i will say they are right about one thing, small sellers are getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress resellers. as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original work. make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress, then sold by all the boring resellers on etsy. 90% of rpg dice sellers are selling the exact same stuff they got from the exact same bulk deal.
one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks.
idk if this is just affecting the retro games / dice communities, or if others are also hit. ALSO you can kinda just sell semi-illegal "grey" goods on etsy? TONS of sellers just selling bootleg game boy games and rarely mentioning that in the product description.
Within 45 minutes of where I live lies a little town that is known for hundreds of miles around as a place to go shopping for locally-produced art and hand-crafted items of almost any kind. You know, glass items, wind chimes, paintings, etc. Why does this still work, 30 years into the internet revolution? Curation. The shop owners choose very carefully what to sell, based on extremely limited space. Etsy purports to be the same idea on the internet, but they'll let anyone who wants to sell on their platform. THEY'D BE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE IF THEY DIDN'T. But for the same reason that I buy less on Amazon and more from brick-and-mortar stores, they're finding that the CURATION is the key to VALUE. The problem of course, is that Etsy, or Amazon, or ANYONE who has a PLATFORM -- like Apple -- has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual customers. It seems that an easy "gate" to erect on the platform would be to limit how many chochkies you can sell per month. It would seem to be a fix for people who are trying to use volume and SEO to take over someone else's product idea. Someone here could probably blow a hole in that idea, though. But if it's a site for personal hobbyists to sell something on the side, then you have to come up with rules to CURATE the content to produce that outcome.
That is the cost of doing business. Without the curation they risk losing their customer base. Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap rather than handmade things?
I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.
Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past they've done a great job living up to that promise for me, and I have to assume others have had similar experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium
knockoffs and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose our business.
So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer Etsy over other options.
> Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.
Well, that's your loss. But it may be Etsy's loss, too, if they allow chintzy crap from overseas to drive the quality sellers off their platform. Amazon has embraced the race to the bottom, so I don't see anybody else competing effectively with them without (at the very least) being all-in on Chinesium.
Capitalism DOESNT fail! This IS the system. In the presence no rules, people will converge on the lowest common denonomiter. The problem with Estsy happens to any platform that gets popular. Its been happening in the real world since the 1990s where large coperations have moved in on mom and pops. Curated gets undercut.
There is no way around this in the free market. Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE. Its about making people consume. Making people want sh*t that in reality they could live without. Overloaded by stimulii, people break. People want the dream. They hear about the dream. People want the cheapest thing so they can 100x instead of 2x. People who knock things off want the most popular thing. This is competition working. Its a race to the bottom or we sacrifice infinite growth. There is no other way. You either create new markets, create new consumers, or steal other peoples cut of the pie. "Disruption".
Please stop writing in caps, it makes your comments look more agressive and rant-like than you probably intend, and it makes it hard to read for me and likely others.
do you want to go back to "mom and pops" shops in lieu of supermarket chains? I don't.
I would like supermarket chains to treat their employees better and I'm willing to pay 10% more for it.
Multiple times each year I rent an inexpensive cabin at one of our state parks, and on the way here I always visit a small grocery store in a small town that carries a local Amish bakery’s goods. I absolutely love their bread.
This past weekend I noticed a Dollar General had popped up nearby. They’re like weeds in rural Indiana.
I have no doubt that within a year or two the small grocery store will be gone, and I’ll no longer have a convenient place to buy that bread I like so much.
I don't disagree that 'race to the bottom' is the rule rather than the exception in modern capitalism, but I don't think your response here captures the context. The fact that Etsy's decline into something like Amazon (which has truly embraced the race to the bottom, enabling it to thrive) was more-or-less inevitable doesn't change the reasons I've used it in the past, or the reasons I may be less likely to use it in the future.
I see an opportunity here. A website who wants to curate products could use Etsy to locate sellers and convince them to list on their site. That curation website could develop a "stamp of approval" brand and grow that way. The art seller could include a printed note in the delivery saying "find more products like this on this xyz site". That way you use Etsy to draw in new customers but keep them as repeat customers for other products on this curated site. The main idea being that the curated site would not have to spend nearly as much money on advertising that Etsy does. Might work.
> They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?
They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're just a shitty ebay.
> It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...
Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not a good reason to ignore doing something that your business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with buyers).
Maybe, but Etsy is part of a long line of businesses that think they can solve adversarial search. The fact that Google can't and is losing the war should tell you everything about your chances. As long as you never use the "discovery" half of their business and find shops elsewhere, IG, TikTok, it's a fantastic experience. Basically Shopify but a little more streamlined.
This assumes every customer has that discernment. No shortage of potential buyers end up on Etsy because they saw something cool, asked the person where they got it, and the only answer they received was "Etsy".
Etsy may be compromised these days but it still IS for artists/creators as you say. We have a stand alone website that gets 2 to 9 visitors a day and our main Etsy site gets hundreds every day. That's why we are on Etsy. We are too small to hire comprehensive SEO/advertising help (I've tried a few) so we let Etsy collect the main slug of customers. We employ 4 people full time.
Curation is expensive, and difficult/impossible to automate, but there's value in it, in a world where anyone can post anything anywhere. We all felt better using Amazon ten years ago, when we could trust reviews, and trust products, but now it's flooded with brand names like "UZOOG" or whatever. People generally liked Facebook more before their grandparents and weird uncle got on it.
The reason it works on reddit is because there is not money to be directly made by tricking the volunteer curators. If those reddit mods were controlling who could sell something, there would be a lot more effort going into corrupting them.
I still think you're right, Reddit has a much higher signal to noise ratio than almost anywhere else on the internet. But there's absolutely money to made by paying off mods of larger subreddits to curate content in such a way that makes their brands look good.
Looks like Etsy made $160M last year. I think they can afford to ramp up their efforts in this area. But, like the Apple App Store, people are only going to get satisfaction if they can make a big enough stink on social media.
The brand is established and it's not that heavily diluted... Even then - it only needs to keep up with the aesthetics and product types, to keep on top.
So no... They don't need to. And curated storefronts were many - I knew of at least 5 startups in that space - they all folded.
Well, yes it is. And it works just fine on the "mom and pop shop" scale. But the whole idea of the post-2008 startups is to "disrupt" the industry by replacing the knowledgeable people with algorithms and minimum wage employees.
So what is the bottom line? Consumers get to enjoy products that are 2x cheaper and 4x worse. Individual makers get priced out and have to join the drone ranks. And the corporate owners of trademarks and algorithms rake in so much cash they don't know where to invest it anymore.
Sadly, this is happening across every sector, and most people seem to be just fine with it.
Etsy is also for curators, though (at least a specific kind). You have always been able to sell vintage items on their platform, and antique sellers are curators and restorers.
Before manufactured goods were on the platform, you were basically browsing items that were either handmade or hand curated. It was a much better experience.
Artists and creators are Etsy’s brand. But those sellers have not been the bread and butter of Etsy’s business for ages.
I still occasionally find small sellers on Etsy whose stuff interests me and I always wonder why they choose to sell via Etsy and I’m sure it’s: because it works and because it’s less hassle than the other options. The traffic to your shop is worth swimming in a sea of knockoffs and doodads. And that’s what you compete with on the internet at large anyway.
This is why I buy music related stuff (e.g. cables) only from Thomann. Amazon more or less relies on vendors to fill out metadata like product type, cable length, plug types and communication standards, and the result is that the Amazon product filter is often just horribly fucking broken. Meanwhile, Thomann does all that curation work on their own, and it's just a breeze to use.
Our biggest electronics chain Conrad however... oh jesus they have gone really downhill some years ago with their website design - the search is broken, metadata for parts are (sometimes completely) wrong, and to make it worse even the in-store staff has to rely on the website instead of a dedicated ERP software which means if you are searching for a part with specific specs (e.g. temperature) even the store staff can't help you any more!
Thomann and the like killed my local music instrument stores. I don’t think Thomann will go away, but it depresses me that it is nearly impossible to find an instrument I want to purchase to test without travelling 5 hours. And I live in a capital city.
A couple of years ago, I went shopping for headphones. I went to a couple of different small electronics/audio stores, and none would let me try the headphones!! They had them in the plastic packaging and said they are not allowed to open them.
What the fuck!
I just left and bought something online.
(I know there are high end hifi shops that will let me try headphones. But I wasn't looking for 500€ headphones, I just wanted something that didn't sound like shit. Thomann is perfect for that.)
> People come in to try them and then just buy them online.
It still puzzles me how much of a disconnect exists between e-commerce and brick & mortar, almost 25 years from Gates's "Business at the speed of thought".
Those people who come in the store should be converted right there and then, by making it trivial to order in-store a home delivery option that is price-competitive with non-b&m-equipped businesses. Keep razor-thin local inventory that commands a premium for the fact that you get it there and then, and everything else can be ordered. This should allow you to offset a decent amount of showroom costs while still competing with web-only operations.
If the price difference is small enough and the friction low enough, making the order in-store becomes a better option than leaving, sitting down somewhere, searching again for the item on some other store, etc etc.
There are still big opportunities out there for retailers who can figure out that sweet spot.
I mean, you could have bought them. Tried them out while in the store, then returned them if they weren't to your liking. But I'll admit that might be more overhead than you were hoping for. But it would also be a great way to communicate to the store that their policies are bad. "I'd like to return these. Nothing really wrong, just don't like them. Oh, and I'd like to try...I mean buy these headphones. ... Actually, I'd like to return these please [etc, etc]
I am assuming that. In most countries it's required that you can return non-consumable items in a sensible time-frame. Restocking fees vary in legality, but typically need to be disclosed before purchase.
I live in the northeast and we seem to still have local music stores offering the usual mix of instrument sales and service, lessons, sheet music and other supplies, etc. If I understand correctly from casual conversations with the owner of our local store many of them make a lot of their revenue renting instruments to local school students.
Thomann started out as a small music/instrument/stage tech store, too - but unlike their competitors, they fully embraced the future instead of showing the typical German skepticism towards change.
I mean, I get your pain. But on the other hand I'm just sick about the Mittelstand complaining that online is eating their lunch... they have all sat on their wealth and glory and thought they had carved out their forever niche guaranteeing themselves profits without having to do anything any more, and every single one that collapses fills my heart with a bit of joy.
> Thomann and the like killed my local music instrument stores.
I think that's a good thing. The business of "holding things in a building" that are occasionally purchased and don't benefit from last-mile caching should go the way of the dinosaur. It will be good to get the space back. The thing that's really needed is a community space but the economics of it are hard unless you're selling stuff. My city tries to promote this stuff with arts council grants.
I'm tempted to say not to mistake local tourist traps for high quality goods.
This is tough, as a lot of artistic items have quality control that is purely subjective. But, often these places are not much more curated than the vendor room of a convention. There will be some nice things; but claims of curation are all too often over sold.
That reminds me of an idea that I sent in to Apple, via their bug reporter (you can submit suggestions).
I'm an Apple One subscriber. I only listen to Apple Music during my morning three-mile walk (45-50 minutes). The rest of the day, I'm working, and I don't listen to music, then.
I use their "Create A Station Based on This Song" feature, like Pandora. It generally works fairly well (I think Pandora works better, but they also limit skips -even for paid subscriptions).
I like to hear obscure, indie, music, from artists off the beaten path. I tend to immediately skip, when I get a song that is in my library, or that I've heard a lot (like the song used to create the station). I also tend to skip a lot, anyway, because a lot of undiscovered music is obscure for a reason.
One time, I was listening to relaxing, wordless, techno/trance, and a freaking Lady Gaga pop song plops in, like an airborne gift from a dyspeptic, incontinent, buzzard. The only possible relation to what I was listening to, was that one of her band members was maybe playing a sampler. She's a talented artist, and all that, but that was not what I wanted to hear. It was quite jarring.
Someone is selling eardrums. That was probably an AI hiccup.
In any case, my suggestion was to create "Undiscovered Music" stations, so you say "Play more songs like this one, but ones I've not heard before, and are definitely not in my library."
I would want to hear indie tracks, and songs from obscure artists. I listen to a lot of different types of music, and most of my tastes are heavily represented in the indie space. I often find it difficult to discover music that I'm not already familiar with.
I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless. They'd probably kill it, soon afterwards, because "Nobody uses this service."
The current push for "Bigger, Louder, MOAR!" is something that does not favor craftsmanship, Quality, or independence.
> I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless.
Why would they do that? It would be massively unpopular, per your own comment, so I can't understand why that would be a commercial move.
It's not even like an indie radio station selling out, because a radio station is at least (usually) an independent competing entity. It's more like a record shop inexplicably filling its death metal section with madrigals.
It would simply lose those customers who liked it, and not even gain any others, since pop customers want the opposite thing (and are already amply catered to) so wouldn't even click on it to begin with.
It's likely the music platforms' data is showing them that users vastly prefer explore+exploit lists vs just explore. If you're in the small minority who wants to listen just to new music, there are plenty of curated playlists you could select.
Asking for an all-new list is akin to asking for a HIIT workout plan, but without the pauses.
I've had issues with these. There's so many spammy, garbage playlists, that it's impossible to pick out the good ones (and I have found gems, but it's a lot of work).
My pet rant of late is a lament that companies seem incapable of having a conversation about achieving profit versus maximizing profit. In the ideal, companies that achieving profit can treat their employees and customers well; however, companies that maximize profit shit on everyone in their blast radius for that almighty dollar. How sweetly bitter is the teat of capitalism...
Honest question though, when is it ever appropriate to yell? Have you seen people ever do it? I think the all caps could be a useful tool for emphasis. Would I do it though? No.
>has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual customers.
This will never happen with Etsy, Amazon, or any other publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible. If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will. If you want a platform like you are describing it will have to be privately owned.
>Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible.
There has been this odd trend over the last few years of mischaracterizing what this means/what that duty translates to. People talk about it as if every CEO has to redline the company at all times and never think about longterm consequences for literally any reason. Every single cent that can be extracted right now must be extracted or the investors will rise up in all their anger crying out "FIDUCIARY DUTY!" as they drag the poor CEO off kicking and screaming.
Companies can think longterm. They're allowed to sacrifice short term profits for sustainability/longevity. I don't get where people get this idea that they can't. To me, "fiduciary duty" has become almost memetic - it's some weird hand wave-y line people throw out to excuse businesses being short-sighted, as if they never had a choice.
Whether it's a legal requirement or not, companies definitely act as if it is. Setting a company on fire to acquire short-term profits with a golden parachute guarantee is the pattern for executives of public companies under American capitalism.
Oh let me be perfectly clear here, I know that that is how things often shake out, especially in the US. What I am talking about is the way people defend businesses that behave this way.
They act as if they have no choice, that there is some legal mandate to just wring out a company all day every day and damn all consideration beyond “I can make another dollar this second.”
> Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible.
I feel like this is in semi-myth territory. Yes, there have been cases where shareholders have sued company leadership because they weren't making them as much money as they could. But it's not quite as clear-cut and well-tested in the courts as you make it sound.
In fact, the case law goes firmly in the other direction.
Management has a ton of latitude to run the business as they see fit. The "remedy" for bad business decisions is supposed to be divesting and starting a competitor, not the courts.
Cases like Dodge v. Ford or Caremark are odd because the board was basically not running a business at all: Ford flat-out said he was doing something not for the business, but in support of his philanthropic beliefs. Caremark was so asleep at the helm that they racked up a quarter-billion dollars in silly fines.
