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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

#21

Post by physcab »

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…

If Etsy wants to moderate this, they can enforce GTIN verification. Google Shopping does this so they know how to rank bids for the same items by multiple department stores. Google Shopping requires that you put in some GTIN value (they verify it) or you make up your own Manufacturer Identifier (either you control manufacturing or you have a virtual item). The downside of using your own identifier is that they penalize you with worse cost / rankings but thats the cost of not having a GTIN.

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

#22

Post by mason55 »

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?

Code as Craft was one of the best engineering blogs ever at a time when the concept was pretty rare.

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

#23

Post by charlesdm »

badloginagain wrote: post #19

What's the deal with the "Activist investor" that is forcing these changes? Is this a common thing in the investment world? Does anyone have deeper insight into this?

Yahoo is a basic example of activist investing. Activist investors try to increase shareholder value in the companies they invest in, in any way possible, to achieve above average returns for their investors.

If that means burning down the house (e.g. selling a company in bits and pieces, or pushing certain strategic changes) then they will.

Apple has plenty of cash on their books. If an activist shareholder could somehow force them to spend all that cash on buybacks (-> significant share price increase), they can make a nice buck that way. That's actually what Carl Icahn did, over the last few years.

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

#24

Post by kylebgorman »

badloginagain wrote: post #19

What's the deal with the "Activist investor" that is forcing these changes? Is this a common thing in the investment world? Does anyone have deeper insight into this?

Activist investors who want changes in business model or cost are extremely common. Just about every publicly traded company has to deal with one at some point.

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

#25

Post by bpodgursky »

charlesdm wrote: post #23
badloginagain wrote: post #19

What's the deal with the "Activist investor" that is forcing these changes? Is this a common thing in the investment world? Does anyone have deeper insight into this?

Yahoo is a basic example of activist investing. Activist investors try to increase shareholder value in the companies they invest in, in any way possible, to achieve above average returns for their investors. If that means burning down the house (e.g. selling a company in bits and pieces, or pushing certain strategic changes) then they will. Apple has plenty of cash on their books. If an activist shareholder could so…

Yahoo was a bloated carcass by the time activist investors got involved. Cutting the fat, selling off parts, and returning some value to investors was the only fair outcome.

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

#27

Post by throwaway61891 »

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?

former etsy employee here:

lots of reasons, but around that time etsy invested heavily in infrastructure and tools like statsd resulted from it.

the last few years the focus has been mostly on product, and product teams usually don't produce the kind of significant technology contributions you're talking about (huge generalization there obviously).

this is more of a personal opinion, but my experience was that the last few years etsy has focused less on technical solutions to problems and more on "people solutions" - if something is inefficient they look for non-technical solutions to that problem, sometimes fruitlessly. as you can imagine in that environment, things like statsd don't get made.

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

#28

Post by DanBlake »

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/farfetch/etc.. products within a week. We actually ended up tripling our revenue off of the etsy traffic so I am glad it happened.

It did show a lack of appreciation for traffic on their end they were so willing to let us go without a fight. No room to budge on rates or even suggest a alternative- Not sure if that was management or department based decision but it was certainly enlightening.

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

#29

Post by amorphid »

cracell wrote: post #4
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…

This has been my experience as well. Etsy in just a few years has gone from a artisan marketplace to a bunch of mass produced junk. From the articles I've read they've done this to increase the number of sales (cheaper items = more conversions) but I think it's been slowly costing them their customer base. Hopefully they realize this and start banning mass produced items and listening to their artisan stores feedback…

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.

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

#30

Post by badosu »

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?

A scenario where a new 'top dog' enters and proposes the solution to all problems™: let's measure our conversions, optimize this and that and make more sales. By the way, all this time you're developing open source you're not helping the company so let's stop that, it costs us developer time and money.

It's not unfeasible.

It would be a scenario that could explain both portfolio degradation and community leave, and not too uncommon. Of course, it could be unrelated and this is just speculation.

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