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Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

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Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#131

Post by Opalhart »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #120
blhack wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tougher than it seems on the surface. A few years ago, I was involved in planning and running a maker "fest". We invited makers, and artists to the festival to show off their projects, and some of them wanted to sell things. A not-insignificant number of participants who wanted to sell things were just reselling things you could buy at Michaels, or buy online (in bulk) for cheap. Sometimes with just a little…

> I think they're in a really tough spot. When they weighed the options, my guess is that they realized that it would be best to let the consumers just decide what they want to buy. ...but then the problem is, what makes them better or different from any other storefront? If there's a ton of mass-produced product on Etsy, why would I want to shop there rather than on Amazon?

Maybe if there was a system where consumers could identify the wares as manufactured themselves. Like a "legitimacy" rating system

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#132

Post by jldugger »

untog wrote: post #79
ahmeni wrote: post #16

It's bizarre to see how Etsy went from producing a significant amount of technical software and community engagement a few years ago and then suddenly stopped. Their GitHub is a testament to this sudden dropoff. Was there anything ever mentioned about why they went from super public about things like dashboarding to nothing?

The CTO left in 2015. He was a big open source guy so I wouldn't be surprised if that had an impact.

And you think the new CTO, John Allspaw, was less of an OSS fan?

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#133

Post by YZF »

accountyaccount wrote: post #72
YZF wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Require a refundable deposit of $1000 (replace by some magic number) which is forfeited if you're caught selling mass produced junk. Other after-the-fact punitive measures can be in the contract you have to sign to get on the site. Something along these lines must exist where legitimate sellers can live with it while the cost to the spammers must be unacceptable.

A lot of sellers on etsy couldn't afford the $1k to start.

That's why I had the (replace by magic numbers) in parenthesis. There may be some number where you can still attract legitimate sellers but is high enough so people taking a risk to just peddle junk will turn a loss on average. The only way you get rid of the junk is to make their expected profit less than zero.

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#134

Post by therealdrag0 »

accountyaccount wrote: post #70
danso wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had forgotten that Etsy changed its policy on allowing mass manufacturing several years ago: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/etsy-embraces-mass-manufacturi... http://abcnews.go.com/Business/etsy-ceo-ipo-mass-production-... Alibaba-resells has had a detrimental effect on Kickstarter and Indiegogo-type platforms too. Many of the things submitted to r/shittykickstarters seem to be resells. Indiegogo doesn't mind them, a…

The amazing thing about Kickstarter knockoffs is that there's a huge market for simply stealing an idea and beating it to market. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this. It's completely absurd, Kickstarter product transparency is, in hindsight, almost ideal to steal products from.

Yep, I found this with the Fidget Cube.

I heard about it after the Kickstarter closed, "aw chucks". A few months later I found the parent company was accepting purchases but wouldn't ship for months more, I bought one anyway (over $20!). Then a couple months later I came across knock-offs on Amazon. I forgot I ordered the authentic one, so I bought one on Amazon for $10. It arrived promptly. Then this week, I got the original cube in the mail--It took so long I totally forgot about it.

And honestly, I like the knock-off more... (granted, might just be a timing bias.)

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#135

Post by devmunchies »

slv77 wrote: post #83
amorphid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they can police the reselling of mass produced junk. I'm imagining initial efforts, making a notable dent in the problem, and then kicking off a "Made By Me" social media campaign. If resellers stopped seeing Etsy as a easy way to sell dollar store items at artisan prices, made that'd curb the problem a bit more.

Etsy gets multiple thousands of vendor sign-ups per day and needs a dedicated team to filter out vendors that attempt to game the marketplace by flooding it with thousands of listings for cell phone cases and other junk. A lot of it is driven by Chinese middlemen and get-rich-quick schemes that are more than happy to burn the marketplace to the ground if they can make a buck in the process. The challenge is that in t…

it wouldn't take a dedicated team to detect if a seller is uploading a high amount of items.

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#136

Post by YZF »

throwaway61891 wrote: post #69
YZF wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Require a refundable deposit of $1000 (replace by some magic number) which is forfeited if you're caught selling mass produced junk. Other after-the-fact punitive measures can be in the contract you have to sign to get on the site. Something along these lines must exist where legitimate sellers can live with it while the cost to the spammers must be unacceptable.

that would go over really poorly. nobody would spend $1000 on what is essentially a gamble (since etsy is determining whether you're 'selling mass produced junk'). sellers already feel like etsy is way too buyer-friendly (at the expense of sellers).

Etsy has to invest effort in making sure that legitimate sellers don't have this gamble. They have to be sure they're only penalizing the spammers. It's not unlike insurance fraud, do you feel it's a gamble that you're getting insurance because the insurance company won't pay out or will pursue you for fraud? Probably not. Yet they still try to identify and prosecute the fraud. If the site is dominated by spammers selling stuff from the dollar store everyone loses. You have to make it so that it's not worthwhile for the spammers. A deposit is one way. Pursuing legal action for contract violation could be another. Another industry with similar issues is banking.

It's not easy but you have to invest in maintaining the credibility of your platform. Machine learning helps but these problems have existed pre machine learning and can have more traditional economic solutions.

EDIT: The deposit could also depend on your prices and sale volume. This way really small players can pay in with a lower deposit. There are probably many variations but again the key is to make it a losing proposition for the spammers/dollar store guys assuming you want them off your platform. If you're only doing machine learning/filtering the cost to attack the system and try to get in is too low.

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#137

Post by roel_v »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #125
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like tons of things on AliExpress are just resold on Etsy. I was looking at plant seeds on there and just found and bought the exact same ones with same pics and everything without markup on AliExpress, so it isn't just jewelry and handmade items. That left a bad impression on me about Etsy.

You really shouldn't be buying plant seeds off the internet. Invasive species is a big problem, and even if you buy legit oregano (or whatever) seeds, there's a high risk that a couple of the seeds are really something else that's not native to your region.

What is 'native'? All apple trees are Persian, in the end. Just because there are a few species that outcompete others, doesn't mean that we need to freeze whatever is the current state of geographic dispersion of species to the 'gold standard', that we will defend and maintain at all cost.

I explicitly seek out exotic seeds to see how they will behave in my climate. Diversity is good. This whole 'native first' (or rather, 'native only') needs to die already.

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#138

Post by vxNsr »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #134
accountyaccount wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amazing thing about Kickstarter knockoffs is that there's a huge market for simply stealing an idea and beating it to market. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this. It's completely absurd, Kickstarter product transparency is, in hindsight, almost ideal to steal products from.

Yep, I found this with the Fidget Cube. I heard about it after the Kickstarter closed, "aw chucks". A few months later I found the parent company was accepting purchases but wouldn't ship for months more, I bought one anyway (over $20!). Then a couple months later I came across knock-offs on Amazon. I forgot I ordered the authentic one, so I bought one on Amazon for $10. It arrived promptly. Then this week, I got the…

I had a friend who had a similar experience but he feels the $30 one is better, the cheap knockoff is lighter and some parts have stopped working...

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#139

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
mustacheemperor wrote: post #2

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.

Gresham's Law?

Re: Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

#140

Post by busterarm »

losteverything wrote: post #123
busterarm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handbags? Oh my god, why isn't she selling on Facebook? I know a very wealthy woman in Thailand selling custom $400-600 handbags to New York yuppies and literally her entire business is on Facebook. I normally don't advocate this sort of thing but their ad platform and social network are basically made for this kind of business. Custom/Handmade luxury goods for upper-middle class women over a certain age? Facebook, e…

How does one sell on FB?

https://developers.facebook.com/industries/ecommerce/
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