Anyone can, of course, sue over anything, but if it's even vaguely legitimate (and the "facts" in Shlensky v. Wrigley are pretty bonkers, IMO), they won't win.
>Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919) is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a charitable manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism. [Wikipedia]
Yup, but the facts of that particular case are tricky. Ford refused to issue a dividend to the Dodge brothers because
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the
benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
number, to help them build up their lives and their homes."
This isn't a business decision; it's an ideological one.
It's been argued that if he said less ("No, just no"), or a bit more ("And this will let us recruit the best workers/expand our customer base/etc"), he would have been fine. This commentary lays that argument out nicely: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/603
That meme also contrasts with the rise of modern ESG, where a lot of shareholder pressure on management teams has been in the direction of making less money. There is a lot of really interesting stuff out there done in the name of ESG, EXFY being a particularly good example.
As much money as possible over what timeline? Crank profits now at the expense of the long-term business? Lose profits now to improve long-term business?
It isn't a straight-forward call to make. The current status-quo with resellers might be making money now, but there will be long-term brand damage in exchange. Will their business still be viable in 5 years if they develop a reputation for being Aliexpress lite?
If you are publicly traded and don't have leverage (e.g. different share classes with different voting rights for the founders) it's a straighforward call to make. Optimize for short term profits or be replaced by someone who will do.
> Optimize for short term profits or be replaced by someone who will do.
No. Optimize for shareholder value.
Amazon shareholders, for instance, are happy to make little in way of profit because Amazon management has shown an ability to increase the value of the enterprise.
In general though, the market is legitimately skeptical of most managers which is not a bad thing.
“fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible”
No they don’t. That’s an oft repeated myth. The have a responsibility to manage in the best interests of the business.
That’s pretty vague.
On purpose.
There's a "however". Actions that reduce the shareholder value without any long term prospects is something that will drive down investment and could trigger lawsuits
Of course. Because by definition you’ve sacrificed the short term and the long term for nothing. But I don’t think anyone here would debate that so I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at.
In my experience it's just a repeated line to excuse companies for not thinking longterm or about anyone/anything beyond immediate revenue. It's very silly and not what the term means at all, yet as you pointed out, we see it all the time.
> Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible.
That is not accurate. They are required to operate in a manner that is satisfactory to their owners, who delegate that responsibility to the board of directors, who then set policy for management to execute.
There is no difference between a publicly traded and privately owned company in terms of the responsibilities of the management and board to their shareholders.
There are numerous incentives to maximize shareholder returns (eg taxation incentives, equity value improvement, dividends), but there is nothing in law or otherwise that applies a fiduciary duty to management or the directors of a company to maximize either dividends or capital value.
It's called the Friedman Doctrine. It is true corporations don't have a legal prescribed duty to maximize shareholder value. However, the Friedman Doctrine is, much like Moore's Law, a norm from which any deviations are considered aberrant and for which the reactions range from disappointment to frustration.
They are being downvoted because "make as much money as possible" is not a clear cut proposition. Apple ran (runs) an expensive recycling program and investors complained that it wasn't valuable at annual meetings. Steve Jobs said "We disagree" but he wasn't replaced. Lots of companies don't maximize the dollars out of every single thing, in response to a bigger picture / longer term vision, and it's up to leadership to sell it to shareholders.
Etsy could certainly argue their bottom line in the long term will be helped by curating a higher quality marketplace and getting rid of junk sellers, if that's a problem.
I had the same thing happen[0], but the point is that companies don't have to make as much money as possible by sacrificing everything else like brand image and human decency; anything that goes against obvious profit-increasing practices must be properly accounted for by the board giving a reasonable explanation. A hypothetical shareholder meeting: "Q: why did you reduce your cut of sales when still trending upward in user and revenue growth? A: we believe higher user growth numbers is more important in the long term and envision our revenue growth will continue to increase despite this change".
> make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress
I work in this space and can provide a little correction/illumination:
The folks selling printed phone cases, gameboy cases, etc are generally not shipping these over from aliexpress. They are almost all printed on demand from printers local to the country of the buyer (there's a half dozen big phone case printers just in the US). Nothing is mass produced except the blanks.
The sellers come up with the artwork and titles/tags/descriptions/etc. Software like mine creates the Etsy listings and processes orders, routing to appropriate printers which ship directly to the customer. Etsy provides an API for this.
Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property. They jealously guard their high-resolution images, but that doesn't stop the industry from having a big ripoff problem. Low-effort ripoffs copy a public low-res image, which makes a terrible print but potential customers/victims might not be able to tell from an online mockup image. High-effort ripoffs involve hiring an artist to make a new work substantially (or identically) similar to something else. Both cheat the intellectual property of the original artist, but they're using the same print companies.
Whether this stuff is "handcrafted" is somewhat ambiguous - is a book handcrafted? Is a set of patterns for a dress or a piece of furniture handcrafted? Something 3d printed? Certainly someone came up with the artwork "by hand", but printing it on a tshirt or phone case is pretty mechanical.
Another grey area with POD (print-on-demand) is creating designs for POD products e.g. products like t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, wall prints, etc.
There are hundreds of online tutorials promising you how to create designs for sale on Etsy - even if you have not a shred of design talent. How? Go to Canva, find a good-looking template and slap on it on as many POD products as possible. Etsy is simply overstuffed with products like this. Many of these sellers are probably making good sales. Does this count as something being 'designed'? Does it even matter?
The perception that Etsy is a marketplace mostly of artists and "makers" is one that hasn't been true for a while.
That's true but I think this is a relatively small part of the POD market. Some POD marketplaces (not Etsy, but Redbubble and TeePublic) detect stock content and automatically ban accounts.
Etsy tends to attract the more sophisticated POD merchants because it's more complicated (separate printer required) and there's a $0.20 listing fee so there's more upfront cost. Most successful POD merchants have thousands or tens of thousands of designs, so the listing fees really add up.
The most successful POD merchants have small design teams that produce content every day. That may or may not fit your mental image of an Etsy seller. But the low-effort non-artists who took a guru's "make money fast in POD" online course tend to do very poorly, and don't make up the bulk of Etsy.
> Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property.
Well they're selling properly licensed products that use their images that are protected by copyright (and potentially trademark).
The supposedly appropriate response would be to have the ability to sue those that rip them off in exactly the same way that Nike or Chanel or any other manufacturer would.
There may be some liability to the print companies (and perhaps the other companies in the pipeline) for producing product that doesn't have a properly validated copyright on the image. Especially if they are producing in bulk/for general sale to the public.
So it should be in Etsy's interest (and yours, and the print companies) to ensure that what a seller is asking you to produce is not ripped off.
There absolutely is a legal risk to print companies and marketplaces for assisting in intellectual property theft. In practice this means we look out for major trademarks, and ripoffs of small players are impossible to police.
There is no such thing as "validated copyright" - you own a copyright on the content you produce and there's no official registrar. Determining ownership is an adversarial process - everyone says "this is mine, the other guy ripped me off". Small players don't have the legal resources to prosecute.
Services like mine which manage whole libraries can pretty easily weed out the bad players because they tend to be full of TM violations. But the marketplaces have it more difficult.
Nobody has come up with a good solution to this yet.
I know someone who was selling an electronic module on Tindie. One day sales went through the floor. Turned out someone had cloned his entire product and was shipping volume on aliexpress. He just closed up shop.
I myself have spent weeks navigating the maze of dodgy NanoVNAs out there. Even one of the official resellers decided to cut costs and ship out poorly functioning clones and try and deny it.
Can’t win so don’t play. Eventually the markets will fall due to crap saturation.
Will the markets actually fail? Or will there always be a sucker ready to try their luck? I remember seeing this happen in the Retro Video Game community with Flash carts.
Independent developer developed a flashcart for the Sega Dreamcast and was subsequently ripped off. After he complained on Twitter, most of the community sided with the cloners. They just want their cheap garbage and they have no idea/care regarding the massive effort it takes to develop a device like this.
Never mind the fact that the original developer will be inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen all the value.
He eventually walked away from the project from what I recall which pissed off his original buyers and now others have stepped up with their own devices(And will probably be cloned).
Luckily the one (temporary) respite you have in software/hardware is DRM. If you can implement a complex enough DRM system you can slow down the cloners from stealing your software for some period of time. It sucks but this is the world we live in.
One tactic that a Flashcart manufacturer is using is some sort of serial coded firmware updates that only operates on a specific date code of flashcart. It requires the user to log into an account and get the specific firmware update that is tied to their flashcart. It has caused some complaints from the community regarding ease of use + resale woes(transferring ownership from one legit user to another) but overall this is an interesting solution. It hasn't fully prevented clones but has slowed them down somewhat.
I wish there was some way this could be applied to the non-software world but you can't defeat the physical layer.
To be fair to the GDEMU situation you touched on for the Dreamcast, the reason the community took the side of the cloners was because it was nearly impossible to get a hold of the original authentic design. He made the ordering process as terrible as possible, seemed to have a shitty attitude to his actual customers, and the demand drastically outpaced his ability to supply the market. The retro community is large, but most of the time people would rather buy from the original source over a clone product, but in the case of the GDEMU he kind of forced people to choose a clone instead.
Yeah I wasn't a customer just a follower as I am fascinated by the efforts used to create these devices. At the same time, PSIO(which I also referenced) has taken as many efforts as possible to provide the product in sufficient quantities and be as supportive as possible but there is a loud portion of the community that still berates them for their anti-clone efforts.
The gaming community just seems to suck as customers. You see this with all the hate a publisher gets when they release something that isn't perfect as well.
There are also people buying the Everdrive clones and then expecting support. I have seen these complaints on Reddit and in various forums. I don't know how rampant this is but its so silly.
PSIO definitely isn't beloved, I'll give you that. I think the main hate of PSIO is because their product always felt like a beta to users who expected something more polished. I'm not going to say either is right or wrong, but it's what it is. PSIO's anti piracy stuff was pretty annoying for the end user vs what other companies are doing like XStation and others can do.
You're right though, that in general the end users are very much entitled assholes in general, and there are still people buying Everdrive clones, even when the real deal was still in stock and available. But Everdrive is still successful for Krikzz, and all of the clones out there are based on a very outdated design that his newer devices are far surpassing in terms of features and support.
It's ironic to me because flashcarts are widely used to pirate console games. Someone making a tool for pirates is complaining about their IP being pirated.
Yes, I know flashcarts are also commonly used for homebrew, and I use mine exclusively for homebrew. I also understand that many of the older games have become collectors items, and wanting to play backups instead of the original is another use case. This doesn't change one of it's most common use cases, which is playing illegal roms.
Yeah I get where you are coming from. That does not change the fact that these products require massive effort to develop. In the case of PSIO(product with the serial encoded firmware) it was started by a high schooler + firmware developer from Belarus in 2012(original concept in 2010) and took years before the product was finally in a state to ship. From what I gather, their custom menu + firmware system is ~50k of C code/MIPS assembly made from scratch.
I watched as this high schooler got harassed for years as people did not believe such a product was even possible. After he released it, everyone forgot about all the harassment that this product was vaporware and impossible to develop and now he continued to get hounded for bug fixes to fix timing issues with specific games(he is emulating the complete CD drive and many games expected exact timings to overcome specific undocumented bugs in the system).
Now you have to throw in the threat of clones. To this day he is continuing to fully support the product despite some clones appearing in the wild. A competing product has recently appeared that takes a simpler approach to emulating the CD drive and likely has not had as extensive of a QA process. It remains a question whether this other approach is better compared to PSIO(new product only supports 3 motherboard versions out of dozens + you lose the CD drive altogether) but because the price is cheaper a large chunk of the community does not care and have moved on. The remaining community are now bashing the PSIO team for temporary slowing down development to rewrite the firmware to stop the latest round of cloners.
You can look at it as theft, but others would see it as preserving and promoting software development on a ~28 year old console. This team also gone into excruciating detail to document the system to help enable new software to be developed.
Just from the outside looking in, I don't know if it is worth the effort to spend years making something like this only to be harassed nonstop for years, getting your IP stolen by the Chinese and in end still be making a product that is a grey market item. I suspect that down the road we will have nothing but low quality Chinese made junk on the market if anything at all.
I'm in this space as a hobbyist, a consumer and occasional producer (I've done some limited runs on simple projects). I'm specifically interested in jp coin-op and 16-bit home console. I see your concern.
There's always going to be the originals, which will almost definitely hold value for the lifetime of millennials at least.
This is always going to be a small market driven by passion. If you can write a PlayStation flash cart you can almost defiantly make something with a higher market value.
There is an active market for extremely high quality products in this space. Look at Analogue (analogue.co) which is building FPGA reference-quality reproductions of classic consoles (NES, SNES, GENSIS, and recently GB/GBC/GBA). These machines play original carts better than original hardware, they are widely critically acclaimed, and the company keeps outputting fantastic machines. Many speed running and other competitive organizations accept plays running on analogue hardware, but not other knock-off consoles.
> Never mind the fact that the original developer will be inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen all the value.
This seems like an opportunity in disguise. Provide paid support, possibly after upselling the crowd to genuine product if required. Then word-of-mouth will be to the original dev's benefit; few will side with the fly-by-night cloners.
DRM makes your product less "hackable" by the customer and less likely to sustain a committed community. It's a very short sighted approach.
Often times users don't even know they have a fraudulent product. Some of these clones are literally just your product (third shifted) and so short of assigning bonded, single use serials (which is easy to say and very hard in practice) there's little you can do to distinguish between a legit and fraudulent product. This wastes your customer service time by supporting customers who didn't even end up paying for your product, which is overall very bad.
The people who are buying Chinese knockoff pirated flash carts, are not the same people pulling out their credit cards for paid support. Also, retro gamers are a notoriously difficult and time-consuming market to support.
Typically they have their own website. Like I mentioned, I believe this specific developer has thrown in the towel but others are making competing products. Typically their website has a list of authorized resellers or sells them directly.
I've started open-sourcing all the design files for the stuff I sell online, because IP protection is very weak (and frankly, I've come to think it's basically impossible). It's been a more healthy way for me to approach my products: I am a manufacturer of this product, and my competitive advantage is my own familiarity with the product and my own reputation. Whether that's fair or not is besides the point, since it's the nature of online sales these days.
The volume folks also aren't shy about outright lies in the product descriptions. Like pictures of stained glass that clearly show real, leaded-joint stained glass, that turns out to be a painted plastic copy. Where the pictures are probably stolen from a genuine seller.
Back in the early 90's, I visited Santa Fe as a tourist. I enjoyed browsing the local shops looking at the American Indian art for sale. After a while, I noticed the same things over and over in different shops - most (all?) the stuff was imported from other countries.
A few years ago I also toured souvenir shops in Malmo, Sweden. I asked the proprietor of when where the merchandise came from, she said it all came from China.
With a global economy, that's just the way things are.
As a note about the markets in Santa Fe, there are some volume producers of all sorts of goods, but it illegal to market something as made by Native Americans and have it be made overseas. It's the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990:
To be clear, not all art in Santa Fe is Native American, but a large amount of it is. And, yes, there's a large amount of junk being peddled as well that is absolutely imported. As a side note, there's a yearly Santa Fe Indian Market that's pretty fantastic and brings artists in from all over the place. None of that will be mass produced or imported and it is worth a visit.
Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese don’t have to respect the system of copyright or patent in any capacity at all? It seems like we’re converging on a point where nearly any novel invention or concept will be quickly stolen by the Chinese, repackaged, and sold in the global marketplace for a fraction of the price.
