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 Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.
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 dismissive attitude to people's (very) legitimate concerns. The people that carried Etsy forward on their backs.
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.
hah similar thing happened to me. I provided them with my renderings that I made and everything showing they were home made. What I thought was crazy was quite a few months later I wanted to buy something on etsy. I couldn't log in so I emailed etsy staff. They told me my account was disabled. I asked them if that was only from selling things and they said that nope, I couldn't buy anything either.
"""
Please do not open any new accounts on Etsy; they will be closed immediately and without notice.
"""
I also sell 3D printed items and they did the exact same thing to my account. I just emailed them and they had me send pictures of my workspace and process to prove my items are "handmade" and my account was restored within 48 hours.
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 inquiring about my products before closing my shop, that would have been a different story but that is not what happened. I refuse to do business with reckless providers.
Wasn't rude in my initial reply. Just the opposite actually.
*Edit - It was the 3rd go around with their support before I started to get rude and pointed out a ton of Chinese products. By this time it was a week after they closed my shop and I was done with even trying with them.
Then their support staff sucks. I've worked support for years and I'll be the first to admit that I gave the 'nice' users better and faster service, but even the most belligerent of users got their issues resolved (eventually) because that was my fucking job.
> 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 you not sell those types of items on their platform?
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 one of the things they are allowed to do, at least for longer than a very well defined period of time. I imagine suspected fraud might supersede this to some degree and have its own rules, but that's what I was pointing out, this isn't a case of suspected fraud, it's a TOS violation, and since Etsy has more insight than paypal into the situation as the marketplace and should know this, treating it like fraud when it's not might be something that could land them in trouble(?).
Contracts aren't as powerful as you think. Lots of people are signed up to unlawful contracts (NDAs being a prime example).
The threat of a contract is powerful though, because to challenge it you have to go through courts, and a company like test had far deeer pockets than you do.
Handmade is actually worse than Etsy for this. I tried creating a Handmade account with the same products I sell on Etsy and Amazon basically said they weren't handmade enough. If you're not making jewelry or textiles, don't get your hopes up.
I used to work for a company called Tictail (https://tictail.com) that promotes upcoming brands. If you're anywhere in the fashion, home, jewelry and accessories kind of space, it might be a good fit. Check it out.
Will echo others regarding China imports, but one last hope to bring me back to their marketplace is a revamp of the review system.
After spending thousands of dollars on furniture, waiting a month for the guy to make it, and another two weeks to ship, I had maybe a few days to leave a review for something I spent a lot of money on. With this policy, reviews are for first impressions only. And I won't be coming back.
Maybe it's in place to prevent review extortion, but a time limit (especially for goods made on demand) isn't the way to do it.
They used to email prompt you for reviews, or prompt you for reviews whenever you signed in. Now they don’t do either, and even if I manually check the backlog of orders, the review time windows have all expired. So I never review anything anymore.
Seems like a strange decision. I don’t understand how that is helping buyers or sellers.
Forgot they used to do that. The receipt emails also fail to mention the time limit policy, causing many more people to miss their chance. For one-off handmade products, reviews are more important than most other marketplaces.
The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud.
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?
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 you're considered a fuckup, and while that's easier than it sounds because people don't know how to rate effectively so almost all feedback is perfect, you also have to deal with people that leave negative feedback because of issues that have nothing to do with what they ordered (tracking shows USPS lost he package for a week or two in delivery, or shows it delivered to correct address but customer did not receive it).
> 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".
Amazon's product questions are like that. It seems people get the emailed question and think a person has reached out to them, they respond "sorry i haven't used it yet", or whatever, and that fits in with the other 20 useless answers.
They don't appear to have user rating on answers, only on reviews?
Similarly I bought some gifts there and it was weeks before I gave the gifts, not much chance I'm writing a review for something I haven't even given yet.
Probably too late as going back would likely reduce revenues. Handcrafted goods are expensive and slow and hard to police the sellers.
Its a shame, because it was such a good idea to have a marketplace for people to sell stuff without the pain of setting up an online website/shop. Though some independents are now are using the squarespace/shoppify....etc.
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."
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.
I mean, Isn't that what they are doing? Shrinking workforce in theory "refocusing" which is code for "we don't need all these people if we are targeting a smaller market"?
what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds.
To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks.
[1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX
Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.
You think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the article mentions?
I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".
No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue.
Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the questions I'm interested in.
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?
> 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.)
I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. It depends on scale and the skills available to you. Yes, amazon and co do a good job of pushing down cloud costs, but you still need people to manage these services.
Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago that very likely wasn't the case.
I'm not saying Etsy doesn't have somewhat higher system costs than others but I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
> It depends on scale and the skills available to you.
Skills -- yes. Scale? That's kind of the point, nowadays. You don't need a large staff to accomplish scale.
> I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
Their eng/ops approach wasn't the cause of any business issues, AFAIK. That's why my comment is directed around what happens when business performance suffers -- you start looking for cost reductions.
I lost interest in Etsy when I saw a bunch of manufactured crap I could by anywhere else. There was a turning point where Etsy became more of this than original, personally crafted items.
