Why not initiate a share buy back, continue to trim the fat and go private? A return to their roots is necessary rather than trying to balance the share holder value of their B Corp status.
Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#62I tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made. I will never again use or trust…
I used to work at Etsy. We buried our heads in the sand and tried to tell ourselves anything to believe that fake shit from China wasn't a real problem. We looked at numbers, we looked at trends and graphs, and we kept telling ourselves the same story: our sellers are delusional - we have the numbers and fake things from China aren't a big deal. We never shared these numbers with people, and we just took a kind of di…
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Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You should try setting out a bowl of each sometime.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's still in a very precarious position - if they open too much to resellers and large manufacturers people will go back to the more convenient alternative - amazon.
More convenient, better experience, better search, better customer support, better shipping, more reviews, etc. etc. I know this is a dead horse here but Etsy needs to go back to it's roots or die. I would use eBay or alibaba before Etsy if they want to sell cheaply manufactured goods.
There's no reason why the cheaply made goods couldn't be their "day job", funding the true passion of supporting the creative entrepreneur.
What would be concerning is if they see it as anything more than a way to pay the bills.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
zensplain
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a contrarian point of view: What if they do embrace China imports, get acquired by Alibaba and become from a front of artistic goods made in China.
Doesn't Amazon already have a lock on all that?
Amazon's "lock on all of that" has pretty much ruined their brand from a retail seller standpoint. They're catalogue is overrun with garbage and counterfeits. It's quickly becoming eBay. I used to look at stuff in brick and mortar stores and then buy from Amazon. Now I look on Amazon for research and buy from brick and mortar stores so I know I'm not buying Chinese counterfeit garbage.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wanted to leave a review after owning an item for a few months, to get an impression for how well it held up and how I liked it. Finally, I was happy with it, and went to leave a review only to be told I couldn't?!? Why on Earth do they have that policy?
It's beneficial for the sellers. Usually if you go back after some time, it's to leave a negative review.
Is it less true that if you go back immediately, it's also likely to be a negative review?
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#68I wonder if that includes the bike-pedaling office composter.
In case anyone is wondering:
https://blog.etsy.com/news/2012/office-ecology-composting-at...
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#69There was a stretch, I think 3 to 5 years ago, when it seemed that Etsy was on a hiring spree -- lots and lots of recruiters were reaching out to me and asking "Would you like to work for Etsy?" I was intrigued because I used to live in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from Etsy is. So if I worked there, I could have biked to work in about 10 minutes. That would have been cool. But every time I asked about the tech, I was…
For me, it's the opposite actually. "We have a monolithic php thing" seems to signal "We made an MVP, found traction, and have been too busy to start from scratch". In contrast, "We have ultramodern microservices" is depressingly often code for "there's no real business here, so we have all the time in the world to polish the tech". With the former using "old, boring" tools, as they have been battle-proven time and a…
> I'd rather do unexciting work in a profitable company, than exciting work in a company with a writing on the wall.
this is a very good point
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. This is economically rational, as Alan Greenspan pointed out in 1983: > ... the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two…
I have a corollary to this: Women who manage to stay in tech for a long time tend to have a level of passion that let them put up with the amount of bullshit that they have been given in the past (and present). Find me a woman, who does engineering, who has been doing it for 10+ years (15 even better) and odds are you have someone who LOVES what they do! Odds are this is going to show up in quality of work product an…
You might want to consider what effect the endless insistence work in tech requires some sort of religious levels of 'passion' has on women or beginners or really anyone from an atypical (for tech) background looking to enter the field.