It's hard to have respect for the copyright/patent system we've constructed in the west when it's frequently abused and often favours large industry players over "little guys". There are some advantages to the wild-west remix culture you see happening with Chinese goods. There are also plenty of inventions that are so trivial/obvious that they should not have had patent protection in the first place[1].
Working at Microsoft, I was not allowed to even read patents incase I accidently infringed on one, which would become willful infringement since I had read the patent.
So, that means no learning from what others had done, which is the entire idea of publicly posted patents vs trade secrets.
The patent system is literally causing the opposite of innovation to happen in certain technology spaces.
> Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese don’t have to respect the system of copyright or patent in any capacity at all?
Even if these were prosecuted, would it really help in electronics, for example?
Since everybody has access to the same chips and creating a PCB is cheap and relatively quick, what would you even prosecute? Sure, you could prosecute the exact clones, but, most people are just following the manufacturer reference designs from the datasheet so there's nothing stopping someone else from doing that.
The problem is that once you prove there is a market for a piece of electronics, somebody in China will now pick off that market for cheaper. Is this not capitalism at its most raw?
The problem that this causes in electronics is that this trashes scaling as well as customer support. You can sell a $100 thingit, create a reddit community, and mostly tell people they're on their own with the occasional answer from somebody semi-official. Or you can sell a $10K+ thingit and actually provide excellent customer support.
In both cases, you will get cloned and ripped off--which limits the amount of money you can get from the market.
The current "solution" is to always have a cloud component which can't be cloned. This is, of course, anathema to open source, but I haven't seen anybody in open source have a good answer for this, either.
> i will say they are right about one thing, small sellers are getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress resellers. as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original work.
At the end of the day, any increase in sales means more revenue for Etsy. The company is following the same digital flea market model that Amazon does, and it has all of the same perverse incentives.
This is a major problem that put my wife and a couple of her friends out of business. Another major problem right now is that small blogs/instagram accounts/etc are nearly impossible to establish because the "influencers" (the big blogs now) will rip off ideas and shameless repost them within hours! Not only does this mean all google traffic takes people to the "influencers" page instead of the young blog that created it, but it makes the young blog look they are ripping off a big blog. It's quite despicable. My wife has shut down because she got tired of inventing great recipes that are damn hard to come up with (ever tried to make Keto desserts, or vegan scrambled eggs?) that get stolen right away.
I've been trying to think of a way to use blockchain to prove "who posted it first" but it's got a major network problem (nobody uses it because nobody will use it because nobody uses it).
I hear that designers are being steamrolled by Aliexpress or Shein all the time. The landscape has obviously changed. I wonder if a pioneering designer somewhere used this to their advantage to mass manufacture their products while integrating a staple design element by which they end up promoting themselves?
Yea this is hugely annoying now on Etsy - I used to love going there for random gifts for people of handmade stuff. Usually you can tell the real from the aliexprses BS by asking the seller how much they can customize the item. But the marketplace is legit flooded with crap
I used to visit Etsy to buy gifts and that sort if thing but I hardly go there any more because of all of the spam products. I can usually tell what is and isn't an independent seller but I can't be bothered with sifting through them all anymore.
Everything and everybody are hit. Etsy becomes yet-another-aliexpress-but-more-expensive (especially if you are not in USA and shipping from China is cheaper than shipping from USA, as many aliexpress resellers ship from USA).
It is very hard to find real hand craft on Etsy, if you don't have direct link for exact creator.
you're 100% correct. Very similar to Amazon and their 3rd party market. There is very little policing of the products being sold I feel like. Lots of knock offs and even things available for free being sold at a cost. (ie. ETSY USB sticks pre-loaded with freeware like Coin OPS X)
I've come across very niche products that get ripped off, it's affecting everything. if your tiny custom tshirt shop gets enough sales you'll be copied soon enough with apparently no recourse.
> as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original work. make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress, then sold by all the boring resellers on etsy
As a buyer it is a massive joy to see the price of some item go down when there’s diversity of sellers instead of a monopoly.
Just to make sure I understand your position... are you saying that it's OK for someone to copy someone else's original design, mass produce it at lower cost, and give no credit or royalties to the original designer?
It absolutely is. Most of what people are calling "original" designs aren't even original. Etsy is rampant with copyright or trademark infringement, or just rehashes of the same designs someone else made. The only difference between Etsy and the spooky Chinese is that China has mastered manufacturing and distribution and that's what puts a lot of independent vendors out of business.
Plenty of industries deal with this in various ways and manage to survive and the consumer ends up winning in the end. Restaurants, fashion, heck even app stores all deal with this and the end result is better products for the consumer at cheaper prices.
No one has a monopoly on designing yet another cute bracelet or rainbow lanyard or generic pillow cover.
That is a very short term an narrow view that leads to a race to the bottom in terms of quality and innovation. It leads to cheap mass produced generic fair. In the long run it’s terrible for buyers.
> Not if that is what the buyers want. Evidence suggests they buy low quality low durability items
Low quality/durability items are not what most people want most of the time. It's sometimes all they can afford, or they think they found a good deal and feel ripped off when the item arrives and they discover that it's low quality/durability, but either way they aren't happy about it. What people want is high quality goods at prices they can afford.
You're suggesting that people do not willingly buy low quality crap, but they most definitely do. Even when knowing it is crap, and even when having the budget to buy higher quality goods. They'll still buy the low quality crap, at massive scale.
I'm from the Netherlands. One of the most successful retail stores here is "Action", which in the category of low quality garbage sinks to the absolute bottom.
Everybody knows it's garbage. One may buy a pair of scissors there and have it break down in 2 months of usage. So then people just buy another one. It's not strictly a budget issue, most shoppers can afford a good pair of scissors, one that lasts 10 years, but they prefer the cheap one anyway.
"Alibaba shopping" is mainstream here. Everybody buys their small items there. One of my colleagues, whom is upper middle class, was proudly telling me how he buys a "value" pack of 10 phone chargers every year. They're all terrible and soon break down, so then he'll just move to the next one. He could just buy a single decent one, but no.
I wish you were right, but you're not. People just want the absolute cheapest thing, and they want it now.
I haven't seen the inside of an Action, but most of the stores here in the US that sell garbage at the lowest possible prices target the poor. The people I know who would never have to enter one, only do when it's convenient and the item is disposable. (We have "dollar stores" that can be a pretty good deal for party supplies/decorations) I hope people who really have a "I don't care if I have to throw this away and buy a new one all the time" mentality are a minority.
Having that kind of an attitude with device chargers is a great way to damage your devices! Does that guy feel the same about his phone as he does his chargers?
There are times when the cheapest option is a smart way to go, and times when it's so convenient that it's worth picking up the cheap item even knowing it'll cost you later. Most of the time though I think people like having nice things.
I'll confess I do know people who have money but always buy the cheapest toilet paper. There's no understanding some people.
I do not share your hope of it being a minority. I understand your remark regarding a possible "social shame" of not wanting to be seen in "stores for the poor", but this effect is gone. At least it is over here. Value shopping is acceptable across the classes.
I don't know if this extends to the US, but over here there has been a massive shift in retail. The middle is gone. There's value shopping and there's luxury shopping. Very low-end and very high-end.
Stores in the mid segment, which used to dominate retail, are falling apart. Some of these chains existed for over a century, had stores in every dutch city. They're all going bankrupt or already are.
They have no reason to exist. Their products may be of a slightly better quality, but barely so, as they too go for cheap Chinese garbage. They don't really offer better service because they can't afford to. Their staff are clueless teenagers for being cheap.
>“Not if that is what the buyer wants [in the immediate term]”
That’s generally how a race to the bottom happens. Short term narrow minded outlooks that barely consider how one action effects another. It’s terrible long run for buyers, employees, and the planet.
Exactly right, but it happens regardless. It seems we're wired this way.
Which means we need to stop kidding around and call it what it is. You can't offer people a cheap unsustainable choice and a more expensive better choice and then hope and pray that this magically works out well.
There should not be an unsustainable choice. At the very least we should start pricing in externalities into unnaturally cheap products.
It isn't really possible to produce a 5$ radio, ship it across the world and still run a profit. It's possible at the cost of a livable wage, basic human rights, reasonable work conditions, proper waste management, underpricing fossil fuel usage, special tax agreements, and so much more.
I have a few designed items that I have oft been told to sell n etsy - I have literally no interest in setting up an etsy shop -- however, I DO have interest in finding out how to get things I design made via AliExpress for my own desires - and dont care if other items crop up so much...
How does one go about getting a product made through aliexpress?
AliExpress is for consumers, for bulk orders you can use Alibaba. You can also get in contact with the manufacturers to make things to your own liking, they'll quote you a price.
Redbubble lets you upload designs for t-shirts, phone cases, etc, and make them available in their web storefront. You only get a small slice of the sale price, but it's very easy to get your designs "out into the world."
I come up with mechanical designs as well as "artsy" things - which could be mass produced... but never like a logo-shirt or something as mentally ephemeral..
---
Right now I am modeling an 'thing' as a 3d printable (or injection molded at scale) attachment to a common house hold power tool, but can come in various grades (home|pro|industrial)...
I messed up and had a bunch of money in 2020 that I should have bought a printer with, but spent on stupid stuff like food and living expenses instead...
Other items are home-goods improvements/desires...
Think of me as the SamCo (Like RonCo) of my personal universe... but I am hoping some of that bleeds put into other universes such as xsmasherCo :-)
They don't there are smaller NFT platforms that offer NFTs of art by smaller artists and there is a ton of fraud occuring on those as well. People misrepresenting themselves as the artist etc.
AI-powered bots shut down legitimate seller accounts seemingly at random, while Etsy looks the other way on resellers who undercut authentic makers by peddling sweatshop-produced junk in clear violation of the spirit of the Etsy community.
AI lockouts are a huge problem on Amazon, too, not to mention many of the sites and services used by HNers. I've said it before and I will say it again:
How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action?
No warning.
No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy."
No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative.
No recourse.
There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case.
Seriously. I got shot down on the last Google related thread about this issue because "what about the scammers". I get it, you need a process for stopping the scammers/psammers, but any system you create will make mistakes and so it must have a genuine system of appeal and recourse.
At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone with enough power to force them to do a better job.
>>At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone with enough power to force them to do a better job.
And then they fix that one situation and go on about their normal business. At least that is what it seems to me. I would wish for something more long term to happen but I am becoming less hopeful.
Claiming (in whatever "official" existence this website is for the sellers)
anything made in China, or any other non-western country, is "sweatshop-produced junk" is definitely not the way to fix this
Manufacturing has moved to these places in some cases because many customers just can't tell the difference or couldn't care less about the difference
Are the people organized under that website all wearing leather shoes hand sewn in Maine cottages? Or are they wearing more sweatshop produced junk
> Manufacturing has moved to these places in some cases because many customers just can't tell the difference or couldn't care less about the difference
Your argument does not hold in this case, because Etsy was established and sustained as a marketplace for handmade goods. This is true also for customers, who visited Etsy to support independent artists and artisans and to purchase unique and limited items.
Many of the sellers of cheap knock-offs are engaged in blatant theft of IP and misrepresentation as independent artists.
> Are the people organized under that website all wearing leather shoes hand sewn in Maine cottages? Or are they wearing more sweatshop produced junk
I don’t see what this has to do with anything. But, yes, many sellers try hard to support other artisans. Etsy is but one part of a culture and economy of handmade goods that includes in-person shows and other off-Etsy venues.
Hand-made is kind of a meaningless term these days because it has been abused over and over again. I've seen things that were clearly designed with the help of a computer graphics program, and then cut with a laser cutter described as "handmade". It is supposed to mean something that is made without the use of any machines, yet Etsy sellers seem to think it means "something produced in small batches".
As the previous poster said though, why would I care about the distinction? Are handmade goods supposed to be better? Seems like a ludicrous proposition. Machines are more precise and faster, and so they make things cheaper. The quality depends on the processes used, and materials, not on whether machines are used.
Since I had my first kid I've seen lots of targeted ads for educational toys on social media. Sometimes it goes to Etsy, sometimes it goes to an individual website. The thing is though, at least half of the ads are for products that you can find on AliExpress for half the price or even less.
I've noticed kitchen goods are usually the same. And it's not just Etsy... I've even seen Kickstarters that haven't finished, yet the product can already be purchased on AliExpress :D
Here are a few quick examples I found on Etsy. I just searched for "toys" and these were in the top results. Some of these even use the same photo as AliExpress:
Those poor companies can't be expected to be responsible with their power, they only make several billion dollars off their users every year and putting conditions on their ability to remove content they find suspicious is comparable to me dealing with a thief in my house.
I bought a couple of things on their site a while ago, but have never been a seller.
Somehow I keep getting emails intended for sellers in France and other places, trying to coordinate shipments or orders, or complaining about issues with orders. This has been going on for at least 4 years and I've reported it to Etsy multiple times with no follow-up at all on their side.
I did not know exactly what the star seller program was. It requires that in the last three months of shop data [1]:
> 95%+ of first messages in a thread are responded to within 24 hours.
> 95%+ of orders ship on time with tracking
> 95%+ of orders receive 5 star reviews
> minimum of 10 orders and $300 in sales
In the petition [2] they explain the Star Seller Program as:
>Passive aggressive efforts to influence seller behavior are counter-productive and result in a worse customer experience. Rather than making us mad at buyers who leave glowing 4-Star reviews, or making us feel that we can no longer offer letter class shipping on items like cards and stickers, Etsy should leave us to individually do the best we can for each and every customer in each and every situation.
The first two bullets are fairly reasonable (especially shipping on time...24 hours response isn't great but whatever), but expecting that high of a 5 star rate is almost unheard of. I see shops that do it, but we get 4 stars quite often for things like "Oh it was smaller than I expected" even though the listing says the exact measurements like 4 times.
Also note that it says "95% of orders" not "95% of ratings." We get feedback, maybe, like 40% of the time if we're lucky. If you're not begging for ratings, you won't hit that number.
They aren't overtly doing much with the Star Seller program yet, but I can almost guarantee that they will in the future. I'm 99% sure it's already influencing search rankings (since they influence them in other ways already, such as prioritizing listings with free shipping). I understand some of that is to promote sales which benefits the seller and Etsy, but if they are or start using Star Seller to tweak results, that's not really benefiting anyone that I can see.
95% only seems reasonable for thumbs up / thumbs down style rating systems. Too many people treat 5 and 10 star rating systems differently to require 95% 5 star ratings. Etsy and others should disclose the downsides to leaving a 4 star review at the time the customer is leaving the review. For me, 3 is OK, 4 is good, and 5 is PERFECT and is rarely ever given out on any system.
> we get 4 stars quite often for things like "Oh it was smaller than I expected" even though the listing says the exact measurements like 4 times.
It's hard to really gauge the size of something from just measurements. One thing that often annoys me about product pages is that have a bazillion images of the thingymabob, but don't actually have a bunch of images where it shows the thingymabob in perspective; e.g. somehow actually holding it, a wider-angle picture of it in regular context (e.g. a painting actually framed on a wall in a regular living room or whatnot), and that kind of stuff.
Anyway, just an aside.
I also see a 4-star review as "excellent", but many of these platforms seem to see anything less than 5 stars as "bad".
I agree, but we've really tried everything to be honest! We put comparative photos on there, mention comparative sizing (e.g., "This is about the size of a normal business card"), and so on. Still, people get it and think it's going to be bigger/smaller and somehow that's a defect? It's just part of working with retail customers of a physical product, but unfortunately minor things like that have an outsized impact in a sales ecosystem like this that expects perfection in these interactions.
