It is good to see the company admitting that it had joined the race to the bottom, though the cynic in me points out that they wouldn't be doing so if they were winning the race (Temu and other recent upstarts are doing rather well there).
Etsy loosened rules that limited generic sales in order to gain growth, and where the rules still have restrictions (i.e. the use of external delivery, including drop-shipping, are permitted as long as you designed the item), those restrictions are a mix of difficult to enforce (i.e. takes man-power to police) and easy to work around (drop-shipped product has a custom logo on the box, does that count if the logo is your design?).
I don't trust them at all. The good will has been exhausted by incompetent management. Someone spin up an employee owned competitor and do a seed round, I'm ready to invest. This is something the size of Let's Encrypt, Fastmail, or 37signals. Build the org, build the culture [1] [2], arrive at steady state, defend the culture and the org for longevity. Have makers (not sellers shoveling drop ship garbage, makers) be shareholders. Governance and aligned incentives.
The market is proven, and to chase valuation traps in volatile fits and starts does a disservice to all stakeholders.
has my OBJ files in their system and they will do the 3D-printing and send it to you. My team did the design, so it is a unique item. But my team does not handle the day-to-day printing and shipping, because that would be exhausting and then we wouldn't have time to make new designs anymore.
you can hire 3rd party companies to manage your logistics. if you design a thing and then have it massed produced, you don't want to have to deal with the inventory taking over your living space. Spouses tend to get very unhappy with that. So you have a company that receives the orders and ships for you and keep the SO happy. "What can brown do for you?" type of companies
I now officially have zero reason to shop there. I haven't for the past little while because it's mostly been dropshippers from Alibaba anyway.
Etsy had a niche, it was out-competing vintage shops, swap-meets, and markets. Now, in light of mismanagement and poor financials they decided to check notes directly compete with _the_ largest ecommerce website in the universe, and one of the largest tech companies.
I can't help but picture a board room of suits all high-fiving and cheering when an exec changes between a slide of Etsy's yearly profits to Amazon's yearly profits chanting "this is us. this is us."
> they decided to check notes directly compete with _the_ largest ecommerce website in the universe
I actually mis-read the headline that way too. They're doing the opposite - making sure they are only selling hand made items (again) and NOT competing with Amazon anymore.
Etsy is little better than an awkward dollar store, with occasional authentic items.
It reminds me of a museum gift shop on the decline. Full of cheap, mass produced junk that is vaguely related to the original premise with an authentic show piece in the window to remind shoppers of the theme.
So many companies have been ruined by the expectation that they must keep growing at all costs. I wish more shareholders could be happy with a company that reaches its optimal steady state without sacrificing the values that got them there, where money could be returned as dividends or buybacks.
An in-between category of products are 3d-printed items. Technically "hand-made" (in the sense that anything that you produce yourself is, even if machinery or technology is involved). Almost no one is using their own designs: they're finding models that have permissive enough licensing (many are Creative Commons Share Alike, which permits commercial production)
If Etsy was serious they’d just hire some people to just use the site and start banning drop shippers. Insane they allow T-shirt companies that do print on demand and absolutely flood it with AI designs.
They should crack down on people scraping thingiverse and printables and auto posting models.
Basically just use the site and take action. IMO it’s unusable right now. It’s temu with higher prices.
I don’t know if I’d consider that hand picked, but we’ll see.
As for your second point that would be almost impossible to enforce, and the line isn’t super clear. What if I generate an image and then make a depth map from that to 3D print? Or do a screen print on a shirt with it?
I wouldn't get my hopes up. Seems like the language of change with ways out of actually doing change. From the article: Each product has to fall into one of four categories: made by a seller (either by hand or using automated tools), designed by a seller, handpicked by a seller, or sourced by a seller.
Easy for something mass produced to be handpicked by a seller or sourced by a seller.
> Easy for something mass produced to be handpicked by a seller or sourced by a seller.
Being able to filter out those would be nice. I wonder what counts as made/designed though. If assembling something counts as "made" or slapping a logo on a white label product counts as "designed" then it's not much of an improvement.
