The Fall of the House of Etsy
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Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#2"This pattern of scale > internal ad products > clusterfuckery > user exodus is generally referred to as “Enshittification,” a very fun term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 to explain why, broadly speaking, everything on the internet now seems way worse."
That used to be called "pulling a Myspace". Myspace pioneered that way to screw up.
Can anyone name a company that went down this road and came back?
Someone should do a tracking site for companies which fail in this way. Something like "deadmalls.com", or "fuckedcompany.com".
YC idea: develop a LLM model to detect early signs of enshittification and generate sell signals.
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#3The 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.
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#4"This pattern of scale > internal ad products > clusterfuckery > user exodus is generally referred to as “Enshittification,” a very fun term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 to explain why, broadly speaking, everything on the internet now seems way worse." That used to be called "pulling a Myspace". Myspace pioneered that way to screw up. Can anyone name a company that went down this road and came back? Someone should…
"Enshittification" originally had a very specific definition:
> First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Nowadays it's just used as a catch-all for "made worse".
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#5Yeah, I began to notice this a year or two ago.
Etsy used to be a place to check out artisanal craft goods. Not necessarily antiques, but the sort of small-batch stuff that was hard to find elsewhere on the internet. Exotic jewelry, one-off wooden carvings, semi-custom knives, etc.
Now it's a place to check out mass-produced Indian and Pakistani merchandise. It has become worse even than eBay in that regard. It's superficially the same stuff it has always been -- exotic jewelry, wooden carvings, knives, etc. -- but the quality is much lower and the value just isn't there. And it could well be that you buy something on Etsy only to see it later on Amazon.com.
Also I feel like prices on Etsy have risen in an unusual and remarkable way over the past few years. Could be because of higher platform costs to vendors & the forced advertising scheme mentioned in the article.
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#6The 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?
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#7This 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 makes the stuff, and can only hit the "refund" button.
Etsy has every reason in the world to want to get away from small sellers and move to high volume manufacturers, (who have actual QA and customer service departments, which a guy hand carving chess pieces in his basement doesn't have) and nothing to stop them. So the obvious thing happens.
(Except then you're competing directly with Amazon in its area of greatest strength, which historically has been corporate suicide...)
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#8This 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…
> and nothing to stop them
Except Ebay and Amazon already existing.
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#9The 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?
OnlyFans
Re: The Fall of the House of Etsy
#10The automatic enrolment in the Etsy advertising program means the platform fees for anyone selling more than 10k USD increase sharply at that point to ~20% of total revenue.
What that means is that any artists/makers that are doing volumes that represent anything even close to a full time wage are totally shafted. If I were an artist selling stuff, I would strongly consider a switch to something like Shopify, especially as you then aren't on a storefront sitting next to a whole bunch of drop shipped garbage.