As a customer, it's really hard to write these kind of reviews; people may still end up expecting something slightly larger, because even with the best of efforts it's just hard to judge these things from a picture or video. This is not anyone's "fault", it's just that humans aren't really good at judging these sort of things.
So what review do you leave? 5-star because the product is "as advertised" and otherwise good? Or 4-star because it's not quite what you were looking for? I think both options are reasonable.
The Real Problem™ here is thinking you can automate these sort of things without any human judgement and expect to somehow end up with a reasonable response. There will always be outliers that any human would judge as "yeah, that's just silly" but computers don't care.
A 5-star review should be left. If you are given measurements and the product matches those measurements, the only one at fault is you. A measurement is literally a definitive answer to the size of something. Get a ruler or measuring tape out and visualize it for yourself. Humans aren't good at judging things precisely, that's why we have tools!
My ex was a clothing Seller on Etsy. A 4-star review because something didn't fit right was super stressful for her, because it meant her average rating went down and her seller status might be demoted.
I think a better option is to contact the seller directly if you are dissatisfied with the product. That way you aren't transferring your problem to them.
So it’d be super stressful if you run into people who are like “yeah they did a pretty good job I’m satisfied. Not the most amazing clothes ever but I’ll wear them. 3 stars”?
That’s exactly the type of person I was before I became a dev and learned about these insane algorithms. As someone else on this post said 3 star - good 4 star - great 5 star - absolutely amazing perfect service! went above and beyond
It seems pretty simply. If you get whats advertised, you rate it good. If it isn't, you rate it worse. If it was what was advertised, but you figured out that wasn't actually what you were looking for, the rating for the product should still be good, even though you made the mistake of buying it. That's not the sellers fault in any way.
Yes, that is true. But I think it has to be compared to how much you liked this product VS others who do the same thing. Not "I thought this product did X" (but it was never specified for example) and then leave a 4 star review after returning it, or similar cases. Maybe I ordered this thing and thought I would like it, but because of something not-the-fault-of-the-product-itself I ended up not liking it, I don't think the seller should suffer from it.
> It's hard to really gauge the size of something from just measurements.
I know some folks already hinted at this in the comments, but it's beyond bizarre to me to read this quote on HN. The size of something is literally the measurements. If the measurements are wrong, that's one thing... I'll sometimes cut out cardboard or mask things off in painters tape if I want to know how they fit in a space. Accurately reported measurements should never be hard to "really gauge."
I ordered a bunch of stickers from AvE, my one and only purchase on Etsy. It seems ridiculous that he should have to package my stickers with tracking to get them to me, and I live on the other side of the world in the midst of a shipping crisis so I don't care one jot if it takes him a few days to pop my stickers in the mail. Consumer expectations these days are so ridiculous. They're stickers.
Programs like this also encourage bots to come review or even buying reviews to game the system and if there is not a good way to combat this misuse, it can get out of hand pretty quick. Most reviews I look at on Amazon are pretty useless to me nowadays because I can't tell what's real and what's not.
I really don't understand these systems where it's "5-stars or bust". Why even have stars if the only thing that matters is 5 or not-5. If you only care about a binary signal like that, then just make it a binary question. "Were you satisfied with this purchase? Yes / No." You'll probably get a much higher response rate, and it will be truer to the actual intent. A bunch of people that would hand out 4 or even 3 stars may still answer yes to that question.
As a buyer, there are so many ways to get screwed on eBay/Etsy, I am 100% with these requirements.
eBay has had super sellers for 20 years now. Not as stringent but it is beneficial to customers.
Meanwhile, Amazon continues to dilute their store with no control over review authenticity. Not saying Etsy isn’t prone to that but Amazon’s entire business model is to let these things slide. Etsy is at least doing something.
I really don’t care about sellers. I want a place for high quality products. Period.
I'm definitely skeptical of dinging people for 4-star reviews, but each of these bullet points are encouraged by Etsy because they improve customer satisfaction and sales.
The petition does make a good point that some products may be better just shipped dirt-cheap without paying for tracking, but overall Etsy is pushing sellers to provide better service and do things that bring in more revenue, both for them and the seller.
My wife is a star seller on Etsy and it hasn’t been hard for her to maintain at all (and she’s never asked for ratings). But she’s also never had even a negative comment made about her product after thousands of sales. I wonder if some product types are more open to criticism than others.
My guess is that price (relative to the competition) is a good signal for this. If someone is buying an $80 mug for example, they probably really like that mug even before they get it, and so they're more likely to leave a good review. A $10 mug might be more of an impulse buy
Perhaps it’s all ratings then because we’ve shipped 100% on time, pay someone to respond to customer messages within 8 hours, and we still somehow don’t meet the criteria.
Seems to me they should offer at least 2 tiers of this rating system. Star sellers for organizations that can give out free product in exchange for 5 star reviews, and ~Premium sellers for those who can't.
They actually hide some stuff in there. Tracking is expensive, if you add tracking to all your orders than someone else will offer a lower price and out-compete you.
Buuut, if you buy your shipping labels directly from etsy that counts as having tracking, even when there isn't any tracking.
So the actual effect of this is just to force people to buy their shipping labels through etsy directly. I presume etsy gets a bulk discount and keeps the difference.
> So the actual effect of this is just to force people to buy their shipping labels through etsy directly. I presume etsy gets a bulk discount and keeps the difference.
Yes. A lot of ecommerce companies (Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Shopify, etc) have a labels side-business that works in this way. Volume-based discounts from carriers.
That is how retail works. You go and buy a hundred thousand of something from a company (in this case USPS) and then sell it to consumers. Your profit is the discount you were able to negotiate by making a bulk order.
Correct. The USPS has what are called "published" rates, which is the set of prices that can be shown to consumers. Labels marketplaces (like Etsy) get an unpublished discount on top of those base rates and that's where the profit comes from. Those contract rates are not disclosed.
This is going to be subject to Goodhart's law[1]. As soon as buyers are aware their favourite sellers on Etsy are evaluated like this many of them will always leave 5 star reviews, while others will try to use the threat of a < 5 star review to get special consideration from the vendor.
This is the same reason many people leave automatic 5 star reviews for gig workers unless something goes grotesquely wrong.
95% of the ratings I leave aren't 5 stars, so that number triggers my fake-reviews alarm. I'm generally far more suspicious of a 4.9 rating than a 4.2.
This is all because Amazon has created unrealistic expectations. Customers think that everything should work like Amazon, even if you’re an artisan selling your passion online.
Seems like there's an opportunity here for a smaller scale marketplace to move in and provide artisan makers what they actually want. One could build a business around "white glove" onboarding of sellers; meaning, you actually have a conversation with the seller and confirm they're producing authentic goods, build a profile for each seller letting folks know who they are, and base the entire marketplace around authenticity. Is this a crazy idea? The argument against it is likely, "it won't scale", but I think and argument could be made that it could.
The main thing Etsy offers sellers is buyers' attention. My wife and I have sold on Etsy for almost 15 years (!!!), and she started selling from the first day she opened a shop selling bow ties. Over the years, it's very rare we'll open a shop offering something and not sell in the first day (and have never had a concept not have at least one sale in a week). It's hard to beat that kind of visibility with little to no investment honestly.
Even as our businesses have grown, the ease of use and convenience are hard to beat if you want to keep them to something casual. Sure, we could pop up a Shopify, ramp up advertising, really grind to get it "out there," but then we're spending more time and money to end up at the same spot.
A smaller marketplace won't have that sort of network effect. The only way I'd see it succeeding is if they really blitz on marketing and making themselves a real outlet for makers (and make sure they're perceived that way over Etsy). Their brand recognition and entrenchment would be super hard to overcome.
Have you written about your experience launching shops on Etsy? A friend and I have a few craft-style products we're itching to make as a side hustle and it sounds like you've figured out some of the tricks of the trade :)
They aren't adding any more value by increasing the fees. And from the perspective of the seller, it got worse because now they have to compete with factories in China.
They know they provide value and that their fees can be higher.
If you think that the value of their service is too low - then you will leave. If you leave. - then they'll have to address it. Original Etsy sellers have the leverage.
They were just undercutting themselves previously in the pursuit of user numbers, aka the strategy of every b2c startup these days. Few companies will stick with this model for eternity, usually they either raise prices or start to rely on Ads (YouTube).
There's no reason to do this as a startup. Someone could spin up an ecommerce site over a weekend and then put in the work to white glove onboard sellers without ever taking investment and turn this into a very nice business all without outside capital. As we're now seeing, outside capital which will want a large return doesn't jive with managing a business for artisanal/homemade sellers.
Fair for me and I think a lot of people a startup is a new business that attempts (and hopefully succeeds) to take on outside investment to grow rapidly -- otherwise you're just a new small business.
I think the argument against it is that customers actually only care about price, despite the virtues they vomit all over the place about "supporting small business".
98/100 will support the idea. 2/100 will pay 2x for something because it isn't a Chinese knockoff.
They are not the same customers. The ones that pay 2x for something are eventually replaced by people who want cheap junk.
They aren't compatible markets, but a company who values profit above all else will start to cater to the lowest common denominator and push out people who care about quality, locally sourced, handcrafted etc. and become another generic retailer.
I think that is sort of the point, if someone were to niche down to actual makers of things. One could make it an exclusive club and spend money to get exclusive items for launch, for example get specially made pieces from well known makers and they can number them if they want, like 1/100 special thing-a-mabob.
Have actual interviews with artisans/makers, slowly ramping up sellers. Take customer complaints seriously. Like if its reported that artisan_maker_27 started shipping cheapo shit from where-ever then they are kicked off the platform.
I think the idea is to do as much as you can without scaling. No AI. No ads on the platform (certainly advertise for it).
If the argument could be made that it could scale, why don't you make it? We've already got eBay and etsy as counterexamples showing that "smaller scale" marketplaces don't stay true to their initial visions, and I don't see this "white glove" onboarding being enough of a value proposition vs just setting up an eBay store, for instance.
> The argument against it is likely, "it won't scale", but I think and argument could be made that it could.
A curated and authenticated store is a very expensive endeavour. They're complaining about hike in fees now, imagine how many would be able to accept hundreds of dollars in standing fees and cut from sales on top of that.
We just keep running into this same issue indefinitely: the internet is a winner-takes-all mechanism.
I wish things were more like in the physical world, where you might have hundreds or thousands of "etsys". Each having a unique vibe, products on offer, and so on. Each of these individual stores would have a reasonable and stable margin and relatively stable group of customers. They can all co-exist.
No such thing on the internet though. Inevitably you always end up with one place to rule them all. Easy for buyers, no need to browse many websites. Easy for sellers, reach the maximum audience with the least effort.
The model always breaks, and the platform facilitating the exchange turns "evil".
The conclusion is primitive. We're all responsible for this. Consumers always pick convenience over any alternative, and they do buy knock-offs. Buyers will always be attracted to singular platforms, want to pay the lowest fee for the largest reach.
We all want "something for nothing", and this is what we end up with. It is the accumulated outcome of billions of tiny selfish decisions.
Is this a natural property of the internet or is it a consequence of how internet businesses are usually funded? It always struck me as weird that "predatory pricing" of a product at below cost can be considered anti-competitive behaviour when done by market leader, but is OK when done by a "start-up" fuelled by millions in VC money. This is especially apparent in the gig economy space, where local knowledge should give you a competitive advantage but instead you're forced to compete with foreign businesses that are happy to sell $2 worth of service for $1 of revenue.
Yes, I'd say centralization of attention/discovery is an inevitable force of the internet.
For digital products, say "content", it has been there since the early beginnings. When people had their "independent" blog, already then they had blog rolls linking to other bloggers and over time a class of top bloggers emerged. A handful getting all traffic, the other 99.99% gets nothing.
Before search engines, we had directories. Lists of links. But there's only so much space, so a few sites get all traffic, the rest none.
We democratized it with things like Digg, but in reality 3 people decided what gets on the homepage.
So yes, it seems to me that centralization of attention is built-in. Or rather, it's a human condition. A centralized service offers more convenience and people tend to do the most convenient thing. Creators do the exact same thing.
...and then we blame the platform. My point is that WE did it. WE created the situation, not the platform.
As for physical goods, I consider that to be somewhat of a separate topic. The internet in itself does not magically produce and ship ultra cheap goods. Such a thing is only possible due to very specific international trade circumstances.
I think it's an issue with discovery. Organic discovery on the internet does not exist -- you do not pass by a cool internet store on your way to whatever else you were doing, the only way for you to know it exists is for it to be advertised to you.
I shop at many physical world boutiques who also have a successful online presence. Etsy is actually the worst place for these kinds of things, as the people there are running under margins where they could never afford physical world rent. A physical world store showing up on Etsy, where people with some free time make things at home, would cheapen their brand as a physical presence in a community
The place where these physical world "etsys" live is usually Shopify
>I wish things were more like in the physical world, where you might have hundreds or thousands of "etsys". Each having a unique vibe, products on offer, and so on. Each of these individual stores would have a reasonable and stable margin and relatively stable group of customers. They can all co-exist.
Can it though? Even in the physical world, larger firms tend to buy up the smaller unique firms and turn them into monotonous big business. Eventually everything becomes McDonalds and Wal-Mart-- also easy for buyers because they only have to go to one familiar place. As much as people hate that, it does appeal to the natural desire for simplicity and repetition. Even though you can find obscure and out of the way stores to shop, most of the time people just go to the big box store they know already
This is a seller strike not a worker strike, just to clarify.
But this made me wonder (since I'm not an Etsy buyer or seller myself), who is their primary market/customer persona? Based on it being heavily craft-focused my naive guess would be stay-at-home/homemaker/caretaker people?
I've tried to use it a few times to shop for used or handmade shelves/lights/tables but always ended up going with Ebay or AptDeco. I found the UI too confusing and there were too many low-quality and super-high-quality pieces when I just wanted something decent but not too expensive.
There's a lot of mass-produced crap and plenty of overpriced stuff on Etsy, but it's not too hard to find real creators. I recently bought some nice wooden guitar wall hangers, made by some guy in Pennsylvania. My wedding ring was made by a guy in Luisiana. I felt both were reasonably priced for something not made in an overseas factory.
Edit: My method is something like, search for what I'm looking for, flip through items to try to find things that actually look like a person made them (i.e. not made of metal or plastic, unless the shop specifically specializes in those; not identical to five hundred other listings), then look over reviews and search for the creator online. Most creators maintain their own web presence outside of Etsy, too. It doesn't seem that onerous to me, you'd want to do that research anyway for a nice, hand-made item, wouldn't you? I don't really understand how people get scammed by drop-shippers on Etsy. Do you just click "Buy Now" on the first listed item you like the picture of?
I agree, it's usually easy to weed out real creators from drop shippers/pirates if you care to. The one method you left off was to send a message to the seller. It's pretty easy to tell through communication.
> This is a seller strike not a worker strike, just to clarify.
I found this clarification interesting. If a headline said “Uber Strike”, I think most of us would assume it was the drivers (rather than Uber’s in-house employees) striking. I naturally thought the exact same thing here.
Maybe I'm getting it mixed up with some other similarly sized tech companies in NYC but I thought I remembered Etsy workers talking about forming a union and I thought this might be related. Maybe I'm thinking of Kickstarter.
I'm the primary audience. I sell hand made wooden goods (shaker trays, boxes, urns) and most of the listings around me for similar items are less than 25% of my prices. I sell less than 10 items a month.