There 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 disappointed. They wanted me to come in and work on a bunch of PHP code. When I asked about the details, from the hiring manager, I was told that it was, basically, a big monolithic PHP thing. I've no idea if they later moved to microservices, but I have been traumatized by a few too many encounters with horrendous blobs of PHP. For me, its become a bit of a heuristic. If a company is apparently working with a big blob of PHP, I am wary. I need to hear very good things about that company, to offset that wariness.
More recently I've read criticisms of their search system. At the risk of indulging in "confirmation bias", I'll say this (bad search) is exactly what I would have predicted, based on what I'd heard 3 to 5 years ago.
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 again, and the latter using $dailyhype, as that's the thing that looks best on your CV right now.
I guess this comes down to personal preferences, and whether you value the tech environment, or the business environment. I'd rather do unexciting work in a profitable company, than exciting work in a company with a writing on the wall.
I'll take the plane on fire but only if the airline is profitable. A plane on fire where the airline is bankrupt sucks. That was the second part of his comment. Working for a company that's growing with revenue is always better.
Seems like a sinking ship for anyone there involved in software especially since they like to blame their tech and poor search for a lot of their problems.
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.
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.
A lot of negative nancies in this thread. I'm not here for kicking people while they're down.
But didn't they have a layoff a month ago? Isn't there a management saying that goes something like "If you're going to eat shit, eat enough so you only have to do it once", specifically about layoffs?
Etsy engineers (and other workers) reading this, I wish you good luck! May you survive and thrive through tough times.
I remember hearing that Etsy had an unusually large number of women working on the development team. I wonder how this layoff is going to affect that? Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a luxury?
I also read that they were also hiring a lot of bootcamp grads. It would be interesting to see the percentage of layoffs coming from bootcamps.
The first round of layoffs included the CEO and the CTO, both men. Anecdotally (as someone who received a job offer right before the layoffs, and asked around about what it affected) I heard that round included a lot of middle management; at the least they laid off my manager-to-be and his manager, both men, and did not lay off any individual contributors on the team I was interviewing for, which was roughly gender-balanced. I have no information about today's layoffs.
I would personally argue that it's a lot more common of a luxury to promote okay-but-not-great men into management instead of letting them go, and a company motivated by capitalist concerns should focus more on eliminating those sinecures than eliminating bootcamp grads, who often can't command a high salary anyway. But then again, Etsy did cancel their entire summer internship program with two weeks' notice, which can't have saved them much money at all, so I'm not sure how responsible/rational they're being in their capitalist motivations.
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 things: It gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women."
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 and better general understanding.
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.
By that statement though, you're implying that men and women aren't paid equally within Etsy. Which is against the whole of diversity and equal pay for equal work campaign isn't it?
Yes, in the absence of strong evidence I would assume both Etsy and every other salaried company that permits offers to be negotiated is paying men and women non-equally for equal work, primarily because (as Greenspan points out) the market value of men is higher: they are receiving competing offers from places that are more blatant about paying men more (or extending fewer offers to women, or whatever). Hopefully this difference is pretty small at Etsy, but it almost certainly exists, and even a small arbitrage opportunity is economically rational to capitalize on.
I'm using "equal work" in an informal sense. (In the legal sense, yes, equal pay for equal work is the law, but also in the legal sense, you can't give an immigrant worker a green-card-path visa unless you can't find anyone in the States to do the same job, and we all know how creatively "the same job" gets defined.)
In the absence of strong evidence, you're making a bunch of assumptions you mean?
In the absence of strong evidence, I personally err on the side of caution.
I don't know what these mythical places are that vastly prefer men over women - every place I've ever worked at, everyone preferred people who are good at their job and are easy to get along with - mostly the easy to get along with part by the way.
Yes, culture fit, or 'getting along with each other' is important. When looking for people they will get along with, most people tend to prefer to be around others who seem like themselves. Given a team of all male engineers and two candidates of equal ability and with similar personalities, one male and one female, the male candidate is more 'like' the hiring engineers which makes him seem easier to get along with. And so a company which is just hiring people who 'are good at their job and are easy to get along with' can end up with a team of men.
They might also be implying that they are paid equally but on average do equal or higher quality work. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing because companies don't typically micro-manage salaries (for a given job title) according to individual performance.
The diversity ratio is likely not going to be affected just by some people being laid off. I wouldn't expect it to change or to have been a factor in this.
Diversity happens naturally when you let people have some say. Meaning, don't think for a second that dev shops full of men wouldn't much rather have some women in the room. They have no say in the matter. Having no say in the matter is the actual problem.
As for Etsy, did they actually have 'diversity initiatives' within the company? What doe that even mean?
I didn't see any numbers on what departments were the most affected, but to my friends at Etsy looking for roles in automation/infrastructure engineering please reach out!
Etsy looks to be just fine. Sales grew 33% for 2016 vs 2015. Their operating loss is down to a very small trickle at $2m for the latest quarter. To go with $275m in cash.
They appear to have a very nice business that's trading for a reasonable four times sales and likely heading toward profitability. What's the problem? Cutting bloat is exactly what they should be doing, it'll drive them to profitability faster.
But I would warn them, based on prior experience, that having a pile of cash can turn you into a target for takeover from someone who wants your cash. Once the companies merge, all that cash becomes 'our' cash and they can use it to buy themselves a couple extra years of burn rate.
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.
I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.