We only started selling on Etsy in February this year. I didn’t have high hopes for this place to begin with but after that update, I won’t invest much more into this site.
Just sad to see that every single platform Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, Faire has opened the floodgates to oversea low-cost sellers. It will ruin them in the long run.
Sadly, long-term sustainability doesn’t seem to carry as much weight, nowadaze, as it long did in corporate boardrooms, so I’m constrained to agree with your astute prediction, dire though it is.
Welcome to the SAS (“SellersAskSellers”) Forums - glad you found us!
The only weight that matters these days is did the company exceed projections for the quarter. Just meeting them is failure (even if it is a profit).
These platforms are very different in the reasons why they have overseas cheap crap.
Etsy like other art and artisan websites like Artfire, which closed in 2021 never had quality standards, never had enough traffic and never had a business model which allowed them to scale up without allowing mass market products.
The high tier of crafts people avoided placing their best work on these marketplaces because they would be copied. Etsy vintage did not have enough buyers or sellers to rival Ebay at any time.
Amazon, Walmart and other sites mirrored B&M retail. If you wanted volume, you offered enough low priced product. Being a publicly traded boutique was an oxymoron.
It will not in itself ruin these sites. A poorly implemented strategy is more likely to do that. And the desperate sellers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey who are drop shipping from in and out of the US may cause some severe consequences.
I give Andy Jassy real credit, he knows what it takes to run a cash cow, and is hell bent on keeping Amazon giving milk for a lot more years. That is sustainability.
I don’t by and large disagree with that premise, but you and I have both been around the block enough times to know that bubbles DO burst - often enough in Recorded Human History for the phenomenon to have been rather-convincingly documented by both primary sources & later observers’ essaying on such subjects, methinks - yet does not the underlying question of greatest import remain this?:
Is the short-term sustainability of a stock price - inflated by an illogical P/E ratio
or not - REALLY worth the price upon Humankind’s Society which such an embrace has historically imposed?
Of course bubbles burst. But that usually occurs to more than one company at a time.
Yes, Amazon could screw up and the stock price could dive. We have seen that happen to other companies which were pillars of American Industry.
But we are a long way from a selective burst of Amazon’s bubble.
Since I am always looking at the potential doom and gloom associated with the U.S. economy, this article speculating on the coming FED actions held my interest.
I am pretty sure I have expressed my belief that the stock market no longer functions as a market. This is another set of observations to support my gloomy outlook.
We have never had the representation of traders aka speculators in the market as we have today. Barring a major disaster, traders will trade. They will make the trades their algorithms tell them are the best trades on any given day,
Do we really believe those algorithms have any relationship to the performance of Amazon or any other company.
The FED balance sheet appears as reliable as the trading algorithms. A disaster requires a return to some sort of reality. Are you ready to believe there is a place for reality in today’s world?
I am not wishing for a disaster but if there is one, who are the likely people to be hurt?
Will it be the productive or the non-productive members of society? I will not go down the path of trying to identify the productive vs non-productive individuals, that is an epistemological matter in this time.
Odds are in favor of Amazon continuing to make money without a major change in this country, and where that change could come from is above my pay grade.
I’m very glad I found you guys as well! Your expertise is dearly missed over in the old forums. Plus as a non-native speaker I always enjoyed using your replies as my daily vocabulary challenge. 
Agree, we just got an email from Etsy tonight about cracking down (on us) as it relates to being sure things are handmade.
I doubt it. They do not have the teeth, and the certainly do not have the level of staff they need.
Welcome home, you are going to love it here!
ETA. P.S. God save us all if your vocabulary is coming from @Dogtamer even I have to go look up what he is talking about from time to time!