It's difficult, though. What is hand made? Can you use a CNC? 3D printer? What percent must be hand made? I use a table saw and mitered joints instead of truly hand made dovetail joints.
Sorry I didn't mean who's the primary audience of this strike I meant who is their customer (persona). I should have said market or customer instead of audience.
For buyers it probably varies a lot but there’s a lot of anime/video game/tabletop gaming stuff. I know it’s the first place I look if I want the sort of things I might otherwise buy at a con. (Think pins, custom dice, etc.)
I've ordered some handmade ties as gifts (silk ties), and niche high quality items for my dog that aren't mass produced, but can be hand made. Stuff like a Dyneema leash, a specific kind Biothane collar that will fit my dog's breed well, and a toy for hiding treats called a SnuffleMat. There's a decent amount of dog stuff at a fair price, and the stuff I've gotten from Etsy lasts way longer than a random piece of kit from Amazon.
I used Etsy a few times to buy art paintings. Back then there were certainly a few high-profile sellers who kept showing up with the same stuff again and again. Not necessarily anything wrong with what they were doing, but I don't need to see it over and over again...
But with a little bit of effort I could find some pretty neat art to decorate my walls with.
There are various markets where I'm pretty certain taking outside capital will eventually cause you to lose the plot as to how your business benefits it's users. This seems to be one of those cases. You take outside capital to grow rapidly and take on scale, you go public for more capital to do more business again at a larger scale. This is all in the interest of a large return for your investors and maybe some retail investors and employees.
I'm not sure how this could ever continue to have the best interests of artisanal crafters and sellers in mind when that market is clearly smaller than the one needed to grow the business to successful after-IPO public company. Someone should make a competitor with no aims to go public and you'll probably wind up with a rather large successful business not beholden to anyone except artisanal sellers and more in line with benefiting artisans long term.
Not everything needs to be a public company and not everyone needs to take on VC money. You have to know your goals and then assess different monetary avenues to accomplish them, you can have a large private company without diluting the vision, just not maybe a multibillion dollar organization but that's okay, not everything needs to be that either -- but it will be what your forced into an attempt at making if you take on outside capital.
Those smaller non-public competitors typically end up being acquired (or destroyed) by the larger, well-funded incumbent. Etsy's acquired a number of other marketplaces already.
That's totally fair but at what point are Etsy and <non-public-whoever> actually serving different markets -- and so not really competitors -- so it's not worth it for them to crush or acquire the non-public company focused on what is now a minor niche to the larger incumbent.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I very much agree that it does tend to play out like that but from the strike it seems like some vocal segment of Etsy's market is no longer actually served by Etsy -- and more importantly (all speculation) Etsy has determined it's not in the best interest of Etsy to serve them so there is some niche to now be captured.
Etsy has been providing it's service at a discount and people are just mad about them bringing prices higher to match their value.
I'm sure any serious seller has considered running their own site, or maybe they have one already, and they know the sales are nowhere near what they get on Etsy because of the built-in audience. If that wasn't the case they would've left Etsy already and not have to deal with Etsy telling them what to do.
A "strike" for a few days accomplishes nothing if people just go back and continue buying and selling. The simple answer for them is to start their own site but that will involve doing everything themselves at significant cost. The fact they don't want to do that should be proof enough for them that Etsy is worth the fees
However, there's literally no incentive for the owners and investors to protect that initial plot. Etsy is so big, that it won't ever fail overnight. As long as it's profitable for a few years and everyone gets a fat check out of it, they are happy. This will always happen. Never trust cult brands to stay loyal to the niche market that made them successful to begin with.
The problem is how you define the "acceptable" goods.
If I design a t-shirt, and then farm out the manufacturing and shipping, is that okay? How about if I also hire a designer?
What if I'm just clicking "go" on a laser cutter etching things onto other things that I ordered on aliexpress? Or 3D printing designs that I bought somewhere else?
Are these handmade goods?
This isn't just a problem at etsy, btw. Every single craft fair is also dealing with this. Just endless seas of people selling what looks mostly like MLM "nutrition" and "lifestyle" products.
It does seem like Etsy has basically become eBay. I used to buy from Etsy all the time, but at this point, I have zero trust that I would actually be buying something handmade from a real, independent creator. Which of course means I just won't buy from them at all. I don't know why Etsy seems to welcome this instead of doing everything they possibly can to fight it.
Ironically enough Ebay is probably the most trustworthy platform atm. It might sound insane but eBay listings are usually pretty clear on the origin and condition of the items. You know when the seller is from China, or if the item is used, and while there are tons of scams and misleading descriptions... for the most part sellers are usually pretty honest in the item descriptions. I don't mind buying knock offs as long as I know that they aren't the real deal, and cheap items are at least priced accordingly. Which is not the case on Amazon.
The differences between shopping at Ebay and Amazon are that on Ebay you're 1) buying from a particular seller with feedback that actually refers to their own performance and products, rather than "reviews" that refer to a semi-random selection of different products purchased from a completely unrelated range of sellers, and 2) on Ebay those products are half the price of Amazon.
Somebody sent me an Amazon gift card a while back, and I still haven't found reason to use it. The only thing I still find Amazon useful for is to buy small amounts of industrial supplies and parts that are usually sold directly from suppliers to businesses in large amounts, who often have terrible web storefronts (or only use Amazon for ecommerce) because they usually deal with their (buy-by-the-case, repeat) customers by phone or in person. If I only need two specialized bolts or two feet of tubing, I'll go to Amazon.
Whoever championed (CIO?) and executed that e-commerce deserves an award. Serious. I work with a bunch of middle market manufacturers and distributors and doing e-commerce is HARD for them. I use that site as a reference on "how to do it right", every. single. time.
In the US, if you buy specialty hardware from Amazon you probably are going to pay a markup on the markup because McMaster Carr is probably the previous source.
Fastenal is another good option as well. Grainger can be good for other random industrial things (tho pricey). I've found that fastenal's shipping is INSANELY fast. Like get it delivered the next day fast. Though that could be my location.
Not sure if eBay still does it, but they also let sellers recycle old listings' reviews for different products on new listings. I experienced that at least once with a return.
You've convinced me to try ebay again. It's gotten so tiresome trying to identify whether or not you're buying garbage on Amazon. I put plenty of time into it and I still get burned occasionally.
I dropped my Prime membership over a year ago and have no regrets. eBay has made that possible. I’ve gotten consistently fair prices and quick shipping, and ironically fewer quality issues. Target and Costco have also become a bigger factor as well with free shipping and in store returns.
My cloud computing has moved to GCP, DO, and my homelab (built from eBay stuff!).
I still use Amazon if I have no other option. I just pay for shipping, but surprise… it’s usually still free over $25.
It's crazy how these 2 platforms seemed to have switched places. Several years ago, Amazon would have been the place to do for scam-free purchasing, and eBay was the shady site that you had to do your due diligence on before buying.
More and more it's the opposite. I have to wrangle with searches and filters on Amazon to try and avoid the "fake" brands and knockoff goods. eBay is easier and often cheaper to boot.
I think it's because eBay, since it's founding, has had a scam problem that it's been actively trying to address. They aren't perfect, but they have certainly been putting in multiple measures to increase trust.
Amazon, on the other hand, has nearly done the opposite. They don't do anything about scammers and have created an environment where even when you buy something directly from amazon you might get a knock off. You can't trust anything there.
Everyone knows the amazon reviews are garbage, even amazon. Yet they keep them because having 1000 garbage reviews looks better than having 10 legitimate reviews (and many of them negative).
Amazon has optimized for moving any and everything.
There is an understanding between shopper and shop owner about what is happening on said property. The shopper normally does not expect that the shop owner would instantly know your entire biography + family lineage just by stepping onto the property.
You collect cell phone IMEIs and sell it to a data broker that aggregates multiple sources to pinpoint strong associations that lead back to a shopper's home. In return you get demographic data on your customers.
sure - posted plainly to the public. "caveat emptor" While we are at it, where are those records kept? Who sells them, to whom? What happens when there are factual errors in a private profile on members of the public? What other restrictions are placed on members of the public due to undisclosed records? What political affiliations do the owners of TARGET have, and do they use their company assets for political purposes, or private law-enforcement activities? Politics and law-enforcement are regulated acitivities, for historically important reasons, right?
I also don't have Prime, and buy from eBay where possible, but a substantial fraction of the time, the things I buy turn up in Amazon boxes. I think there are eBay sellers who have Prime, list items at slightly less than Amazon's price including shipping, then use their free shipping to drop-ship items to customers. They collect slightly less than Amazon's shipping fee in gross margin, and only have the Prime free as overhead.
(Prime video, but in Germany I feel there is only uninteressing films there)
It's interesting how without prime they tell me it takes one week to be sent (or some days), but then always after ordering correcting shipping date down, most often to the same as prime (which makes sense, holding back my order would only create costs to them).
Prime Video is worth the cost alone. Cheaper than Netflix.
Why'd you say free and 2-day shipping is a thing of the past? All my shipping from Amazon is free, and 2 day is the slowest it arrives usually. Mostly I get things next day, sometimes within 12 hours
I wanted to do that. But EBay has decided my account was hacked (I haven't done anything in 5 years and suddenly want to sell something - I understand the red flag). This can only be resolved by calling them at a phone number they will not give me.
Oh that's a very good point though. Ebay support is great for refunds but absolutely useless w.r.t any account specific problem. I couldn't buy anything for 2 years a while ago and they would never explain why.
Turns out my old PayPal account had a minor issue, and that meant I couldn't use ebay even if I didn't even have my PayPal account linked to ebay anymore and I was using a new credit card. I had to figure that out by myself, ebay was completely useless and unhelpful.
Honestly I can’t say that one’s corporate ethics and practices are superior to the other. It was just a matter of trying to limit my footprint. Google’s got me locked into gSuite for now because I’m haven’t been up to the level of effort to move my domains, docs, etc. I’m on a journey towards free software and devices, but Apple and Google still have broad access to me, my wallet, and my behaviors. I’m fully divested from Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft (except for a mostly idle Xbox). I use almost entirely free software on my desktop. My ISP and cell provider are mega corps. Libre Office, NextCloud, and other tools have come a long way. I had an adventure with a Pinephone, but it didn’t meet my needs at the time. Email hosting has remained an elusive issue for finding an alternative to gsuite. I’ve paid them for years and not had issues.
All of this is to say I’m trying various ways to limit my participation with dubious companies but I’ve had to pick my battles for myself and my family as we all do. Not using Prime has been a relatively convenient and painless change that I was able to do.
I invested heavily for years in getting various AWS certs. Leaving it behind for my personal cloud computing wasn’t easy to do, but my side projects and day job have recently lined up around GCP so I’ve been putting energy there.
I’m not convinced my choices are going to make much of a difference, but I would make them again at this point.
Thanks for the explanation. While it may not make much difference I think there are other personal benefits to your approach. Big company stuff is less personal, harder to get support for etc. (Apple excepted). Open source of course has the advantage of not changing (Looking at... JIRA!) on your or cancelling (be it a famed Google shutdown, or a startup not getting their next round). If the OSS software does change just keep to the old version or fork.
The greatest part about eBay for me, is that it actively encourages you to network with a set of vendors, and develop a level of trust. That's just something I've never got from Amazon.
I have repeat purchased from vendors on eBay for different items based on previous experiences. eBay makes that easy - Amazon is the complete opposite. They hide the vendor as much as possible.
I agree that eBay has quietly become more trustworthy than most others, and they have more experience with user review and trust management systems that just about anyone.
I am not even sure that eBay has become more trustworthy - they just kept doing what they were always doing. The others have just become significantly more shady.
Unless Ebay has overhauled their reputation system recently, you will buy counterfeit/mislabeled goods from a merchant, and then either receive a bribe (as a partial return) to keep a five star rating or you have to open an incident to get a full refund, in which you can't leave a rating and tell other people to beware.
This allows terrible merchants from all parts of the world to push crap on unsuspecting customers.
I also buy (after 10+ years) much more from eBay than Amazon. First for trust, second they often have more specialized filters than amazon (E.g. cardboard box sizes).
eBay's search gets worse every year, but Amazon's sucks way harder. As you say, at least you can filter better on eBay (although their price filters are getting vague like Amazon).
This doesn’t detract from your point, but I find a lot of shipping from China sellers listing themselves as from/shipping from Australia when it’s just not true. Maybe it’s just Australia with this issue?
The way to differentiate in my experience is the Chinese sellers often won’t have a city or post code in their ships from address shown on the listing, and more obviously the postage times are twice as long (or more) than an actually local seller.
I've sold on Etsy for a while as a hobby side business. The change seems to happen after their IPO. It felt like pretty quickly after that there began a trickle of incremental changes. A rule that allowed "manufacturing partners" really opened a huge loophole though, and in general things went down hill rapidly over the last 2-3 years.
Depends on what you consider "scale". I did 5k+ orders in about 5 years. I scaled back a bit after that because I had some large projects at my main job, but that's not bad scale for hand-made items on a hobby basis. If I'd been devoted to it full time & increased efforts to get more exposure (which I avoided since I had all the sales I could handle already) then even as a solo creator I could have scaled to 25K in that time period & earned a nice salary doing this FT even after setting aside $$ for PTO & retirement funds.
On the other hand, if you consider "scale" to be > $300k/year, then yes it's hard to do it without a manufacturing partner. And that can be a legitimate route even within the traditional Etsy framework! Design something, punch out countless copies w/ the "partner", and do final finishing/customization yourself. Or a few other similar models. The problem is this opened the door for sellers & etsy to rationalize keeping all sorts of definitively not handcrafted items in the marketplace. At best it's handmade by the "partner" through mass cheap 3rd world labor. At worse it's white labelled junk.
Anyway, the entire point of Etsy is that, even if "there's only so much you can get from handcrafting", that was what Etsy was for. The place where true, actual, real handcrafters were selling their items. Sure, it represents a cap on scale, but that was Etsy's mission. Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Scale is value and the potential to sales increase. Software license sales have infinite scale, Gwyneth Paltrow egg sales is high scale and $200 hand crafted in spare time earing sales is no scale.
> Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Yes, it was intended a storefront for handmade junk for 2x the price... With occasional interesting things.
I think that's what they targeted as their market niche post-ipo. It may even have been non-deliberately incremental. I'm cynical enough to think it's deliberate though.
For my part, a fair number of my items are non trivial to duplicate without a distinct loss in quality, so I still get reasonable sales and could probably ramp things up of I wanted/needed to.
However some things I sell have been SEO squated with crap quality items that don't even look remotely the same quality, but I don't have the energy or need for additional sales to optimize my own SEO. So, right now, I sell items that mostly average out to $40/hour profit, which isn't too bad for a hobby I enjoy.
About 80% are items that are pretty routine but still fun to make knowing the recipient will like them. The other 20% are truly unique items that I love making as more of an artistic endeavor, even though the time:cost ratio is much less in my favor than the other 80%. But that's also why mass producers can't poach my sales -- the market is way too small for these niche items to create a production line to copy them.
I'm working in a medium (leather tooling) where you really can't reproduce handmade quality at a mass scale. At least not economically: custom die cuts w/ embossing plates and personalization aren't economical for unique designs where I can offer 50 variations even though some of them might only sell 1 every 3 months, and the handmade version looks better than the mass produced stamped-out design anyway.
It's very hard to find a niche like this though. A lot of things are easier to replicate in exact detail than hand-carved leather.
That's a little cynical. We don't make the screws that go into our furniture or smelt the iron ore that goes into the steel pipe fittings or grow the trees or generate the electricity that supports distribution of this thread. But we do feel like we make each piece that we sell on Etsy.
