41–50 of 273 posts
I can only add my experience with etsy on the affiliate side. TheHunt.com previously sent them significant traffic (as in, hundreds of thousands of visitors) via their affiliate program. We then got a email that they were going to change our rates to be something like 5x less than our current rates because we were high volume. Needless to say we removed every etsy product on our site and replaced them with amazon/far…
The conversion problem on mobile does seem like an issue, but speaking as a former customer of Etsy what drove me away was the selection. Not that it's too small - rather, Etsy is now flooded with thousands of storefronts selling "artisan" pieces that are actually bought on AliExpress or similar and marked up. If they're trying to apply ML to managing customer recommendations, they should figure out how to identify w…
There seems to be some natural law of Internet shopping that ensures that every "Specialized marketplace for X," will, once it becomes popular, inevitably devolve into a flood of thousands of sellers all reselling identical cheap junk from AliExpress for $0.99 + free shipping--to the point where it's impossible to find anything genuine or non-counterfeit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's trickier than you think. a VERY common complaint i saw while i was at etsy: "i make bracelets and someone on aliexpress is ripping off my designs and even my photos, what do i do?" i'm not denying that someone would do exactly what you're describing (purchase on ali and resell on etsy), but it's sometimes way more complicated than that.
This is something which is really a challenge. In many markets discovery is a challenge (how do you create visibility to all of the customers who might be interested in your product) and then operational costs when your concept is discovered. When brainstorming things I heard an idea which I thought was pretty cool, create a "trademark" registry in these bespoke market places. It would work by sending the market make…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's trickier than you think. a VERY common complaint i saw while i was at etsy: "i make bracelets and someone on aliexpress is ripping off my designs and even my photos, what do i do?" i'm not denying that someone would do exactly what you're describing (purchase on ali and resell on etsy), but it's sometimes way more complicated than that.
This is something which is really a challenge. In many markets discovery is a challenge (how do you create visibility to all of the customers who might be interested in your product) and then operational costs when your concept is discovered. When brainstorming things I heard an idea which I thought was pretty cool, create a "trademark" registry in these bespoke market places. It would work by sending the market make…
the hypothetical person on aliexpress isn't really interested in selling on etsy, they're interested in copying something successful and selling it where they can maximize their profit (in this case, aliexpress).
it's basically the same problem that more established brands like ray-bans face (with cheap knockoffs), except because it's on a much smaller scale most buyers assume the worst (that the person is just buying on aliexpress and reselling on etsy).
i mean even amazon is facing this problem right now (with counterfeit goods), so one can only imagine how bad it is for a significantly smaller operation like etsy.
enforcing trademarks is difficult enough even within the US, and enforcing it globally is insanely difficult.
I ordered a rustic pipe desk from Etsy a while back and the seller was not able to deliver the item on time. He/she communicated the issue so it wasn't that big of a deal for me. I had a prearranged vacation coming up while waiting for the item to be finished and sent, so things took a little bit longer then expected on both ends. When I finally got back home and put the desk together, I noticed that there were items…
The conversion problem on mobile does seem like an issue, but speaking as a former customer of Etsy what drove me away was the selection. Not that it's too small - rather, Etsy is now flooded with thousands of storefronts selling "artisan" pieces that are actually bought on AliExpress or similar and marked up. If they're trying to apply ML to managing customer recommendations, they should figure out how to identify w…
- How do you highlight "genuine" artisan products without some laborious process to inspect the seller?
- How do you allow new sellers to build the requisite reputation to be trusted as good and legit? How do you do this in a way so they don't get drowned out by more established sellers who have been around longer?
- How do you process incoming reviews to prevent voting rings and voting abuse, while nonetheless accumulating information on the seller's performance and trustworthiness?
These are difficult, inexact problems that can't be solved from a book and to the best we know, have to be trial-and-error tuned to the particular community in question. Much more so than anything solely technical, the way these problems are solved end up being the secret sauce behind communities, and similarly often responsible for their decline.
The conversion problem on mobile does seem like an issue, but speaking as a former customer of Etsy what drove me away was the selection. Not that it's too small - rather, Etsy is now flooded with thousands of storefronts selling "artisan" pieces that are actually bought on AliExpress or similar and marked up. If they're trying to apply ML to managing customer recommendations, they should figure out how to identify w…
There seems to be some natural law of Internet shopping that ensures that every "Specialized marketplace for X," will, once it becomes popular, inevitably devolve into a flood of thousands of sellers all reselling identical cheap junk from AliExpress for $0.99 + free shipping--to the point where it's impossible to find anything genuine or non-counterfeit.
I ordered a rustic pipe desk from Etsy a while back and the seller was not able to deliver the item on time. He/she communicated the issue so it wasn't that big of a deal for me. I had a prearranged vacation coming up while waiting for the item to be finished and sent, so things took a little bit longer then expected on both ends. When I finally got back home and put the desk together, I noticed that there were items…
This is why centralized marketplaces in general are, in my opinion, on the way out. In the future people with something to offer will be able to offer it without being routed through one-size-fits-all platforms who want to control your options for communication, payment, reputation, shipping, etc. in a "my way or the highway" attitude. If one takes this perspective, then Ebay, Taobao, and Etsy are all anachronisms, t…
i mean even if you look at major alternatives to etsy (like shopify), they still are "centralized" in that regard.
buyers also need some sort of discovery platform - even if it's just google, then google becomes the centralized platform, no?