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Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

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Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#11
post #6

Etsy tapped into one of the most passionate communities out there, which happened to be on eBay not by choice, but by necessity. If you want to find opportunities, I'd say look at who is using eBay, Amazon, etc. (as a platform) out of necessity due to a lack of alternatives. Once you find those niches, you've already established that there is a market, and if you design a product for that community, customer acquisit…

What is funny is that as Etsy grew a lot of sellers got dissatisfied and left to 1000markets. The sellers that all left were able to organize this because of the strong community communication tools provided by Etsy.

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#12
Over 90% of Etsy users are women. Their market isn't underserved by just eBay–but rather the entire web.

My wife loves Etsy. She's tech-savvy, loves to craft, loves fashion, and loves to shop.

My guess is they overcame the chicken/egg problem because a lot of their sellers are also buyers–which allowed rapid initial growth. Mix in some good PR, people complaining on Ebay forums, VC connections, and there you go.

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#14
My 2c on Etsy. My mother is a freelance artist by trade and I witnssed a radical change in her web savvy and understanding in her first 6 months on Etsy. The reason was that she was participating in the Etsy community forums which provide a lot of technical direction. Generating facebook leads, optimal posting strategies, how to make white backgrounds on photos of inventory, etc. In short, they have a passionate self-training community that increases seller efficiency rather than just punishing the inefficient.

One odd side effect of this passion and sense of community is that sellers see selling on Etsy as a hobby rather than a profession, and their effective compensation reflects this.

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#16
post #6

Etsy tapped into one of the most passionate communities out there, which happened to be on eBay not by choice, but by necessity. If you want to find opportunities, I'd say look at who is using eBay, Amazon, etc. (as a platform) out of necessity due to a lack of alternatives. Once you find those niches, you've already established that there is a market, and if you design a product for that community, customer acquisit…

What is funny is that as Etsy grew a lot of sellers got dissatisfied and left to 1000markets. The sellers that all left were able to organize this because of the strong community communication tools provided by Etsy.

What strong community communication tools are you referring to?

As far as I can see, actually cultivating community has been a big shortcoming for Etsy. The 'teams' section of the site is very underdeveloped (it's been the same for years and isn't tied into the rest of the site very well). The forums are frequented by the a small group of focused people, mainly all sellers, and the tone on there has been very negative for years. The in-house messaging system ('conversations') is extremely lacking, with no serious organization tools for your messages. The shop/item favoriting system doesn't function as a social networking 'friends' system, it's geared only towards shopping.

Etsy sellers tend to network through their own blogs (mainly on blogger), independent craft blogs, and use Twitter for communication.

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#17

Etsy does really creative product search - it might be the best site out there. http://www.etsy.com/buy.php . It's a really fun site to navigate. They probably get less attention in the tech space because their user base is mostly women.

Are you sure? The general consensus among sellers is that the search tools are lacking. They are great at finding fairly random collections of items, and some of the tools are fun toys, but it's not the best if you're actually looking for something specific. About half of the sections on the page are fairly useless for serious shopping.

The number of items on Etsy has increased by 100 times in the past few years, but the lens through which you can see the items has stayed the same size - search pages of 20-30 items. Few people are going to page through more than 20 pages of results.

Basic search has improved significantly since Chad Dickerson came on board, but I think even the tech staff acknowledges that there's a long way to go.

One major problem is the tagging system, and the lack of true categories. It used to be that your first tag functioned as the 'top level category', but they didn't make this clear in the listing creation step. You could (can?) also choose contradictory tags/categories with no problems. The top level categories are rather disparate conceptually, and aren't particularly well chosen (i.e., 'Quilts', with 24k items, has it's own top level entry, same as 'Jewelry' with 1.4 million, and art, with 500k). Also, the tags and titles are completely in the hands of sellers, some of whom mis-label items inadvertently or intentionally. It's a bit of a tricky deal.

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#18

Over 90% of Etsy users are women. Their market isn't underserved by just eBay–but rather the entire web. My wife loves Etsy. She's tech-savvy, loves to craft, loves fashion, and loves to shop. My guess is they overcame the chicken/egg problem because a lot of their sellers are also buyers–which allowed rapid initial growth. Mix in some good PR, people complaining on Ebay forums, VC connections, and there you go.

What is your source?

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#19
They also completely bypass the chicken/egg problem. The site can work with a small number of sellers. If I'm an artist I can set up a store on etsy and use it as my professional website. I then give out the etsy link to people I meet in the "real world" to buy my work online.

Re: Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy

#20

Etsy does really creative product search - it might be the best site out there. http://www.etsy.com/buy.php . It's a really fun site to navigate. They probably get less attention in the tech space because their user base is mostly women.

Are you sure? The general consensus among sellers is that the search tools are lacking. They are great at finding fairly random collections of items, and some of the tools are fun toys, but it's not the best if you're actually looking for something specific. About half of the sections on the page are fairly useless for serious shopping. The number of items on Etsy has increased by 100 times in the past few years, but…

I meant "really creative browse". :)
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