I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale outsourcing of production is the only way.
These days you can outsource original product manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't mean that you're not the artist behind them.
I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
>I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
I don't have a problem with "manufacturing partners" in this sense. It's when that loophole is used to justify or hide countless sellers simply white labelling items that is the problem. If I make a design and have a manufacture stamp out copies in the thousands, but then offer customization that I add JIT for each order (a hallmark of etsy) then that's fine. But if I take a $0.50 beaded necklace bought in bulk on Alibaba and resell then at $10 with not other value added, that does not fit the supposed mission of Etsy. Take that to Amazon, Ebay, & it's okay. But it's absolutely not within the handcrafted marketplace, even when "handcrafted" is loosely defined, that Etsy is supposed to be.
Yes I agree, Etsy used to make sure you were original or had manufacturing partners. They had some kind of vetting for the partners until Josh Silverman(?) came on board. I think that is when those rules loosened and AliBaba became a legit partner on Etsy. It's been a slippery slope. My segment on Etsy is not conducive to mass production and I think we have simply priced ourselves above it as a way to keep separate . I have started seeing furniture made in Turkey and Poland and Romania that is now beating us up a little on price, not sure how they get the shipping so cheap but that is a different issue
IIRC the US offers a steep discount on international shipping coming from countries that it has designated "transitional". It's possible that Poland and Romania are on that list: I have highly specialized, custom tools that I bought from a machinist in Romania, and shipping was about $5. Whereas I could be at the US side of Niagara Falls and ship a light package 100 feet to the Canadian side and it would still cost me about $14.
Credit where it's do though, the tools I bought from Romania are amazing, unique, top quality. For some reason there's a few countries in Eastern Europe (Ukraine actually is one of them) where leather crafting has become somewhat popular and there are a few Etsy stores with fantastic items. They don't use the absolute best quality leather, but it's good: orders of magnitude above what you'd find in stores, and the construction is solid
(also leather is an area where price increases near exponentially with quality. Cheap junk like PU leather is maybe $0.25 per square foot in large bulk. Lowest quality real leather is about $1, and is actually still a fine choice for certain type of items if used carefully. Okay leather might run about $5 a sqft, good to very good will be $10, $20, $50, and the absolute best can be $100 to $200 per sqft. Although it's important to know that not all leather is suited to ever task. And sometimes the price:quality ratio is about product consistency. You might pay $20/sqft for a side of leather that has near perfect consistency in thickness and lack of surface defects. Very important if you're making large items, and they have a usable portion of 80 or 90%. But you can also buy miss-split that are uneven thickness and have some surface defects for $3. The usable portion may only be 60%, but if you're making small items you're still getting the same very high quality leather, you just have more scrap left over. You can even find a use for that too: some people really like the "character" that natural imperfections add to an item. Or I use it as practice pieces testing out new designs, no Sorry, more than you probably were looking for on leather detail. But it's HN so I figured there's often people interested in the minutiae of non-tech fields)
8% is actually a about what they take, at least prior to any fee increases going on now:
Keep in mind Etsy only takes a cut, and it's close to 8%. If I sell a $100 item they take about 7% in transaction fees. Then there's merchant fees for payment processing. I'm sure Etsy take a cut of them, and they are about 3%, so assuming they get 1 point of that their total take is 8%.
In comparison Ebay w/ PayPal merchant fees is a few points higher at about 14%. Which if you're selling high volume low margin race-to-bottom Alibaba junk then the extra 3-4% profit explains why Etsy's loosing of seller restrictions has attracted so much junk.
The bank payment processing probably isn't doing an even split, so I would guess that Etsy's take really is right about 8% of seller revenue.
You wouldn't hire Elon Musk to turn anything into PayPal, as he wasn't a founder nor truly even an employee or executive of PayPal. Musk joined PayPal via merger with his fledgling X.com online bank. It was Confinity's PayPal product that continued from the merger, not Musk's X.com product. Musk was appointed CEO of the combined business, but contributed nothing of note to it. He was only there for a few months before the board ousted him from the company, while on vacation: his regular absence from the job was one of the reasons. The other was that his contribution to the engineering direction of the company amounted to "let's stop working on the business, and instead rewrite the platform on .NET to run on Windows servers", which the organization found so preposterous they circulated a petition to the board among the engineers to have Musk removed. The board did so.
I suppose he could let rando users load their crap into a launch and then have people bid on "owning" a bit of spacejunk memorabilia orbiting the planet. Think, "Shamrock Beanie Baby, but orbiting the Earth!".
Probably not great if you want the actual thing, in hand. No one spending 3x the price of a Steam Deck right now will want that price going towards launching it into orbit instead of having it in hand, playing games. Still, maybe there's a market for "owning" orbiting space debris contributing to Kessler Syndrome? Sort of like buying & burning an item to make an artificial scarcity NFT? Only this way you get to contribute to the destruction of mankind's ability to easily launch anything into orbit.
> I don't know why Etsy seems to welcome this instead of doing everything they possibly can to fight it.
They can raise short-term profits this way. The problem is that there's only so much rent you can seek before it becomes unprofitable for sellers. It turns out that "industrial-scale" sellers, copycats and outright scammers have lower operating costs which means they can stick around and replace the independent creators that have essentially been priced out of the market. Of course, in the long-term it will be the death of the company, but by that time, bonuses would've been paid, raises would've been awarded, stock would've vested and lots of "shareholder value" would've been created.
They've also recently bought Depop for a significant amount of money and I'm not sure if it's profitable, so they might be intentionally cannibalizing their earlier product to make money to prop up the next one.
Why can't you build a business around selling "industrial-scale" artsy/customizable stuff?
In a different context, someone made a great point that your first million users don't necessarily need to be included in your next 20 million. Maybe Etsy has or will cycle through all their early buyers & sellers. But that doesn't matter if the group cycling in is more valuable.
> Why can't you build a business around selling "industrial-scale" artsy/customizable stuff?
That's essentially what old-school furniture & home stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce and margins are low.
I also suspect that a lot of the industrial-scale producers & copycats use the artisans as their R&D department and only copy their successful designs. In this case, the innovation still comes from the small-scale independent sellers, which if they are driven off the platform would eventually kill off the industrial-scale sellers and copycats as they'd no longer have anything to copy (and designing in-house might make them unprofitable).
>That's essentially what old-school furniture & home stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce and margins are low.
Eh, I can't think of a directly comparable site. The closest would be something like Pier 1, but there's no customization there and it's all sold by Pier 1.
Well part of the value is being handcrafted and being original. If others lie about the first, and can just steal the second, then yes, it is hard to compete.
Brand recognition and originality is value. Making felt handbags for 10 years and expecting that no one else would copy that - is what drives people away from stagnating crafts people.
Yeah... that may seem naive (to value the "niche" over actual revenue numbers), but once etsy loses its original niche, I'm not sure what differentiates them from Amazon/eBay/etc. => their brand dries up => revenue eventually dwindles? What stops this?
Nothing really. Most people do not pay attention to how the sausage is made. They don't care if the car service they use was a total toxic fratbro culture using unsustainable pricing to lure in users. They just wanted "cheap" rides without caring about why they were cheap. Just as another comment on this topic suggested they don't care about original as long as the thing they want is cheaper.
So no, I don't really think that educated populace will stop supporting shit practices because they can't be bothered.
Well I'm not talking about people supporting Etsy though, I'm talking about Etsy itself.
Like one possible story is that Etsy does this and it's shitty for sellers and maybe a lot of buyers too, but it ends up making Etsy successful in the long-run so they don't care.
That's not the story I'm telling though, it's one where Etsy chases medium-term revenue at the cost of their long-term niche and thus their long-term success. If me and GP are right, in theory Etsy itself ought to not want this to happen.
But the only way that Etsy can measure any decision they make is with the number of transactions from which they receive a cut. If they allow mass produced items to be sold that increases the number of transactions, then that's the bottom line numbers they care about. If they force a rule that it has to be small batch hand crafted type of items to be sold, then the per transaction numbers go way down. Bean counters and stock analysts don't like those numbers, and they are after all the people any public corp are most concerned.
Yes, but the interesting question I think is why the bean counters are given free reign to make decisions that ultimately lead to the company's downfall[0].
Like what if you had a fine dining restaurant where things are going okay, and someone comes in and is like "Hey guys, I noticed we're spending a lot of time washing plates. We'd be able to serve X% more customers if we just like scraped off the food and did a quick rinse." The restaurant tries it, it works for a bit until diners see specs of old food on their plates, the restaurant's reputation tanks, they lose all their customers, and they go out of business.
I think most restaurants are structured such that this does not happen. The restaurants correctly see that even though it seems like doing this might make some graphs go up in the short-term, it will actually make everything terrible in the long-term, and so they don't do it.
And again, this isn't about like, benevolent restaurant owners valuing the custom experience even if it's bad for the bottom line. Washing the plates thoroughly is good for the bottom line; any sufficiently intelligent restaurant owner shouldn't listen to the bean counter even if the owner's just a greedy capitalist.
(This reads enough like a Scott Alexander post that I'm pretty sure I might just actually be copying one; I think he wrote something along these lines once.)
[0]: Again, all of this is precipitated on the idea that actually Etsy will fail once it loses its niche, since it'll just get beaten by Amazon/eBay/etc. when it's just like any other seller of goods. If what's really going to happen is that Etsy will do fine as a company, then this becomes a totally different shape of problem: "the market rewards things that we actually maybe don't want for society".
Did Amazon fail when it opened the flood gates to the mass market? Did eBay? Did Walmart? No. I don't accept your premise that a company switching from handmade to low price mass produced will fail.
Fail means different things to different people, but to the stockholders that the bean counters are beholden to determine fail/success by stock price and profits. What definition the original users of the site expecting handmade/small batch type of items have of fail/success means nothing to those in charge. It's not really a hard subject to understand is it? You have to accept that the "leadership" of Etsy is different now than when it was created. Their ethos has changed. It happens. You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality. People still use Google now that "don't be evil" is no longer their ethos.
> Did Amazon fail when it opened the flood gates to the mass market? Did eBay? Did Walmart? No.
If Etsy can fit in just becoming another giant generic undifferentiated seller of things, then yeah, this all checks out.[0] But my question is how much room the market has for those kinds of businesses. If Etsy does become just another big generic seller of things, why keep using them over Amazon, eBay, or Walmart? What are they going to compete with them on?
It's true Amazon used to be more niche (books), but I think they were early enough that they didn't have to worry too much about someone crushing them.
Walmart was always a giant seller of things, just a physical one that went online, but I don't think they were ever really niche.
Did eBay have a niche? I thought they were also pretty much just selling generic stuff from the beginning.
[0]:
> You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality.
I think you're confusing not thinking this is likely with some kind of denialism/not wanting it to be true. I don't especially care a whole lot if Etsy ends up being a giant generic seller of things, I'm just not sure that'll work. At the point where Etsy is just re-skinned Amazon, what stops Amazon from crushing them?
What stops that is the incumbents destroying or acquiring upstarts in their space. Etsy has already purchased Depop, Elo7, A Little Market, Trunkt, Reverb...
Why does Depop, A Little Market, Trunkt etc not get blamed for "selling out"? Because at the end of the day, people start businesses to make money. In fact, it is a tried and true model to create a start with the specific purpose of getting acquired.
What's their unique gimmick? Paying for mass produced quality weekend project items?.. Tie dyed tees at 3x the price?
I bought from Etsy once, but even then the items were recommended to me via Instagram. Etsy in 2014 was already filled with poorly made "artsy" crap at double the price.
I started out selling my own hobby stuff on eBay, and then switched to Etsy because I appreciated the way it presented my products as a storefront. It seemed more "legitimate". But with the way things are going, I'm ironically thinking about moving primarily back to eBay and just embracing the free-for-all there.
Etsy makes money on transactions. More transactions = more money.
Most users of etsy do not care about source or authenticity. They just want what they see for the price listed.
Losing the handmade trinket shops is meaningless compared to the full scale China operation doing 100x more business. Customers by and large cannot tell the difference nor do they actually care too much.
I think the glaring issue with that line of thought is that the position of 'rent seeking middleman providing a web storefront' is pretty commoditized, and is likely not viable long term.
In their niche, they had a smaller addressable market, but they had a moat from their brand within said niche. Outside of the niche, that moat doesn't exist, and they are competing against Amazon, Ebay, and many others.
I disagree. Having a reputable online handmade trinket shop was very valuable because it was the largest and had the best brand recognition. Being a Chinese factory retail outlet is less valuable because _everyone_ is a Chinese factory retail outlet.
Sure, the market for cheap imported goods is much larger. It's also more competitive. Do you really think Etsy is going to stand against Walmart, Amazon, etc?
Etsy is occupying a niche of semi-customized trinkets, a minority of which are hand-made. This isn't a space that Walmart and Amazon seem particularly interested in.
I don't think it's that simple. The real problem is that people want nice, handmade trinkets at cheap Chinese goods prices. Which is why the cheap Chinese good manufacturers spam their generic AliExpress-tier wares into places like Etsy to fool people as to what they're getting.
The websites that function as clearinghouses (Amazon, Etsy, etc.) could figure out ways to prevent it but they have incentives to play along with obfuscation as to which market the consumer is shopping in.
The problem is that "cheap Chinese goods" is already monopolized by eBay, Aliexpress, Banggood and Amazon. I don't see how they're ever going to break into it.
The only reason to go to Etsy is to (try to) find unique stuff. If that stuff is diluted 100-1 by Chinese knockoffs, there's no reason to go there anymore. I might as well go to eBay or Amazon, which probably have even lower prices.
Exactly. It sucks because I have bought absolute garbage from there. I know the seller matters just like on eBay but the trust that I’ll be getting a craftsman-made item when buying from Etsy is now firmly lost outside of specific stores. It is actively user hostile now.
How much demand is there truly for handmade products from independent creators? It is possible that Etsy has decided that is no longer a market that is worth pursuing and they would rather try to compete with Amazon and AliExpress. It is often better to have a small piece of a huge pie than the majority of a tiny pie.
Etsy has somewhere on the order of 100 million active buyers, searching Etsy for goods to buy every month. If you set up a storefront on Square, you start out with 0 active buyers, searching your storefront 0 times every month. Marketplaces bring tremendous value to small sellers.
So... Let me get this straight - they get a lot of customers off other people's work, but aren't willing to pay for the increased costs of providing them those extra customers.
The pattern with these sorts of Web 2.0 companies is grimly familiar now. They start promising more access and reach for small creators. They get a lot of small creators in the door with the ease of use and cutting out of the old middle-men. Then they implement a bunch of mechanisms to foster lock-in and fleece the small creators in ways that aren't much better than the old middle-men (though, admittedly, with more reach). It's like one of those fish traps you put in a current where the fish swim in but can't turn around to get away.
yeah, the last item I bought from Etsy showed up in an Amazon box. The seller legit just bought the item on amazon and shipped it to me for 2x the price.
I work with a lot of Etsy sellers and the parts of this I am familiar with and can confirm are:
* resellers - I see lots of sellers with thousands or tens of thousands of products. These sellers are obviously not making craft items. Etsy does nothing to limit this from what I've seen and experienced. And come on, I'm sure Etsy makes more money from these sellers, so what's their incentive to stop them (other than killing their platform).
