While aspects like 3rd party manufactures is disturbing, I'm surprised by the notion that successful companies move beyond Etsy.
Etsy seems like a small business incubator. It provides, at a reasonable fee, a working environment conducive to growth. You have forums and other communication mechanism to train with others. You get the ability to have the e-commerce headache serviced. You get a known location that customers arrive at looking for their special things. At some point all of this infrastructure is limiting. You leave the small business incubator for a more custom environment.
I agree completely. I helped a store migrate from Etsy to a custom CMS because they had outgrown Etsy, and they did so in about a year. Etsy would do well to pivot their marketing from Handmade/Craft to Small Business Incubator. Or maybe they have and that's what all the butt hurt is about.
That is, in fact, Etsy's goal. But the DIY & handmade is a movement on its own with its own set of virtues, probably an heir to the Arts & Crafts movement as a reaction against mass production:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement#Social...
The question is how Etsy wants to position itself relative to Ebay.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being ebay! It's a fine way to find traders selling mass-produced items. But I was under the impression Etsy wasn't trying to compete with them directly.
Etsy could — however — as Kickstarter has done, particularly w/r/t to hardware products — limit itself to a more narrow and carefully regulated set of goods. Even as the crowdfunding world has grown, Kickstarter has maintained it's reputation and growth by sticking closely to a set of arts-oriented values. It leaves the drivel to platforms like IndieGoGo — and doesn't stray too far from it's creative core, by banning charitable projects.
I suppose you could say that that limits their growth — but it also keeps em' awesome.
I think that's the fundamental flaw with Etsy. By it's very nature, you earnings are time limited. So once you get well known enough and successful, suddenly Etsy does not look attractive any more.
Etsy's move into allowing designed items to be sold is a recognition that to cash out on Etsy you need to have other people make your products for you (as you are time limited) or attempt to price yourself high while trying to sell into a market where people are constantly undercutting each other.
So there is a natural progression to mass made designer items. The moment you begin thinking about higher pricing, you're on the path to selling at your local craft markets or in local boutique shops.
.. except that the entire sales pitch for "craft", "handmade", and "indie" relies on believing that the items are being made in a particular way, by non-alienated labour. Turning it into mass production is the opposite of what the original buyer's culture wants.
You are right but it's deeper than that. The entire philosophy is nonsensical. Notably Etsy didn't restrict their own scalability. It's not like each order was hand fulfilled or something. Etsy is very happy to utilise their capital to scale their business while they restricted their sellers from doing the same. It's funny that this article positions Etsy as selling out, where as what they had before was a manifestly unfair business model for their sellers.
No, sellers that refer to themselves as crafters are actually saying exactly the opposite. This business model that allows manufacturing is unfair to them because they can't compete, essentially. The same way crafters can't compete with manufacturing on any other marketplace. And they are disappointed because Etsy has originally promised to be different.
And their problem is not only price competition from chinese trinket sellers, but also visibility. Because manufacturers have many more products, small sellers don't show up in search results any more.
The point I'm trying to make is that the crafter philosophy, on which Etsy is built, is non-sensical. Etsy's old rules keep crafters poor, because they can't harness economies of scale. The new rules put new entrants at a disadvantage. At some point Etsy's policy what that you could outsource work if you worked in the same location (IIRC) which biases the market against third world artisans. Morocco, for instance, is full of people creating beautiful goods in small workshops. Under these rules they couldn't have a US representative sell their goods.
The only way I could interpret Etsy's rules was as an elaborate code for "people like us" -- affluent, middle class, first world residents.
I don't follow you. How is keeping things hand made and priced appropriately nonsensical? What economies of scale even exist when it comes to hand crafting?
Also, how is it anti third world artisan to require they make their own page and get the full first world price themselves?
> how is it anti third world artisan to require they make their own page and get the full first world price themselves?
I'm basing this on my experience in Morocco in 2004. I doubt the artisans I saw could afford Internet access, or would understand how to work a site like Etsy, or had sufficient written English skills to deal with first world customers. The mail system was notoriously prone to losing packages as well. If they could get a middle man they could access the market, but Etsy's rules forbade this.
Etsy didn't exist in 2004. The third world is much more connected now, on mobile phones.
