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The Fall of the House of Etsy

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Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#31

Post by Khartoum »

derefr wrote: post #28
noodlesUK wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real answer is where they always have: local markets and craft fairs. Most towns and cities have some kind of periodic craft market, which is often related to a farmers and/or food market. They usually have some kind of weird schedule like first Sunday of every month or similar. You can also see if your local arts centre/university/whatever has some kind of market. There's also usually different kinds of conventi…

Why are you so sure that an item being sold at a local craft-market gives you any guarantee of its local origin? The "hobbyist jeweler" standing at the twee little booth in the community center on a Saturday afternoon, could just as well have 1000pc boxes of identical "artisanal" rings and pendants from Alibaba sitting under the table, ready to replenish your purchase. Mind you, you can at least be sure that food ite…

The sellers at craft fairs I trust most and purchase from most often are those who are sitting there making things. It's easier to match the quality of things there making against those they're selling.

It's pretty much the only way I can be assured they're not (exclusively) selling dropshipped items.

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#32

Post by hinkley »

derefr wrote: post #25
sbierwagen wrote: post #7

This isn't new. The Regretsy blog extensively complained about dropshippers in 2010. The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment, having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually work for the person who…

> intractable problems with quality and fulfillment • Re: fulfillment — why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-to-order to a fulfillment center first , where it'll be inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment center — with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a charge, on it until t…

If you sell your goods at fairs or cons it’s not uncommon for the site to go dark for a few days while they haul all their goods to man a booth. Anything that doesn’t sell goes back up.

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#33

Post by tensor »

sbierwagen wrote: post #7

This isn't new. The Regretsy blog extensively complained about dropshippers in 2010. The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment, having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually work for the person who…

Shopify did very well connecting small makers/vendors to customers. Granted, to your point they are now trying to go for big vendors, thinking they can somehow unseat amazon. Probably won't work out well for them either.

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#34

Post by derefr »

Khartoum wrote: post #31
derefr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so sure that an item being sold at a local craft-market gives you any guarantee of its local origin? The "hobbyist jeweler" standing at the twee little booth in the community center on a Saturday afternoon, could just as well have 1000pc boxes of identical "artisanal" rings and pendants from Alibaba sitting under the table, ready to replenish your purchase. Mind you, you can at least be sure that food ite…

The sellers at craft fairs I trust most and purchase from most often are those who are sitting there making things. It's easier to match the quality of things there making against those they're selling. It's pretty much the only way I can be assured they're not (exclusively) selling dropshipped items.

Only really works for some types of goods, though. Someone selling e.g. end-grain wooden cutting boards would require a very spacious booth to demonstrate their particular skill. Someone selling stained-glass pieces would require a fume hood to make any permanent progress! Someone making scented soaps? Legally, you need PPE to be within 50ft of the process!

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#35

Post by threecheese »

acheron wrote: post #6
seattle_spring wrote: post #3

The prevalence of drop shipping is what killed Etsy for me as a buyer. I guess I was too trusting originally, but I was very disappointed when I found out that several items I had bought from them, all marketed as handmade, were just cheaply made pieces of garbage from places like Ali Express, then marked up 10x.

Where do people actually handmaking stuff sell now?

Shopify has implemented much of Etsys value as a selling platform, though it doesn’t serve as a marketplace for discovery. Social media (TikTok and Insta) can easily offboard to a website shop, and lots of product creators sell there (and some use TikTok’s Shop, which admittedly is competing more with Etsys garbage dropshipping than anything else). Clearly there are gaps here, as not everyone can create a Shopify site, and social media isn’t exactly an e-commerce marketplace.

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#37

Post by iLoveOncall »

irq-1 wrote: post #26
sbierwagen wrote: post #7

This isn't new. The Regretsy blog extensively complained about dropshippers in 2010. The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment, having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually work for the person who…

Etsy should charge the sellers fees per sale, and make them post an expensive bond. Then Etsy can ban drop shipping, give instant refunds, pay return postage, and generally hold the creators to high standards. Etsy should also mandate the inclusion of a scan code in the package, which the customer can use to show they received the shipment but it wasn't as advertised. This would catch people lying about the contents,…

This would be a minor inconvenience for drop shippers but kill small businesses by drowning them in fees and paperwork.

Etsy already charges fees, even just to LIST items, regardless of whether they sell or not.

I've been wanting to sell some of my 3D printed designs, but I'm not paying a buck a piece for a listing that will earn me 5 to 10 bucks if I manage to sell.

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#38

Post by derefr »

hinkley wrote: post #32
derefr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intractable problems with quality and fulfillment • Re: fulfillment — why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-to-order to a fulfillment center first , where it'll be inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment center — with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a charge, on it until t…

If you sell your goods at fairs or cons it’s not uncommon for the site to go dark for a few days while they haul all their goods to man a booth. Anything that doesn’t sell goes back up.

Since it is by definition a low (sales) volume process, you'd only need to keep one or two of each thing in stock at the Etsy fulfillment center. Items in stores run on "tight logistics" would just have their items constantly going in and out of stock as they alternate between 0–2 copies in stock at the warehouse.

Of course, if things were constantly going out of stock, then you'd want to create a system to allow people to put down a hold on their card to reserve a copy of something, waiting in a virtual line to be the first to get it when it does come back in stock. (Which would actually work much better than Etsy does today, as it would give makers the ability to know how many of each thing to target making as a batch to attempt to satisfy upcoming demand — without money already captured forcing them to work to a potentially-impossible deadline.)

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#39

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #25
sbierwagen wrote: post #7

This isn't new. The Regretsy blog extensively complained about dropshippers in 2010. The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment, having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually work for the person who…

> intractable problems with quality and fulfillment • Re: fulfillment — why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-to-order to a fulfillment center first , where it'll be inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment center — with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a charge, on it until t…

[deleted]

Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy

#40

Post by marcinzm »

derefr wrote: post #25
sbierwagen wrote: post #7

This isn't new. The Regretsy blog extensively complained about dropshippers in 2010. The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment, having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually work for the person who…

> intractable problems with quality and fulfillment • Re: fulfillment — why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-to-order to a fulfillment center first , where it'll be inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment center — with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a charge, on it until t…

> Re: fulfillment — why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-to-order to a fulfillment center first, where it'll be inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment center — with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a charge, on it until the seller's goods are inspected by the fulfillment center as good? (In other words: turn the process into a goods-for-money mediated escrow.)

Because that costs money and most Etsy sellers sell very few things. We're not talking thousands or hundreds or even dozens per months. We're talking single digits per month. Per store. Not per item. With 7 million stores.

> Re: quality / drop-shipping — I feel like a lot of this could by solved just through simple semi-automated verification. Require for a product to be listed, for the seller to upload a video of themselves making the thing. Then pass those videos to MTurk workers to evaluate them for tricks.

See the previous point. No one would use Etsy if they had to make a whole video and go through an automated process for an item that might sell once per year.

edit: Amazon sells something like 350m products including the marketplace and 12 million directly. Etsy sells over 100m. Amazon has 40x the sales revenue. The economists are so different between them it's not even the same universe.

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