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 “crochet” specifically, but mostly not. Even after filtering results as much as I could, there were 1000+ results, plus twice as many ads.
HAIL NAW ain’t nobody got time for that!!!
I exited and didn’t even buy my cart, I was so frustrated.
So…yeah… 