market power agreeing to collectively price squeeze another player in an upstream/downstream market. Textbook cartel behaviour.
Edit: typo
A cartel is a group of businesses who collude to take market power as an oligopoly. That's not what this is, because these sellers are striking for platform changes, not consumer domination. You can keep saying it's cartel behaviour, but you're working with a different definition of cartel to the mainstream one. They're colluding yes, but they are not warping market forces the way a business cartel does (the typical example being the lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel).
We can argue about whether or not this is good (by the sounds of it, probably?) but the entire purpose of them agreeing to restrict their output is to influence the cost of their inputs/outputs.
In the absence of market power, individual firms can’t do that!
If we're talking about the generic concept of a cartel that encompasses basically all special interest groups, then yes they're a cartel - but they're not a business cartel in the same way that Phoebus group were. The power imbalance puts them in a position more comparable to a labour union.
>While the “number of small labourers team up against large employer” narrative sounds superficially like the actions of a labour union, what this appears to be is actually a number of small businesses forming a cartel to influence the prices for their goods. Probably blatantly illegal in much of the developed world.
Aren't labor unions (especially closed shop ones) basically a cartel for labor?
At the same time we for the most part decided that businesses best serve society when in the absence of market power, hence competition law enabling unions and outlawing cartels.
While you're right in your categorization, you aren't necessarily right in calling it bad, because that category isn't always bad. Particularly because of the asymmetry between actors. In this case, that same asymmetry is there (like with uber's "contractors"). You might be right, but I think it's less blatant and more nuanced than you're giving it credit for.
In fact I probably agree with their demands, but on its face this is a) not a strike and b) in need of authorisation or similar mechanism under completion law.
Collectively agreeing to simultaneously stop selling in order to force a change in the cost of your inputs is in most cases not legal.
The easy test is to ask yourself if it makes sense for an individual seller to reduce their output in the absence of any other changes. In this case, the answer is no. Only when they all collide to do it at the same time does it work.