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Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

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Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#101

Post by fidelramos »

Lucadg wrote: post #90
faintrain wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your options? 1. Build your own. 2. Collectively organize with other Etsy shop owners to advocate with Etsy leadership. These type of policy changes aren’t a surprise anymore, no? We’ve seen them from Apple, Facebook, Shopify, Twitter, Amazon, EBay, etc for more than a decade now.

Maybe decentralized marketplaces could offer a solution in the long term. This one surely is a serious attempt: https://www.originprotocol.com/ We are working with them to build an Airbnb alternative but all sorts of marketplaces can be built.

OpenBazaar (https://openbazaar.org/) is the pioneer decentralized marketplace, it has been working for years. They recently launched their mobile app, Haven, which makes it very easy to use. From what I read they are gaining traction, and hopefully moves like Etsy's will incentivize people to explore these solutions to censorship and centralized control.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#102

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

WalterBright wrote: post #99
glogla wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's crazy. Etsy is not the market, it is a market. If you don't like it, you move somewhere else. Sufficiently big _a_ thing becomes _the_ thing because of economies of scale, network effects and "the software is eating the world" effects. See Google, Paypal, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

All those companies are well aware that the worse they treat their companies, the more likely competitors will appear. It happens all the time. Big, unstoppable companies become sloppy and complacent, and suddenly find themselves in free fall.

If by "all the time" you mean "once every couple of decades, often after antitrust intervention", then possibly.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#103

Post by TsomArp »

MicahKV wrote: post #43

I'm one of those sellers who is being forced into Etsy's new ad program. It is frustrating and obnoxious, but I can't say it is surprising given the policy changes they've been rolling out the past few months. It seems to me that online marketplaces like Etsy find their early success by bringing buyers and sellers together and just letting them do their thing, but as the marketplace becomes more established it's rela…

In South America we have a similar situation with Mercado Libre (ironically called Free Market in spanish). For example, they started charging 1.5% commission, and by the time they had no competition, they have raised it to 11% or more, which is crazy. They force you to ship things (I only want to sell in person because people then dispute things and keep the orders and the money), etc. But at this point it has gotten so big that it is almost impossible to not be there. You just hope that the next purchase will be not through they.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#104

Post by PeterisP »

sneak wrote: post #94
MicahKV wrote: post #43

I'm one of those sellers who is being forced into Etsy's new ad program. It is frustrating and obnoxious, but I can't say it is surprising given the policy changes they've been rolling out the past few months. It seems to me that online marketplaces like Etsy find their early success by bringing buyers and sellers together and just letting them do their thing, but as the marketplace becomes more established it's rela…

> I'm one of those sellers who is being forced into Etsy's new ad program. How are you being forced?

They'll be charged 12-15% of the purchase value if Etsy thinks that their buyer clicked on an Etsy-related ad somewhere in the last 30 days.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#105

Post by Fnoord »

csomar wrote: post #91
MicahKV wrote: post #43

I'm one of those sellers who is being forced into Etsy's new ad program. It is frustrating and obnoxious, but I can't say it is surprising given the policy changes they've been rolling out the past few months. It seems to me that online marketplaces like Etsy find their early success by bringing buyers and sellers together and just letting them do their thing, but as the marketplace becomes more established it's rela…

> I feel like we need some form of regulation That's crazy. Etsy is not the market, it is a market. If you don't like it, you move somewhere else. We already have too much regulation that for some fields it's impossible to start a business without jumping through many hoops. Last thing we need is to start regulating on a per-business basis. This is really a case of giving up your store brand/independence for convenie…

> That's crazy. Etsy is not the market, it is a market. If you don't like it, you move somewhere else.

Easier said than done due to network effect. That's what they went for. Its also how Amazon and Facebook got so big. Heck, its even why Microsoft Windows got big. Become the cheapest, get volume, then abuse your market domination.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#106

Post by WalterBright »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #102
WalterBright wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those companies are well aware that the worse they treat their companies, the more likely competitors will appear. It happens all the time. Big, unstoppable companies become sloppy and complacent, and suddenly find themselves in free fall.