A faithful interpretation of the rules to accomplish what the article says they want would be that handpicked means that the seller goes shopping at markets and chooses items to resell. Sourced means that they have an artisinal manufacturer they directly work with and they do the wholesale purchase/import and then sell on Etsy.
For example, I want some nearly unique leather shoes.
1. I find a shoemaker on Etsy who is selling their wares.
2. I find a shoe designer on Etsy
3. I find a shoe on Etsy whose seller has purchased vintage shoes from another store.
4. I find a shoe on Etsy that is from an importer who works with a shoemaker in Leon, Mexico.
Those are all what I would expect to find in an artisinal store. I could see how these could be abused to support Temu, but also how you could enforce them to remove listings that are abusive.
This could be useful if they allow search filtering. Sometimes I may want something artisanal, other times I may not care much about the artisanal qualities and curated is good enough.
Isn’t that because how we legally define success via public trading returns? It seems like privately owned businesses can avoid that ‘line must go up’ stupidity.
Readit News
Etsy loosened rules that limited generic sales in order to gain growth, and where the rules still have restrictions (i.e. the use of external delivery, including drop-shipping, are permitted as long as you designed the item), those restrictions are a mix of difficult to enforce (i.e. takes man-power to police) and easy to work around (drop-shipped product has a custom logo on the box, does that count if the logo is your design?).
The market is proven, and to chase valuation traps in volatile fits and starts does a disservice to all stakeholders.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899454
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40894595
Isn’t drop-shipping when a seller has the manufacturer ship an item to a buyer directly without designing it?
https://trajann.com/products/dolphin-pen-holder-planter-vase
then that's drop-shipping. In the background,
https://www.shop3d.io/
has my OBJ files in their system and they will do the 3D-printing and send it to you. My team did the design, so it is a unique item. But my team does not handle the day-to-day printing and shipping, because that would be exhausting and then we wouldn't have time to make new designs anymore.
It's so little effort that the platform has been entirely flooded with low quality garbage.
I now officially have zero reason to shop there. I haven't for the past little while because it's mostly been dropshippers from Alibaba anyway.
Etsy had a niche, it was out-competing vintage shops, swap-meets, and markets. Now, in light of mismanagement and poor financials they decided to check notes directly compete with _the_ largest ecommerce website in the universe, and one of the largest tech companies.
I can't help but picture a board room of suits all high-fiving and cheering when an exec changes between a slide of Etsy's yearly profits to Amazon's yearly profits chanting "this is us. this is us."
I actually mis-read the headline that way too. They're doing the opposite - making sure they are only selling hand made items (again) and NOT competing with Amazon anymore.
It's a misleading PR move pretending to move back to "hand-made" items with loopholes big enough to drive a planet through.
It reminds me of a museum gift shop on the decline. Full of cheap, mass produced junk that is vaguely related to the original premise with an authentic show piece in the window to remind shoppers of the theme.
They should crack down on people scraping thingiverse and printables and auto posting models.
Basically just use the site and take action. IMO it’s unusable right now. It’s temu with higher prices.
"Designed by a seller" includes "seller-prompted AI art", too. https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/1276491338090
As for your second point that would be almost impossible to enforce, and the line isn’t super clear. What if I generate an image and then make a depth map from that to 3D print? Or do a screen print on a shirt with it?
Easy for something mass produced to be handpicked by a seller or sourced by a seller.
Yes, those are categories that shouldn't be on a site that is what Etsy claims they want to be.
Being able to filter out those would be nice. I wonder what counts as made/designed though. If assembling something counts as "made" or slapping a logo on a white label product counts as "designed" then it's not much of an improvement.
For example, I want some nearly unique leather shoes.
1. I find a shoemaker on Etsy who is selling their wares. 2. I find a shoe designer on Etsy 3. I find a shoe on Etsy whose seller has purchased vintage shoes from another store. 4. I find a shoe on Etsy that is from an importer who works with a shoemaker in Leon, Mexico.
Those are all what I would expect to find in an artisinal store. I could see how these could be abused to support Temu, but also how you could enforce them to remove listings that are abusive.