How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul
wired.com
wired.com
Etsy seems like a small business incubator. It provides, at a reasonable fee, a working environment conducive to growth. You have forums and other communication mechanism to train with others. You get the ability to have the e-commerce headache serviced. You get a known location that customers arrive at looking for their special things. At some point all of this infrastructure is limiting. You leave the small business incubator for a more custom environment.
So a whiff of mass production is seen as taint.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being ebay! It's a fine way to find traders selling mass-produced items. But I was under the impression Etsy wasn't trying to compete with them directly.
I suppose you could say that that limits their growth — but it also keeps em' awesome.
Etsy's move into allowing designed items to be sold is a recognition that to cash out on Etsy you need to have other people make your products for you (as you are time limited) or attempt to price yourself high while trying to sell into a market where people are constantly undercutting each other.
So there is a natural progression to mass made designer items. The moment you begin thinking about higher pricing, you're on the path to selling at your local craft markets or in local boutique shops.
And their problem is not only price competition from chinese trinket sellers, but also visibility. Because manufacturers have many more products, small sellers don't show up in search results any more.
The only way I could interpret Etsy's rules was as an elaborate code for "people like us" -- affluent, middle class, first world residents.
Also, how is it anti third world artisan to require they make their own page and get the full first world price themselves?
I'm basing this on my experience in Morocco in 2004. I doubt the artisans I saw could afford Internet access, or would understand how to work a site like Etsy, or had sufficient written English skills to deal with first world customers. The mail system was notoriously prone to losing packages as well. If they could get a middle man they could access the market, but Etsy's rules forbade this.
You have the old rules more or less correct, but the spirit of them was exactly the opposite. The intention was for Etsy to serve as a (much lower cost) middleman for third world sellers. It is certainly true that Etsy hasn't lived up to its own aspirations here, as yet.
There is a backlash against the third world, but it comes from some segments of the existing US seller community. Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."
Are they actually reselling, though? There's a big gap between dog whistle racism and legitimately not wanting people to sell things they didn't make. The current rules of the site are a separate matter.
In other cases people assemble items from raw materials (e.g. from Alibaba) in ways that may not strike you as particularly creative, but it's kosher when it comes to the site's rules. American sellers do the same thing and have been since the site's inception. Only the Chinese folks who do it wind up in critical news articles with the "reseller" label, though.
If you see sellers described that way and they don't get banned, they have most likely gone through a documentation process whereby they explain their work with dated photos and other materials. Etsy sellers are highly motivated to flag their competition when they think there's a term violation, and real resellers don't last long.
Disclaimer - I don't work for Etsy anymore.
Regretsy.com (which sadly doesn't exist anymore) was constantly pointing out crafts that were being sold as one-of-a-kinds and originals with a direct link to their alibaba.com source.
"How eBay alienated its sellers and lost its soul"
Was it true? Perhaps, and it has nothing to do with whether eBay was able to build an auction platform business that spits off two billion dollars per year in profit.
Etsy will be just fine, despite the scare headlines. There's nothing else quite like it, and no replacement for it of scale. They already won, and that's why they can afford to alienate people now.
I hope they can survive the turmoil. Maybe they can move as a group to another company.
The author seems to wish Etsy would play gatekeeper, er, I mean, "curate" goods, assuming of course the author's goodies make the cut. That seems to go against Etsy's values - not to mention the zeitgeist of the Internet age.
But who knows? Maybe someone will come along and out-etsy etsy.
* Facebook started with colleges only, and lots of people lamented when they opened up signups for all
* Twitter used to be a close-knit community for tech people, and tons of people whined, saying all the new people joining Twitter were ruining it.
Pinterest could have a similar story too.
Once a website/app/tool gets large enough to be useful, brands move in with money and fundamentally change the platform.
It works poorly, and users can tag an item in endless categories (often conflicting ones, like 'gemstone' and 'rhinestone'), and so frequently give items dozens of tags, that it makes the search irrelevant.
The categorization and organization forces you to "wade through pages of crap" to find anything relevant; that awful feature lost me as a buyer years ago -- agree 100% with the author there.
> Guys, I used Etsy before it was cool. Now it's like, super mainstream, and it's not cool anymore. Totes.