I find it frustrating that Etsy, in order to keep showing increases (growth), they come up with a new seller fee for the quarter they need to have the boost.
I did not know that they recently started charging $15 to new sellers.
It will never end because they constantly need something new to keep up the growth facade.
P.S. Silverman is a schmuck.
That was a good piece - I saw it posted on Reddit the other day. Worth the watch.
This I think is a good thing - itâs to help fend off the TEMU and Alibaba resellers who pop up like whack-a-mole. Get shut down, immediately open a new shop. So itâs to curb that I think.
But yes. It is too far gone now to ever be what it was. I remember back in the days of front page galleries, the participation in the forums, the sense of community. It was pretty great. Sadly - the death knell was the second he allowed âlight manufacturing.â Because once that door opened, dropshippers and resellers took over. Alas.
Unfortunately there are so many of them now that itâs nearly impossible to find TRUE handmade pieces - and buyers are completely turned off by the experience.
Share price nearly $300 Nov. 2021. Now $60. No one has won in Etsy going public (sellers, buyers, or shareholders), except for Chinese junk factories. I do not see another path forward except for becoming another TEMU. I imagine buyers seeing their trendy âhandmade or uniqueâ commercials are going WTF when they get to the site.
I am going to do a âdumpâ of my unfiltered thoughts about Etsy.
Artists and craftspeople may one of the worst groups to have to rely on to populate a retail site.
They often do not have a lot of money to invest in selling their work.
Their thought processes are not those normally associated with business people.
Many of them are producing items which can be easily reproduced, are not protected by IP laws, and not always creative or novel.
There have never been any standards for Etsy sellers to meet. Entry has had few barriers.
For many years, a large number of Etsy sellers became part of groups, who traded among themselves. (I forget what they called these groups). It was hard to guess how much of what they sold was reciprical trade among Etsy sellers.
Etsy offered some of the worse tools for their sellers. The search was truly the worst on any shopping site. Many Etsy sellers spent many hours adding keywords to their listings in the hope of drawing some buyers. This compounded the poor search engineâs weakness.
Truly innovative artists and craftsmen avoided providing their most recent and best works on Etsy because their designs would be knocked off, by far east sellers or US sellers.
Some of these high quality artists used Etsy as a reminder that they were still in business but made their sales at shows and in galleries.
The vintage area was made up of sellers who were less knowledgeable about what they sold than Ebay sellers. They were there because the fees were lower. The buyers were less knowledgeable than Ebay buyers, bought lower priced products unless they were Ebay buyers snatching underpriced items to resell.
On the whole, the quality of merchandise was lower than Ebay.
Like all online marketplaces, the Asian sellers saw an opportunity. They could live with low margins. No significant equipment or skills were needed to duplicate other peopleâs products. Low postal rates made shipping costs more attractive than US shipping costs.
How many bracelets and necklaces which were strung beads could be absorbed by the US market?
How many Mason Jar mugs?
Why would any buyer trust the authenticity of gemstones and precious metal? They have learned not to trust more established sites.
My daughter is on the crafts show circuit. I stopped by a decent sized show she was in. The number of Etsy sellers trying to make a buck was evident. The same show had a different feel than it had in the past years.
One of the biggest problems is, handmade and quality do not mean the same thing.
Etsy lost itâs way so long ago most of you donât even remember Regretsy. It was a parody site highlighting both terrible craft (not so much skill, but like the tragic-crafting trend, and ânot-remotely-handmadeâ but soon enough came the summer of bubble necklaces, and they gave up.
Around 2012 I think it was, they featured a âshopâ making furnitureâŚwhich could also be found on Overstock and other places from the same seller. Big weekend front page Earth Day feature.
Whatever âwayâ Etsy had, it didnât lose. It made a choice, long ago.
I donât mind putting a few hurdles in place to vet sellers, but charging $15 for a TEMU reseller isnât going to stop many.
Iâm so insulted by some of the comments in this thread.
If they want to use money to filter out serious businesses from the rest, it needs to be more than $15. Thatâs like the cost of going to mcdonalds for a crappy burger nowadays.
I think the $15 is just such a weird flex point. With there being a .20 cent listing fee to list an item, any store that already plans on listing 500 items (for example AI POD, or whatever), is already planning on spending $100, what is another $15?
Knowing that these store are going to pop up and mass list, Iâm honestly not sure why they wouldnât go with a .10 cent listing fee increase instead? If itâs .30 to list an item, now 500 listings is $150âŚso an extra $150. Any legitimate business might â â â â â and moan about a .10 cent increase, but Iâm guessing for most people a .10 cent shouldnât really make or break a business. If your business is going kaput because of .10 cents then you have other issues.
Look at it like Disney theme park for example. They know they can keep raising the prices, because people will keep paying. Disney isnât for everyone. Disney knows this. They know tons of people canât afford their theme park, guess whatâŚbroke people are not their target demographic LOL.