You have the old rules more or less correct, but the spirit of them was exactly the opposite. The intention was for Etsy to serve as a (much lower cost) middleman for third world sellers. It is certainly true that Etsy hasn't lived up to its own aspirations here, as yet.
There is a backlash against the third world, but it comes from some segments of the existing US seller community. Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."
>Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."
Are they actually reselling, though? There's a big gap between dog whistle racism and legitimately not wanting people to sell things they didn't make. The current rules of the site are a separate matter.
There are of course people who just put up finished goods without modification, and "reseller" is a descriptive term in those cases. That activity violates the terms, so these people eventually get banned. In my experience this is a tiny sliver of the activity that gets described as "reselling."
In other cases people assemble items from raw materials (e.g. from Alibaba) in ways that may not strike you as particularly creative, but it's kosher when it comes to the site's rules. American sellers do the same thing and have been since the site's inception. Only the Chinese folks who do it wind up in critical news articles with the "reseller" label, though.
If you see sellers described that way and they don't get banned, they have most likely gone through a documentation process whereby they explain their work with dated photos and other materials. Etsy sellers are highly motivated to flag their competition when they think there's a term violation, and real resellers don't last long.
Another approach is to diversify: have a second product that is targetted at larger businesses, with a nice seamless transition from Etsy to this new platform.
Regretsy.com (which sadly doesn't exist anymore) was constantly pointing out crafts that were being sold as one-of-a-kinds and originals with a direct link to their alibaba.com source.
"How eBay alienated its sellers and lost its soul"
Was it true? Perhaps, and it has nothing to do with whether eBay was able to build an auction platform business that spits off two billion dollars per year in profit.
Etsy will be just fine, despite the scare headlines. There's nothing else quite like it, and no replacement for it of scale. They already won, and that's why they can afford to alienate people now.
Is there an Image comics to Etsy's Marvel/DC? Curious if there's a place that re-captures the soul of indie crafts? Or if the successful crafters simply open up their own store and etsy remains the primary place for people to become successful crafters.
I wonder if Pinterest could jump in here? I would imagine they have quite a similar audience demographic, and I'm sure people would quite like being able to buy nice stuff they see pinned.
I can't find too much fault with the author's complaints, being an etsy customer on occasion I have found it hard to wade through the flood of stuff to find the "perfect" trinket - after a while "perfect" and "make it stop, please" become hard to distinguish.
The author seems to wish Etsy would play gatekeeper, er, I mean, "curate" goods, assuming of course the author's goodies make the cut. That seems to go against Etsy's values - not to mention the zeitgeist of the Internet age.
But who knows? Maybe someone will come along and out-etsy etsy.
Seems like this happens to everything that starts small and then experiences exponential growth. This is the inevitable change to anything that gets significantly popular.
* Facebook started with colleges only, and lots of people lamented when they opened up signups for all
* Twitter used to be a close-knit community for tech people, and tons of people whined, saying all the new people joining Twitter were ruining it.
Pinterest could have a similar story too.
Once a website/app/tool gets large enough to be useful, brands move in with money and fundamentally change the platform.
Etsy is also alienating their customers. I bought an item that I never received. Etsy told me that's not their problem. They do not have a customer service number. The reason is simple: They have no customer service. They are not responsible or accountable for anything!!! You pay your money and take your chances - might be a real company/item... might be totally bogus! The arrogance of their attitude, and their unwillingness to vouch for the veracity of their sellers, will take them down over time!
The point about the search feature is extremely accurate; in my opinion it's one of the most fatal flaws in Etsy.
It works poorly, and users can tag an item in endless categories (often conflicting ones, like 'gemstone' and 'rhinestone'), and so frequently give items dozens of tags, that it makes the search irrelevant.
The categorization and organization forces you to "wade through pages of crap" to find anything relevant; that awful feature lost me as a buyer years ago -- agree 100% with the author there.
Etsy seems like a small business incubator. It provides, at a reasonable fee, a working environment conducive to growth. You have forums and other communication mechanism to train with others. You get the ability to have the e-commerce headache serviced. You get a known location that customers arrive at looking for their special things. At some point all of this infrastructure is limiting. You leave the small business incubator for a more custom environment.