* extreme AI actions - If you build an app to connect to Etsy's API, you'll need to test it of course. Except that Etsy's AI will ban your account for performing any testing. I hope you don't use that app to support hundreds of Etsy sellers, because they all get screwed. Wait several days to hear back, and then they tell you some silly tricks to avoid getting caught by their AI when testing next time. No real test environment and no promise they won't turn around and ban you again tomorrow for the same thing.
It feels like they're slowly building another Amazon, and haven't learned any lessons other than that's where the money is.
>We will put our shops on vacation mode April 11-18. Those of us who can will strike for the whole week, and some of us are striking only for April 11.
The reality that many (most?) sellers can't afford to strike will significantly limit the scope and impact of the exercise.
This is exactly why unions have strike funds.
It may seem weird for a bunch of small business owners to form or join a union, but that's what they should do.
I think that most sellers won't "strike" simply because there's likely a financial incentive not to. For that week, you can be the only "custom sticker maker" on the platform and increase your profits. What can the other sellers do about it?!
The reason why workplace strikes work is because you are visibly seen 'crossing the picket' line and so majority of workers comply. Other Etsy sellers can see you continue to sell, but what does it matter, you don't work with them. They are all independent of each other.
I feel like Etsy should have done this from the get-go. The problem I think for them is without all those re-sellers, they would have a fraction of the sellers they have now.
I've seen the private -> public transition ruin many companies, and it makes me sad. I'm holding out for Valve but I imagine that if they ever go public that'll be the end of my game purchases, unless a worthy competitor arises.
Yep I'm referring to the platform itself. I wish Valve made more games, but I'm happy with the direction they're going in, i.e. working to make SteamOS3 and their Steam Deck a success, since this will also be a win for Linux gaming.
Make each seller verify their account by sending one of the products to the business hosting the platform in order to open the storefront. And if in the future, that store is receiving complaints about "reseller junk" or similar, either via your marketplace customer service, or from reviews of the seller, make a order via a fake name to review it again. If they break the rules, throw them off the platform.
If I understand correctly, our markets are flooded with cheap Chinese trinkets because the Chinese government subsidizes shipping, making it possible to sell something for 99 cents online, send it across the ocean, and still make money.
This could be very easily fixed for every website like this by the US government adopting a small tariff on low-cost goods shipped from China to cancel out that subsidy. Just enough that it is no longer profitable. Something to think about.
The cost of shipping individual trinkets already went up quite a while ago. What you do is import a whole crate or shipping container of trinkets, then distribute them from a US warehouse. The shipping cost on the crate/container is higher, but spread over hundreds or thousands of units inside that container.
Such a tariff would have wide ranging impact. Low-cost goods are not just finished products going to consumers, it would impact intermediate products such as small chips or modules that are assembled into final products. We also have come to expect many commodity-like products to be readily available at very low cost, something that a tariff would hurt. These aren't trinkets, we're talking batteries, cables, etc produced from reputable Chinese manufacturers like Anker.
I'm not exactly sure why the Chinese government paying for the transport costs of cheap trinkets likely bought by low income consumers is a situation that needs fixing.
This won't be successful - ETSY is a publicly traded company, unless corrective action can replace the loss revenue from ads/punishing duplication/aliexpress - it's not going anywhere.
This is exactly what happened to eBay for anyone that remembers when it was garage-sale mania, then it became publicly traded and effectively became Target.com with < 1% of personal things sprinkled in.
A bit of a tangent, but Etsy lost me (and likely some amount of other sellers) when they pushed so hard on free shipping. Not all products are amenable to this, and we wound up losing money on every shipped item under the new plans. Ebay also did this at some point in the past, with the same results.
Those two, and this example has me wondering why these companies continue to side with the buyers?
Isn't it obvious though? The buyers are the ones transferring their money from their account into the coffers of Etsy. If they piss off one seller, 2 more will pop up in its place.
Consumers just work that way. I've had an ebay account since 2006 and I can't count the times I've posted something for 15$ + variable (3-8$) shipping that wouldn't sell that I just sold for 22$ with free shipping instead and it goes.
Funny thing, I totally filter by free shipping too when I buy on ebay. It's just easier.
To anyone reading the above and thinking "well, just move the shipping cost over to your product cost, duh" -- the problem is that shipping becomes dramatically more expensive the further the package is going. How do you pick one single price for an item when 50% of your customers are in the US and 50% are in the UK? Which half subsidizes the other?
But there's another sharp corner to avoid: online product ad services (Google Ads, Facebook ads etc), tend to penalize merchants who list different prices depending on where the customer is located[1]:
> Don’t change the price of your product on your landing page based on a user’s location. Ensure that users can purchase the product online for the price that you submit, regardless of their location.
Which means that (if you don't want your Google ads account deactivated) you can't bake in a variable shipping cost into the product cost; you can only select one amortized shipping cost.
So sellers who want to offer free shipping are really between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time in terms of not losing money on shipping vs not overcharging buyers.
Yes, that's true. That can help with international rate discrepancies for ecommerce sites that have those different TLD's. But I know for a fact that there are large ecommerce sites out there that are not doing per-TLD ad syndication, as they probably should.
Also, shipping rates within a single country can still vary pretty dramatically based on distance traveled, whether you're shipping to a remote area postal code, etc.
The problem with ebay is the scams where shipping is $50+ for something that isn't large or heavy. I always just sort by lowest price+shipping to push these off page.
My etsy store is paltry compared to most but I joined the strike in solidarity.
I sell seeds that are collected from my own garden, but I often see other sellers reselling seeds from established farm/ag operations. Its also clear that some of these sellers are selling seeds as a loss leader.
There's no point of a small scale operation like mine even being on etsy when I have to compete against such stuff. I assume if they continue down this path a new marketplace will spring up for handcrafted/original products but it would be nice if we didn't have to go through that cycle.
Cheap stuff on Etsy is never going away. Misrepresentation on Etsy is here to say, as long as there's cheap labor offshore, if not China then in other countries.
Even if something is born as a small batch small creation, if it sells well, then Chinese will copy it and sell it.
And guess what? If the quality is decent enough, majority of buyers will not care.
I will never use Etsy again after my first experience with it recently. I paid $200 for (what I thought) was a full size high quality living room rug. What I recieved was a polyester bath mat, that was shipped via DHL from Turkey, and took two weeks to arrive... I don't know what happened along the way, but I see Etsy now as simply an extension of Aliexpress.
Honestly, it might be easier to pivot your business model and/or use a different channel. This seems too much like "some one else do the work to make my life easier again!!"
There are no other channels for small sellers. Etsy has spent their time on the top aggressively purchasing all viable competitors and shutting them down in order to maintain their lead.
Anecdotally: I get about 49/50ths of my sales from Etsy. They have captured a lot of the virtual storefront at least for the stuff I sell (accessories I make for board games and toys). It's almost not even worth your time to list on other sites. Did they get there through the luck, or genuine business savvy? I can't say one way through another, but they're starting to really press their advantage to extract as much money from their customers/sellers as possible.
I already closed my shop, years ago. It doesn't make sense to offer hand made products if you compete directly with AliExpress and the users has no way of telling that 90% of the platform is China resell.
You can claim whatever you want, no control, no warnings, nobody from Etsy actually cares.
The reason I finally stopped was because they did not accept my new credit card and I had no way to contact anyone to clear this up. I made several thousand dollars a month on Etsy yet nobody actually helped. With no credit card attached I couldn't use any paid features anymore and my shop was dying either way. I contacted every email, every support forum and never got any kind of response more than a link to the faq that didn't help.
I may still recommend it to test the waters for cheap (if you are lucky and have a credit card that actually works for them), but I wouldnt recommend anyone to build a business around this shady platform
My girlfriend is one of you, her account on Etsy has been falsely suspended by their AI and can't sell anything there, I think the AI also scrape data from other website because my gf also selling it on other place, so maybe they think it's not original because of that. They really fucked up with their AI.
Went to buy a Ukrainian flag earlier on in the war. Would only buy from a Ukrainian or a charity that directly sent proceeds to help.
Etsy was absolutely overrun with corporations plastering the Ukrainian flag onto everything. Quickly gave up - there's absolutely no way to cut through that garbage.
I am just going to write it here, having no idea of the income of the Etsy sellers, but let's say that someone arrives and builds a fair Etsy, then how long until they go the same path? Or how long can you be victim of a corporate warlord? And I understand a small seller has less visibility and power to build a small e-commerce for itself alone... What I was thinking: how much of a stupid idea is for like for a bunch of Etsy sellers to put power together and create a marketplace where they have full power of votes about the marketplace direction and policy? Here seems that small players are getting fucked at every step, either on Amazon or on Etsy, but can small players fight back by joining forces and abandon these big marketplaces?
In theory a cooperative of craftsman sellers not beholden to VCs could develop the marketplace software. But they will need to attract, retain, and manage software developers without being able to offer them any equity with "lottery ticket potential". Managing software engineers itself is not for the faint of heart, to put it mildly.
A cooperative of altruistic software developers could build marketplace software. Open source exists after all. Then someone will need to run this as a company. Perhaps as a non-profit?
It sounds possible. But I haven't seen a single marketplace run like this yet.
Even if we kept the original 5% fee, and kept it there - and kicked out the stupid resellers - we’d be making a lot of people happy. It really wouldn’t be hard to whip up something basic. It would be much harder to attract people to it and keep a user base, of course.
I saw an etsy tv ad the other day. My wife is an etsy seller so I thought this was interesting. They pitched it as a place where you can find someone to put your logo on a sign. The interaction with the seller was minimal, their name was even shown as anonymous "etsy seller". This seems like a use case that a bigger co could easily support and downplays the value prop of etsy as a place to connect with a craftsperson/artist to buy their work or commission a unique piece. I guess they are trying to move away from that model to more print-stuff-on-signs/shirts/etc.
Etsy can target incredibly well to show me things I want to buy....when I'm looking at one of their ads on Instagram. Their actual site recommendations? Deeply mediocre. The difference, given that I sign over a bunch of data to them either way? I might guess: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21155193/etsy-advertising...
I don't totally buy that -- that they're in charge of the integration with Etsy's catalog? That there's no device ID fed back from the referrer links I click that Etsy could be using to pull over my computed advertisement characteristics, given that I've logged in there with Facebook? Etsy knows I've been clicking on those Instagram ads run to certain groups -- surely they could use that to improve my onsite recommendations.
My wife is an etsy seller, so I asked her opinion on this. TLDR of her response: "it is the people who don't take it as a serious business who are having issues with the etsy cut increase".
Basically, the ones who try to compete on price with the mass manufacturers (aka already low-balling their prices). The ones who make a living already have the etsy fees in their product prices so will just bump up accordingly and likely not loose customers.
That said, the demands listed are all ones she agrees with. The user experience of having to tell if a product is really hand made is bad for buyers and sellers alike.
Yeah, as someone who sells five figures on Etsy every year, the fee increase (while crappy) isn't shocking or offensive. It's the other things they enumerate in the demands that are chafing us.
I don't even see how things like the AI-powered "trust and safety" garbage they implemented or the "Star Seller" thing benefit Etsy in the slightest. The T&S bots have nabbed our shops a few times and every time it wasn't even anything they should have been concerned about. One time they shut us down completely for a week because they _thought_ we got too many orders (even though we filled them in a day). Like, what? And Star Seller basically makes you a slave to unreasonable customers. It's almost Uber-esque in the degree of perfection it expects in turnaround and ratings, and in a world where "I didn't read the listing" ends up in a three-star review, it's just untenable (and again, what's even the benefit??).
> I don't even see how things like the AI-powered "trust and safety" garbage they implemented or the "Star Seller" thing benefit Etsy in the slightest.
Etsy basically tripled its user base in the past 2 years, to something like 100 million active buyers and sellers. This happened during the pandemic, when Etsy's offices were locked down, everyone had to learn to run the business remotely, and the labor market tightened up making it harder to hire (and then to train remotely).
Almost every change Etsy's made in the last two years is about reducing the burden on their staff, which now has a much higher user to staff ratio to deal with. Requiring sellers respond to messages within 24 hours reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring sellers resolve issues to customers' satisfaction to maintain their standing reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring customers contact sellers before they can open a case reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Implementing AI-powered review of new sellers and listings is the only realistic answer to having ANY review of new sellers and listings when there are hundreds of thousands of them being added every month for each employee in charge of enforcing policy on them.
I'm 100% sympathetic to their growth issues, trust me. Their support team is stretched very thin, and I always try to be really understanding when tickets sit unanswered for a bit. At the same time, if they're cutting off someone's livelihood (especially in a case like ours where we're being too successful for their algorithm), it really, really should be reviewed by a real person before the policy is enacted rather than depending on the AI to not have issues identifying real problems.
The truly annoying thing is that when it is reviewed by a real person, they have strict policies about how long things have to be a certain way before they will reverse what is obviously a flaw in their algorithm. We ran into "well yeah obviously you didn't do anything wrong but bans like this are a week long so you have two more days to wait" a couple of times. I'm guessing they had someone new take over their T&S team who feels like strict enforcement across the board regardless makes things more fair (which I can see from one angle), but given that Etsy's whole pitch is making commerce more personal, it'd be nice if things like that were also more personal.
There should be some law of good marketplaces on the internet, that if they need to grow beyond a certain amount they inevitable become a trash heap of crap and end up losing whatever customer and seller goodwill they built up in the first place
I have some etsy sellers I know and love bookmarked, and some of the more niche areas (like hand built midi controllers) are still remarkably free of cruft, but the bigger categories are just dropship knockoffs
As an etsy seller. I don't really care about the rising fees, they send so many customers my way I am okay with that. What I do care about is that their report features don't work. I have reported so many shops just reselling commercial items that I am shopping for. Literally they don't even remove the branding, just straight up reselling a finished good that isn't vintage. So lame.
Agree with all of them except #2 ("crack down on resellers [...]"). There's really no good definition of what a reseller even is, and what exact line between handmade and mass produced Etsy should draw. Ultimately you have to compete on quality and appeal of your own product, not by restricting others.
It's funny 'cause that is the only one I fully agree with. Etsy used to have strict rules that everything posted had to be hand made. Obviously, they weren't able to scale that rule as they grew, but for me it is the entire appeal of the site. If I want to buy mass produced goods I'll can go to any big retailer or eBay if I want a deal. That said, I rarely use Etsy anymore because all of the hand made stuff is drowned out by all the mass market crap and it's hard to even search out unique hand made items anymore.
If sellers are willing and able to organize a change to their business operations, and put up a public site and social media/marketing push to raise attention ... then how much further would they need to go to just splinter off Etsy?
Is there room for a federated or coop model, where the sellers own+govern their own marketplace?
Etsy is a Tech/Data Company which gathers data on all the sellers etc...
Sellers are artisans, to think they are going to handle setting up an actual clud hosted marketplace and hire a savvy tech staff with devps, eng, support, cloud arch etc...
The buyers aren't going on strike and complaining about it, though. Not to mention the comparison doesn't make sense to begin with. The sellers are operating a business presumably.
From Etsy's point of view the etsy sellers are like the buyers from the etsy sellers point of view. Ultimately everyone is going to do what they can to maximize revenue from their end.
If this strike has any level of critical mass they'd just all leave and create their own thing. This is literally how Etsy itself came to be to begin with. It's just the nature of things. eBay sellers went on strike and all migrated over to Etsy. If this is that big of a deal, it's time to do it again.
Reliability, scale, general operations, security, convenience? Putting up a site is easy, yes. Keeping it up while your business is based on it, not so much.
Though TBH I wish the infrastructure was there such that this could be a viable option. I feel like we're inching our way there with "no code" products.