Etsy can pivot, and raise rates to an astronomical rate, and if they âclean up the parkâ people will still pay it. It just depends on if Etsy wants to be seen as âupscale luxuryâ like disneyâŚor continue down the path of âdollar general mass producedâ. Handmade isnât profitable, and without all the imported goods, Etsy probably wouldnât even exist at this point. It sucks to hear, but realistically thatâs the issue. Etsy will continue to cater to whoever makes it moneyâŚwhich at this point is AI/POD and Imports.
Everyone had issues with Amazonâs âhandmadeâ having high feeâs as wellâŚbut I think in the very beginning when they still cared about the platformâŚit really did keep out a lot of non serious people. Once they eliminated the professional fee (Not that they ever charged it, but they kept extending when it would be imposed till it was eliminated), then all the non handmade stuff came in.
I had hopes for MakerplaceâŚbut it just seems to be moving so slow in implementing a functional shopping website. Theyâve been around for almost a year and are still lacking things like built in shipping labels and shop sections. I know Etsy had a slow start, but I expect more from an already established company starting a new venture. They seem to have an unlimited advertising budgetâŚbut that means nothing if people canât easily navigate a shop. For now they are US only, but that still doesnât stop someone in the US from importing goods from Alibaba/Temu. The fact that is free to list and recently they had a contest to try and encourage people to mass listâŚless of a hurdle for people to jump over.
I miss the only community aspects of EtsyâŚAlchemy, virtual labsâŚthe treasuries, chat roomsâŚrecently sold, recently listedâŚAll those were fun community based tools. 15 years later and Etsy just keeps showing me light switch covers on my home pageâŚyeah Iâm not buying light switch covers I am selling them. I miss the old front pages where I really could discover something new. Gift Mode might be coolâŚbut already seeing shop clumping and itâs been around for 3 months with no updates and so your still seeing the same items over and over and over again.
Makerplace really wants to âreplaceâ EtsyâŚbut they really donât seem to take much advice from the community of of knowledgeable sellers.
These were so much work, but I did enjoy the community. You really got to know the people in your treasury groups - it was nice.
The $15 isnât to weed out or whatever other âreasonâ that might be given.
It is simply the number that Etsy came up with in order to prop up their income.
Every single year they need a âbumpâ, they come up with some new income source (seller fee) in order to meet their âtargetâ.
I do not and have never sold on Etsy, but I do shop there, with a few specific shops run by people/small businesses that I know otherwise (and they just happen to have their shop on Etsy).
Today I added a few seasonal, physical items to my cart from a favorite shop (adding to my collection), and before checking out decided to search for a specific kind of crochet pattern (these are offered as digital downloads). I usually shop these from my favorites, but today I used search.
And boy, howdy, Etsy search was worse than Amazon search. If you can believe it.
On mobile, search results are presented in 2 columns, with 2 options per row. EVERY OTHER ROW was paid/sponsored and being shown to me I guess because I searched for literally anything? Sometimes maybe âcrochetâ specifically, but mostly not. Even after filtering results as much as I could, there were 1000+ results, plus twice as many ads.
HAIL NAW ainât nobody got time for that!!!
I exited and didnât even buy my cart, I was so frustrated.
SoâŚyeah⌠
I can definitely believe it.
And searching for handmade on Amazon is worse than searching for anything else. Etsy sellers brought their keyword spamming to Amazon.
Sometimes more than half the results on Amazon are sponsored. You do a google search and tons of sponsored ads come up first. Even instacart for groceries has sponsored ads paid for by Frito Lays and what not. Brands pay B&M stores for product placement and have been doing that since before ecommerce existed.
Better get used to it, the whole world is becoming one giant sponsored ad.
This was at least 50% ads (2 out of 4).
That is not consistent with my personal experience on Amazon (usually about 1 in 5, so 20%) or Google (usually 2 or 3 out of 10 or 15, so 15-30%)âeven less after I filter my results. 
I donât use Instacart.
I scrolled yesterday through mine (and my daughterâs) purchases to find something and I couldnât believe how many shops are now shut down - so theyâre definitely doing âsomething.â Mostly POD, but still.
Etsy needs another pandemic. I really feel like the only reason Etsy did well lately was because of the shutdowns.
My sales were non-existent before the pandemic (from 2015 until 2019), and are cooling now after the pandemic.
The economy also isnât great for a lot of people right now, which means people buy less stuff they donât need. The pandemic was the holy grail for this kind of shopping because people werenât spending money going out so they buy random stuff online.
Lots of people actually blame the pandemic for driving the thousands (millions?) of new Etsy POD and shops. Iâve read some statistics that are nutters about how many shops existed before vs. after.
That said, I did well before the pandemic, went nuts during 2020-2021, and now things are pretty bad. Iâm a photographer and itâs so hard to compete with download shops selling museum scrapes for $3 - and Etsy doesnât seem to have any interest in shutting them down.
My sales at Etsy were non-existant until mid/late 2019 which is when I believe they started off-site adsâŚI think there was a direct correlation.
But then 2020 and 2021 came along and saved my neck because my sales there skyrocketed while my sales at Amazon were the lowest everâŚEtsy really filled a gap there (to my astonishment).