If by "all the time" you mean "once every couple of decades, often after antitrust intervention", then possibly.

Sears, Kodak, GE, etc.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#107

Post by rcxdude »

WalterBright wrote: post #99
glogla wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's crazy. Etsy is not the market, it is a market. If you don't like it, you move somewhere else. Sufficiently big _a_ thing becomes _the_ thing because of economies of scale, network effects and "the software is eating the world" effects. See Google, Paypal, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

All those companies are well aware that the worse they treat their companies, the more likely competitors will appear. It happens all the time. Big, unstoppable companies become sloppy and complacent, and suddenly find themselves in free fall.

Then another huge company grows out of the competitors and begins doing the same thing. Just because the company on top switches out occasionally (and during the transition there is a viable option which isn't abusive), doesn't mean the system is working.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#108

Post by barry-cotter »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #98
csomar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like we need some form of regulation That's crazy. Etsy is not the market, it is a market. If you don't like it, you move somewhere else. We already have too much regulation that for some fields it's impossible to start a business without jumping through many hoops. Last thing we need is to start regulating on a per-business basis. This is really a case of giving up your store brand/independence for convenie…

It's not crazy. Being "a market" for a certain good is a natural monopoly -- there are economies of scale so that one market will inevitably drive out the others. I don't know if Etsy has reached that point, but it could someday.

There’s extremely limited evidence that natural monopolies even exist. The economic definition is when the efficient number of sellers in a market is one. That may be the case for airframes, see the endless subsidies for Boeing and Airbus to avoid that happening. But even a market like microchips where a fab costs tens of billions of dollars supports multiple sellers.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#109

Post by blueboo »

josephjrobison wrote: post #17

Well the easy, non-controversial way to do this is to just introduce it as an easy and awesome new product, that stands on its own and let people opt-in at their own discretion. By auto-enrolling everybody and requiring them to opt-out, that’s creating a huge controversy just asking for backlash. And then forcing anyone who makes over $10k to now be required - that’s a strong hand they’re playing. Can only point to s…

Indeed. If the ads were effective and appealing, sellers would trip over themselves to sign up.

If they're not, the only way to enroll would be this approach.

Their strategy doesn't preclude the possibility of the former, but it sure signals the latter.

Re: Etsy sellers are furious over new mandatory ad fees

#110

Post by neya »

I know this sounds crazy, but for E-Commerce, you never go with all these third party "platforms" as your sole business strategy.

1. First of all, you can't differentiate much in terms of offering and most of the time, you're put in a position of having to compete by price if there are similar offerings in the same platform.

2. Believe it or not, it's only a matter of time when other sellers (particularly from CN) will replicate your offering if they ever find it to gain traction and will force you to compete by price.

3. Because you're pushed into a red ocean, you barely get to build your brand and curate your own email list.

4. Finally, you can avoid all these random fees by having your own shop. These fees can make or break your business especially if they force you to increase the price of your products.

I've been in the E-Commerce (mostly drop-shipping) business for many years now and I will never recommend anyone to solely rely on Amazon or Etsy or Ebay or even Shopify. Get a domain name, roll out something quick. Use WooCommerce or Magento or whatever it takes. Start off with a simple shared hosting account if you can't afford to pay a lot, use the rest of the money to advertise on Facebook/Instagram and start building your own list. When you grow, move to something like AppEngine on GCP or some managed dockerized hosting on AWS so that you don't need to worry about devOps.

You'd be surprised, how effective this strategy is over the long term, than having to sell your data to all these platforms which you're helping to grow by paying your money to them and as well as data. I know atleast Shopify effectively sucks your analytics from your shop and resells it to you back as a premium offering called "Shopify Analytics" (https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/sho...).

Install Google Analytics and Tag Manager, read some tutorials and setup event tracking. Feel free to ping me if you need help. You'll then start to see how much valuable data you've been giving away to these leeches for free (sometimes even paying a fee to them to steal your data).

With all of the above and the right combination of products, UX, ads, you can easily make much more than relying on these third party platforms.

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