"Do the entire thing yourself" is what you suggested in the GP. Now you're suggesting a site that "does everything except marketing for you." Those are very different suggestions.
No, what I'm saying is that you can purchase everything except marketing, and presumably the folks striking would handle the rest, so in sum, yes they could "do the entire thing yourself."
You should look up the history of etsy, it literally began by a mass exodus away from eBay. I'll never understand why people handcuff themselves and then complain about it. The question in the end if whether etsy is worth it to them after all of the fees, restrictions, etc. If so, continue, if not, move. Both the etsy sellers and etsy itself aim to maximize profit.
> The question in the end if whether etsy is worth it to them after all of the fees, restrictions, etc. If so, continue, if not, move
It seems you do understand after all, unless you are making the questionable claim that Etsy provides literally no value.
I think the crux of the matter here is that these sellers were previously happy with the tradeoff, and then Etsy changed the terms and they don't think it's worth it anymore. Getting angry and yelling about it in hopes of changing it rather than just shrugging and moving their whole business to another platform seems perfectly logical to me. The stuff with garbage resellers does seem like a really good point: Etsy is going to devalue themselves into the toilet if they don't do something about it and there is a mass exodus.
Businesses understand a hit to the bottom line, not some abstract strike manifest. So exodus is exactly the most efficient way of voicing your opinion to a profit seeking operation
Except there's a real cost to exodus, and complaining (along with a measurable-yet-easily-reversible impact like turning off sales) is an easy first step that only costs the temporary sales loss. So on the off chance enough people complaining and pausing sales causes the company to change their mind, an exodus that forces the sellers to do a bunch of store-rebuilding would have turned out to be a very inefficient method.
It's a statement trying to get the attention of the company. Nobody is claiming it's guaranteed to work. It's a desperate act for before you bail entirely.
it's hard to do (it requires a specific skillset), it requires capital investment (servers cost money), and you become fairly indiscoverable. these are surmountable problems given adequate money but without it, a major platform like etsy has a real moat.
Bringing customers to your own website is very costly and difficult. You will need to spend a lot in ads and convince your customers that you are legit.
I have often wondered how close the fees that 'marketplace' companies charge are to the value they provide; of course, in a perfectly competitive world, they would be very close. However, it seems that in practice, the marketplace uses VC money to obtain a near-monopoly (probably aided by the network effects of marketplaces in general), and then extracts what amounts to an economic rent thereafter.
It's interesting to see a strike organized against the marketplace. Perhaps this will be an ultimately more successful way to apply downward pressure on the fees? I wonder if consumers will read this and also participate, ramping up the bad PR for Etsy and putting more pressure on lowering fees. One challenge is that, unlike a labor union, I don't think there are really any legal protections for a 'seller strike'.
As a buyer, I don't even know if I can find actual small seller goods anymore. its all existing shops having another sales channel. Sometimes horrible quality trinkets from industrial shops.
The unique value proposition of etsy is almost invisible at this point. Just like shopping Amazon these days...
The fee increase literally only harms the sellers. I use Etsy at least about once a month - I'm a huge fan of custom knick-knacks such as this lovely 'fix your hearts or die' 'Twin Peaks' pin in support of transgender equality:
There's a lot of cosplay items, etc - Etsy is an incredibly unique market that looks like it needs a replacement with accountability towards it's community.
The fee increase does not "literally" only harm the sellers. Fee increases are necessarily passed on to buyers (as are all expenses; buyers are the only source of funds moving in the marketplace), so if you feel that a fee increase is a harm, it's also harming the buyers. However, the fee increase does not only harm anyone. The increased funds going to Etsy will be spent, and some of that money will be spent on growing the number of buyers on their platform, which puts money back into sellers' pockets. Potentially growing their business by even greater than the 1.5% the fee is going up. After the increase, Etsy still has the lowest fees of any major marketplace -- cheaper then eBay, cheaper than Amazon Handmade, etc.
I think it would make sense for Etsy to spinoff a separate site for used / mass produced goods. While some of the reseller volume is sellers trying trick buyers into thinking the products are first-sale handmade goods, and others are sellers simply going where the market is, I think there are also a large number of sellers and buyers that simply like the Etsy model better than Ebay.
If they had a separate site the consequences of cracking down harder would simply be that sellers need to move their products to this other site, not shutdown altogether. This is particularly important for the fuzzy definition of used (sorry "antique") goods. Thus there would be less push-back and gaming from the sellers, and less financial incentives for Etsy Inc to be lax with the rules. It would improve the experience for both buyers and sellers of handmade goods, without harming buyers and seller of used goods.
I think the main objection to this would be handmade goods sellers complaining that Etsy Inc is supporting knock-off sellers. While true, it isn't within Etsy's power to remove these off the internet altogether, and as long as the buyer is aware that what they are purchasing isn't handmade, I don't think Etsy has any obligation to avoid this market.
Etsy began as a service to a niche market, and was a good platform for small sellers. But they're a public company, and their purpose is to create more and more returns... ultimately, diluting their brand and flooding their site with slop might be a money-making proposition.
Ironically this is the best time to be a seller on etsy.
But regardless of platform, ebay, amazon, etsy, shopify - you are always at mercy of the platform and being deplatformed.
Sellers should use the platforms as a funnel and then once they verify their idea works, pop it onto a private hosted website within their full control - ofcourse this is a bit complicated, but not really, even something as silly as wordpress + woocommerce + stripe would work, and if you get big enough spend, can get a better rate on credit card gateways. Or, go full crypto.
Genuine question, why is the fee increase such a big deal? I assume Etsy assumes this will just get passed along to the buyer. And if there are less sales as a result of items becoming more expensive to cover the fee increase then Etsy would feel that too.
The other items make more sense about not wanting ads and wanting fairer representation between creators and resellers. I just don't follow why fee increases are such a big deal for sellers since they can be transparently passed along to buyers.
Has anyone tried buying art from Etsy recently? It's very difficult to find something that is actually original. Etsy is full of super hero Chinese knockoff poor quality shite
Slightly off topic: I frequently hear it mentioned in threads like this that Chinese companies are able to compete with native sellers even while shipping individual pieces to customers? How does it even work? international shipping is not cheap, especially when you're not shipping in volume. Is the shipping cost included in the product? If anyone can direct me to info on how this trade works I would be thankful.
Here's an older article ePacket shipping / the Universal Postal Union. The last administration was pretty adamant about closing the one sided deal that we somehow got ourselves into. Regardless of political affiliations, I think we all agree that an American shouldn't pay more to ship in America than someone from outside of the country. The economic advantage hurts users and small businesses.
I've been pretty bummed with the Etsy changes to Reverb.com (they acquired a few years ago). It was great and I regularly shopped there, now it's hit or miss and feels more like ebay / wish.com
might be unrelated with overall strike but one thing that I never understood is their double standards towards sellers in certain categories, specifically my friend who saw CBD oil being sold on their website, tried to do the same but was rejected because it was an "prohibited substance"
then he listed those existing listings and they were removed but not all, just the ones he pointed out.
I recently bought a nicely designed coffee mug on Etsy... which never arrived. Tried to contact the store - no answer. I didn't go broke and go homeless, but it certainly stung. Especially since it was supposed to be a birthday present for someone.
Etsy used to be my favorite place to purchase bespoke artisan crafts and products, and it has turned into a cheap tchotchke reseller hive full of low quality, print-on-demand and other pure garbage.
It's wild that one of the best e-shopping techniques is now googling "___ review reddit". We find ourselves playing a strange whack-a-mole game of trust amongst organizations.
Honestly all the resellers on the site have driven me away from using it completely. Etsy would be wise to listen to these people at least for that part of their site experience.
You may have been scammed, or you may have simply purchased from a home business that sells on multiple channels. Lots of Etsy sellers are also eBay sellers and also Amazon Handmade sellers. If you've already shipped your inventory to Amazon's warehouse, it can be cheaper and easier to have Amazon fulfill the orders regardless of what channel they come in on.
A tag or a sticker with a piece of paper with an expert opinion attached to the item provides provenance. An NFT provides a way to harm the environment.
To you down-voters: this was a serious question. I have heard that NFTs are used to provide provenance for collectables and artwork. So based on cursory knowledge, this would seem to be a use case. What am I missing?
A little more education and a little less snark and vitriol, please.
I think it could, create an Association of X with some sort of DAO/governed organization that only allows you to mint NFTs if you are part of the Association. They do the vetting.
As for it "hurts the environment", that depends on your blockchain. PoS, nope. PoW/PoST, maybe but it depends.
Edit: Also for non-mom/pop shops NFTs are probably huge. Getting a provable NFT w/ your shoes for example will raise the level of difficulty for mass-producing knock offs substantially.
I'm afraid thats not how life works... *End the Star Seller Program*? Are serius?
Star seller means exceptional service. What you're advocating is to reduce the overall quality of the platforms so bad sellers can be perceived just as good sellers.
Whether or not you agree with the demands, it’s probably disingenuous to call this a strike.
It’s much closer to cartel conduct, and a flagrant antitrust/competition law violation.
While the “number of small labourers team up against large employer” narrative sounds superficially like the actions of a labour union, what this appears to be is actually a number of small businesses forming a cartel to influence the prices for their goods. Probably blatantly illegal in much of the developed world.
Collective bargaining is always a weird line between bad anticompetitive behavior, and well... good anticompetitive behavior. We needed a minimum wage, for example, because labor dynamics meant some other worker would generally bid lower than that. Labor competition drove wages too low.
While you're right in your categorization, you aren't necessarily right in calling it bad, because that category isn't always bad. Particularly because of the asymmetry between actors. In this case, that same asymmetry is there (like with uber's "contractors"). You might be right, but I think it's less blatant and more nuanced than you're giving it credit for.
You’re right, which is why I didn’t call it bad. I called it a cartel.
In fact I probably agree with their demands, but on its face this is a) not a strike and b) in need of authorisation or similar mechanism under completion law.
Though, many Etsy businesses are sole proprietorships or family businesses, in which case capital and labour are the same, and it's also a labour strike.
“Capital strike” tends to be used in situations where this kind of behaviour is spurred by an unfavourable government policy, and enacted by firms that have some form of market power (or political power).
These are small businesses with no market power agreeing to collectively price squeeze another player in an upstream/downstream market. Textbook cartel behaviour.
Capital strike is a strike by capital. There can be typical cases, but fundamentally that's what this is - though under platform capitalism, I think platform residents hold a much more precarious position than traditional capital because they answer to more than just the government and the market - the platform forms a second government for them.
A cartel is a group of businesses who collude to take market power as an oligopoly. That's not what this is, because these sellers are striking for platform changes, not consumer domination. You can keep saying it's cartel behaviour, but you're working with a different definition of cartel to the mainstream one. They're colluding yes, but they are not warping market forces the way a business cartel does (the typical example being the lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel).
They absolutely are warping market forces - that’s the whole point.
We can argue about whether or not this is good (by the sounds of it, probably?) but the entire purpose of them agreeing to restrict their output is to influence the cost of their inputs/outputs.
In the absence of market power, individual firms can’t do that!
I wouldn't describe it as market forces when the organisation they're opposing is a platform with monopoly power. Etsy has fiat power over anybody on their platform.
If we're talking about the generic concept of a cartel that encompasses basically all special interest groups, then yes they're a cartel - but they're not a business cartel in the same way that Phoebus group were. The power imbalance puts them in a position more comparable to a labour union.
Etsy sellers could become a cartel. And banding together to force some third player to only play with them, to the exclusion of others, is classic cartel behaviour
Not saying this is right or wrong, or if it even matches up with the case, but this is what I found on price fixing. Businesses are (from my training as an engineer) generally not allowed to coordinate any behavior related to pricing with a competitor.
Example: A group of competing optometrists agreed not to participate in a vision care network unless the network raised reimbursement rates for patients covered by its plan. The optometrists refused to treat patients covered by the network plan, and, eventually, the company raised reimbursement rates. The FTC said that the optometrists' agreement was illegal price fixing, and that its leaders had organized an effort to make sure other optometrists knew about and complied with the agreement.
I know you are getting downvoted and a lot of gaff, but I do think you propose an interesting question. I am not sure what is illegal and what is not, but I am confident I support the strike.
So, let's say you are right. Would that make it illegal for all Uber drivers or strippers to strike? They are independent contractors, not employees. It also seems to me that these laws are created specifically to protect the consumer. Without damages, where is the crime? Even the example of the optometrists includes some theoretical damage to the consumer as the prices of their insurance could go up or the consumers had less access to eye care.
In the case of Etsy sellers though, I can not see how this could hurt consumers. Sellers are striking to lower the price of fees, which should help consumers and only hurt Etsy. I don't know the law, but I do feel like the law should be written in a way that these government agencies only act to prevent non-competitive activities that could hurt consumers.
Why do you say that, just because things sold by Etsy merchants aren't sufficiently substitutable for each other?
I think Etsy sellers are certainly less in competition with each other than say, idk, oil sellers, but I do think there is some degree of substitution between the kinds of things sold on Etsy, and so to a degree they are competitors.
> etsy is not 'the market'
So? It's a significant part of the market. A cartel influencing just one seller doesn't necessarily make it not-a-cartel.
> sellers have not agreed anything to each other
Have they not? Isn't that the whole point of the strike? Communicating to other sellers "hey how about we all do this thing together? if only a few of us do it nothing will happen, but if all of us do it we can influence Etsy".
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If you replace the many small Etsy sellers with a smaller number of larger sellers, this starts to look very much like a cartel "bullying" a buyer. Like OPEC refusing to sell to the US unless they abide by certain policies, or something.
Like GP I don't think this is bad or anything, but it's interesting to note that cartels and strikes are kinda similar in shape, and it's more "sliding" properties (how many sellers? how big are they? how strong is the competition between them?) that differentiate them.
I think they are obviously very substitutable And surely many of them are selling elsewhere and consumers aren't being forced to pay more. there doesn't seem to be a conspiracy behind it, this is a very public petition , like boycotting russia . It would be quite a stretch if this falls anywhere near anticompetitive. What's next, banning uber drivers from boycotts?
They're not working to change the pricing of their goods but rather to force a service provider to change its pricing and behavior. They're not asking to restrict competition or to prevent each other from lowering prices. So not sure where you get cartel from.
>It’s much closer to cartel conduct, and a flagrant antitrust/competition law violation.
>While the “number of small labourers team up against large employer” narrative sounds superficially like the actions of a labour union, what this appears to be is actually a number of small businesses forming a cartel to influence the prices for their goods. Probably blatantly illegal in much of the developed world.
Aren't labor unions (especially closed shop ones) basically a cartel for labor?
A union is explicitly a labour cartel. But we as a society decided that giving workers more money and better conditions is good, and that they should be allowed to collectively bargain for them.
At the same time we for the most part decided that businesses best serve society when in the absence of market power, hence competition law enabling unions and outlawing cartels.
Of course you are allowed to change your output - but independently and in reaction to your own circumstances.
Collectively agreeing to simultaneously stop selling in order to force a change in the cost of your inputs is in most cases not legal.
The easy test is to ask yourself if it makes sense for an individual seller to reduce their output in the absence of any other changes. In this case, the answer is no. Only when they all collide to do it at the same time does it work.
one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks.
idk if this is just affecting the retro games / dice communities, or if others are also hit. ALSO you can kinda just sell semi-illegal "grey" goods on etsy? TONS of sellers just selling bootleg game boy games and rarely mentioning that in the product description.