Etsy accused of 'destroying' sellers by withholding money • Hacker News Board

Re: Etsy accused of 'destroying' sellers by withholding money

#41

Post by cyanydeez » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:27 PM UTC

raincom wrote: post #36

justinclift wrote: post #4

> Etsy told her it "isn't able to give... [a] specific reason" Sounds like it's probably some newly implemented "black box" (either AI or external vendor) solution that can't be probed or debugged. :(

Use "blackbox" to avoid any responsibility. This is how c-level executives have layers and layers of people to do the dirty work to not get prosecuted. Now replace 'layers of people' with software/ai/machine learning, etc. This is how financial institutions are debanking people in the name of de-risking (read how politicians and small businesses are being debanked in UK--maybe, banks should debank techocrats) This is…

If we could rid ourselves in America of republican fascism, we could focus on the business end of that.

Re: Etsy accused of 'destroying' sellers by withholding money

#42

Post by arp242 » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 11:33 PM UTC

lockhouse wrote: post #29

rightbyte wrote: post #2

This is the problem with all these middlemen platforms. If you base your business around them you are at their mercy.

I agree with you to a point, but what’s the alternative? Running your own storefront online is a huge undertaking, even more so if you want to accept international orders. Processing payments securely while also properly accounting for things like taxes, customs, and other laws is a huge undertaking. This is just not something that would be realistic for most of the people on sites like Etsy to implement properly.

Ideally there should be a few storefronts you can viably choose from as a provider of goods or services.

For example, I can walk to a Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, SuperValu, and Spar from where I live, there are a bunch of clothing shops relatively close, phone shops, off-licenses, computer shops, etc. etc. And all that in a town of ~25,000 people.

It's kind of unusual that for a lot of online stuff there's so little choice, especially from the seller's perspective: it's "Etsy or bust" (or "Amazon or bust", "YouTube or bust", "Android or bust", etc.)

Re: Etsy accused of 'destroying' sellers by withholding money

#43

Post by arp242 » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

sleepytimetea wrote: post #7

Would Shopify custom shopfronts be the alternative to using Etsy ? Will custom shopfronts be searchable via Google or Pinterest - how do they submit them for indexing ?

The big advantage of a platform like Etsy is just discoverability: it's like walking into a store and browsing to see what they have. Everything I bought from Etsy was by "browsing" like this.

It's the same as YouTube in this regard. Sure, you can set up "https://sleepytimetea.video" and start posting videos, but attracting an audience will be so much harder, and it was never easy in the first place. This kind of thing only really works for people who already have an audience.

Re: Etsy accused of 'destroying' sellers by withholding money

#44

Post by Schiendelman » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 1:44 PM UTC

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #37

bratgpttamer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If your revenue stream is unfairly disrupted, just sue the major corporation with your backup pile of cash, switch over to your backup line of credit, and if all else fails, ask daddy for a small loan of a million bucks to see you through!"

Maybe a mutual aid and insurance organization for Etsy / other online marketplace? In which members pay in a little bit to a legal fund which is used to correct payment problems

Maybe like… a government?