101–110 of 112 posts
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Where should we go? I make little things frequently and friends have been telling me to start an etsy shop, but stories like this keep me away.
https://www.amazon.com/Handmade
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In what was does violating the terms of service of the platform mean that the platform gets to keep the money but not return the goods? You don't get to keep someone's money just because you decided so. That's theft. I'm not a lawyer, but I think there are probably fairly clear laws on exactly what you can and can't do an an intermediary of payment. I doubt "we decided to deliver your goods but keep your money" is on…
Contracts are power stuff that overrides most things. If you agree to something then people, and courts, will hold you to it. I expect it is in the agreement they require you to use before you join Etsy.
The threat of a contract is powerful though, because to challenge it you have to go through courts, and a company like test had far deeer pockets than you do.
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Yes, in the absence of strong evidence I would assume both Etsy and every other salaried company that permits offers to be negotiated is paying men and women non-equally for equal work, primarily because (as Greenspan points out) the market value of men is higher: they are receiving competing offers from places that are more blatant about paying men more (or extending fewer offers to women, or whatever). Hopefully th…
In the absence of strong evidence, you're making a bunch of assumptions you mean? In the absence of strong evidence, I personally err on the side of caution. I don't know what these mythical places are that vastly prefer men over women - every place I've ever worked at, everyone preferred people who are good at their job and are easy to get along with - mostly the easy to get along with part by the way.
I know this will cost me mucho karma, but what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds. To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO…
I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".
Etsy should go back at what they did initially and support the craftsmen instead of the china imports, maybe that would help bring them back on track.
Probably too late as going back would likely reduce revenues. Handcrafted goods are expensive and slow and hard to police the sellers. Its a shame, because it was such a good idea to have a marketplace for people to sell stuff without the pain of setting up an online website/shop. Though some independents are now are using the squarespace/shoppify....etc.
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They used to email prompt you for reviews, or prompt you for reviews whenever you signed in. Now they don’t do either, and even if I manually check the backlog of orders, the review time windows have all expired. So I never review anything anymore. Seems like a strange decision. I don’t understand how that is helping buyers or sellers.
Forgot they used to do that. The receipt emails also fail to mention the time limit policy, causing many more people to miss their chance. For one-off handmade products, reviews are more important than most other marketplaces. The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud.
Which may be the actual intended consequence.
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I did email them but when I pointed out the Chinese knockoffs, that didn't go over too well. I guess I could have handled my response differently but come on! The fact that they closed my shop without pre-warning when I had sales along with pending orders really made me lose complete trust in them. Especially considering the endless Chinese products on there that are obviously not handmade. If they had contacted me i…
It sounds like you were rude to the support staff and that made them unwilling to investigate further. Something about honey and vinegar.
I know this will cost me mucho karma, but what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds. To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO…
You think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the article mentions? I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart…
Yes.
"schadenfreude"
No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue.
Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the questions I'm interested in.
I remember when this article about the Etsy engineering department came out on Techcrunch 3 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377 The items that jumped out at me: > The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter. > The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers. > It wanted to know how Hadoop worked, and the only way to do that was to bring…
I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. It depends on scale and the skills available to you. Yes, amazon and co do a good job of pushing down cloud costs, but you still need people to manage these services. Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago that very likely wasn't the case. I'm not saying Etsy doesn't…
Skills -- yes. Scale? That's kind of the point, nowadays. You don't need a large staff to accomplish scale.
> I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
Their eng/ops approach wasn't the cause of any business issues, AFAIK. That's why my comment is directed around what happens when business performance suffers -- you start looking for cost reductions.
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You think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the article mentions? I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart…
"You think the tech leads ..." Yes. "schadenfreude" No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue. Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too…
You are acting like the whole company is just an amorphous blob that chooses to siphon 'focus' into buckets. That is just not how companies work.
It simply makes no sense to infer anything negative about the company due to them having a good ops image.