191–200 of 273 posts
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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?
I spend a lot of time with Etsy sellers, all one-person micro-businesses creating fully-handcraft items. They tell me there are three major problems that are all interconnected: 1) search is poor, 2) cheap knockoffs swamp the search results, 3) there's no obvious way to emphasize truly handcraft items. All the sellers are experimenting with alternate platforms, such as Shopify, Wordpress, Wix, etc.
Ouch.
https://venturebeat.com/2016/11/03/etsy-paid-32-5-million-fo...
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They should really just add a rating system, I dont know anything about etsy but if customers say that they found it on alibaba with a given link then the seller would probably lose all future sales. Sounds like a very easy problem to solve...
But then Etsy lose all those sales, which presumably is why they don't do that. Are they more committed to their morals or their profit?
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I think parent commenter talks about crowdsourcing labeling, not software.
Yes, and when the median number of labelings for a given article is near zero (as it will be for handmade artisanal articles), it's very easy to spam in a few five-stars. The crowd you want isn't the crowd you get. So you have to filter or supplement the user ratings/labelings/reviews using either software or inhouse people, which runs into the second problem I mentioned.
Anyway, I got distracted by an influx of work, a new baby, and ultimately other startup ideas.
Good to know I would have wasted my time trying to finish and launch that company...
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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.
Add velocity controls for the IP address and you'll get a thousand sign ups from a thousand IPs. Limit it by device and you'll see a thousand devices. Flag the images using a perceptual hash and the images will come back superimposed on random pictures of food.
At some point you find that your accounts are now traded as a commodity on underground markets at various prices by teams that specialize in creating accounts, aging them and selling them for x cents. Add enough restrictions to new accounts and you'll find existing shops being taken over and flooded with listings.
And do all of this while still having an "effortless" signup experience for new legitimate vendors.
Maybe ignorant question. Why would one choose Etsy over Amazon
Etsy was originally a marketplace for artisan or custom goods that would allow you to buy directly from the artists/craftsmen.
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Maybe the future of Etsy is with Vintage instead of handmade? I think it is easier to distinguish between vintage and factory made then handcrafted and factory made. For example: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BonjourBizarre . I'm pretty sure you could not find any of those items on AliExpress.
Definitely. I think a combination of handmade and 'curated' is fantastic --- just not 'curated items from AliExpress.' The overarching issue is that Etsy doesn't appear to recognize their users and what they're actually looking for. They've allowed for too much noise over the years.
I don't think Etsy "allowed noise". It's more that becoming a stick-on-folksy tat [1] bazaar was infinitely more profitable than trying to be a genuine source of lovingly crafted artisanal hand-mades.
Etsy seems to have enough users who are just fine with this.
I wonder if the real story is that other sources of tat have become more competitive and more widely known. Maybe there is no mass exodus of outraged craft buyers - Etsy's customers are simply shopping for the same things elsewhere, and paying less for them by cutting out the middlesite.
Etsy's profits didn't seem unduly harmed when they opened up their market, so the exodus theory seems unlikely.
[1] In case "tat" isn't a thing in USian English:
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What's truly fascinating is all of these innovative products made in Asia which aren't officially marketed in the West (thus allowing people to market it in smalltime ways, like Kickstarter). If you go to the right parts of Asia now you will see a wild array of amazing, futuristic products that you can't find anywhere in the US.
like what? selfie sticks? (i live in asia)