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Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

engadget.com

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Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#81

Post by gutnor »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #24
k3oni wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Etsy is based on selling handmade/artisan stuff. They can get away selling mass market stuff because of the reputation they earned with actual artisans at the beginning.

Your strategy would be to get full steam becoming a front for Alibaba, fooling your users for long enough so that eventually Alibaba buys you.

Problem is why would Alibaba do that ? By that stage you have a toxic brand: at any time, if a enough ripped off users make some noise, you are done forever.

The best move for Alibaba, assuming they are interesting in building a Chinese artisan store, is to simply destroy Etsy with "Cut out the middle man, buy Etsy chinese mass market stuff cheap directly at the source on Alibaba. Or if you are interested in the genuine chinese art, check out our new dedicated store. Click on the following link to see all the process and check we put in place to make sure it is genuine handmade, not found in a super market good."

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#82

Post by jroseattle »

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 it in-house and figure it out.

As a means to an end, this is a _really_ expensive way of operating nowadays. And when the business isn't rolling, these costs become magnified (and the associated operation vulnerable.)

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#83

Post by ghthor »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #60
20years wrote: post #26

I 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…

In this area I see the only real defence coming from employing the users to build graphs and small knit communities. If you empowered your users with data and suggestions you can leave it up to them to build a web of trust for the users that are providing the stated service or at least goals of the community. This leaves an open hole for the community of cheapest made knockoff products a place to grow as well.

In this environment new sellers are handed nothing with a mountain to climb, but you could offer a series of incentives to encourage the sellers within the webs of trust to review and verify new sellers. You could encourage sellers to meeing within meatspace as well to build these webs of trust. This would allow new users to join communities of trusted sellers/makers and then be given the proper showcasing and search placements to the buyers.

The TL:DR use your real community and encourage it to grow outside the site and within meatspace to build webs of trusted sellers and makers.

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#84

Post by amazon »

I have only had positive experiences working with Etsy but a lot of other people I've met have had their businesses shut down and their funds locked on the site. Incredibly shady especially since most of their products were legitimate crafts they made. Hopefully they get their act together because there really is no replacement.

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#85

Post by creepydata »

kbenson wrote: post #29
20years wrote: post #26

I 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…

> They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made. That seems illegal. Then again, Etsy does its own payment processing now, and Paypal's been using that same tactic for years. I wonder if Etsy could get in trouble for doing both, since they have more info and can generally confirm shipment, given you print labels from them, and the problem is not that your items were misleading or fraud, but that they prefer y…

Amazon does it too.

It's standard practice.

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#86

Post by creepydata »

gregmac wrote: post #54
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think good review and ratings systems for online marketplaces are possibly one of the hardest things to get right. I'm not sure it's ever been done really well before, or even if it can be done well. As a spouse of someone with a successful Etsy shop, let me tell you that the sellers aren't always exactly happy with the system either. You have to basically keep it at perfect feedback in some goods marketplaces or y…

> you also have to deal with people that leave negative feedback because of issues that have nothing to do with what they ordered I gain a little bit of hope for humanity whenever I see a low-star review like "arrived 2 days late" or "wouldn't accept my visa card but I just bought gas with it yesterday and it worked fine" followed by "0 of 19 people found this review helpful".

"Best" review I ever saw (on a book):

3 stars

"I haven't read it yet but looks interesting. I'll try to get to it this summer."

This was the worst review of the book.

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#87

Post by creepydata »

socrates1998 wrote: post #36

I have just heard a gradual declining of Etsy's quality and creator service of the last year or two. Their reluctance to crack down on Chinese crap along with being very unhelpful to it's creators are the two biggest issues. I mean, I get that a tech company would struggle with service to it's sellors, that's pretty normal, but if your brand is "handmade quality", then why the hell would you allow Chinese trash?

Chinese trash is $$$$$.

It's hard to resist a stream of very easy money (in the short term at least).

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#88

Post by desireco42 »

menzoic wrote: post #32
5ilv3r wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I love Amazon, but they will not be in any better situation there then it was at Etsy. New platform is needed.

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#89

Post by natermer »

kbenson wrote: post #58
paulcole wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That seems illegal. Just curious but based on what? In Etsy's interpretation, the seller violated the terms of service.

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.

Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

#90

Post by CodeWriter23 »

kbenson wrote: post #58
paulcole wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That seems illegal. Just curious but based on what? In Etsy's interpretation, the seller violated the terms of service.

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…

It's called deep pockets.
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