Is the Etsy.com Site Page Broken?

This is a difficult hub for me to write. I've had a shop on Etsy since 2007, 2 years after Etsy opened on-line in 2005 to sell crafter's and artist items for a reasonable price set by the person actually making the items. When Etsy opened the site the T&Cs were all about getting the items in the shops out to the public to promote sales. When an item was listed, the seller paid a 0.20 listing fee to Etsy. Anytime a sale was made, the seller and Etsy both got a profit out of it since Etsy took a small percentage of the sale amount as commission. There was no actual advertising, Etsy depended upon their sellers and buyers and the Search Engines to promote their site to new buyers.

I totally joined in and started telling everyone I knew about this wonderful site I found. Since I knew a lot of craftspeople and artists, I wanted to share with them this great site where they could display their wares for not a lot of money and expand their client base. I set up a shop on Etsy and purchased items that I found there that I'd never see anywhere else. I'd set the Etsy home page so the whatever I was working on the new items listed on Etsy would be on the bottom portion of my page and I could watch the items just scroll by until something caught my eye. Yes, there were issues with the site but nothing is perfect and the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages.

One of the disadvantages - favoritism is rampant at this site. The front page features a group of items to promote them and various newsletters that you can opt to have delivered to you via e-mail. If you're on Etsy for any length of time you'll start to notice that the same sellers get featured again and again. This is nothing new to Etsy, this has been going on since I joined 4 years ago. If the crew that work at the Etsy offices decide they like you, you get promoted and petted and if they can't see the value of your work, you'll never see the front page. Typical practices, no matter what business you're in, that's why people network and get in good with people that can be useful to them in the future. Since I live in the Midwest and Etsy is based in Brooklyn, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to network myself into a better position, even with Forum activity. OK, no prob, I can still make sales with my shop and discuss things on the Forums.

The Forums are one of the places where controversy rages, as with most sites. But there's good information there also and a lot of fun. One of the continuing discussions is that Etsy doesn't do a very good job of policing their own pages. Recently they (and Glamour) magazine got caught by a mass produced wedding gown from China. The gown was listed on Etsy as being handmade by a young female crafter and Glamour magazine picked it as an entry in an article on 'Would you wear this wedding dress?' It didn't take long for someone to point out that the so-called 'hand crafted' wedding gown was displayed on a China distribution site for the same money that it was being sold on Etsy for. This is not an unusual occurrence. And even when other users 'flag' a shop or individual items as questionable, no action taken until the noise reaches the media level. A shop recently featured 'rape' greeting cards of totally questionable taste, even with Etsy users flagging the shop and items and a major furor in the Forums, the shop was not removed until the story was picked up by CNN. Then action was finally taken and the cards removed.

But even in the Forums, you had to be careful. And that meant more than the ordinary courtesy and appropriate rules of Net etiquette. if you made too big of a noise on Etsy, letting them know that their favoritism and hypocrisy had been noticed, you were 'gagged'. You weren't allowed to make entries to the Forums, although you can still sell items because that's what they wanted was their cut of the money you made. If you got really noisy, then they'd block your shop and discard your profile. The EtsyBitch blog actually has an avatar that users can download to their sites to brag about the fact that they've been 'gagged' by Etsy.

So now, it's 6 years after they started and Etsy has achieved brand recognition and with that recognition has come attitude changes about what their focus is. I put listings on Etsy in order to sell items, I expect Etsy to support me in that effort. In the past year Etsy has;

1. Removed the item description from the search function. This is the largest area for the seller to put in keywords that will pull new buyers in from Search Engines to their shop. Now sellers have a 10 word area to attach tags and the item title to put descriptors in to pull in buyers.

2. Removed the Advanced Search function from the home page, when a buyer tries to narrow down a search they have to enter the basic search and then enter -descriptor to try and remove some of the (sometimes) thousands of items that are pulled up.

3. Started promoting 'Circles', ostensibly for sellers to gather their friends and cliques of buyers that will return to their shop for repeat sales. (I don't know about other sellers but most of my sales are to new buyers. My repeat sales are less than 5% of my total sales.) What they call social selling actually looks like a poor man's Facebook.
   

4. Changed the feedback code in October, 2010 that not only allowed previous purchases to be seen by Search Engines but allowed both buyer's and seller's personal information to be seen by anyone that wanted to look. The users had to Opt Out of this being allowed. Even after complaints by users and articles on the Net focused on this, it was only after media attention was focused on the issue that they acknowledged that it had happened and they would change the policy, this finally occurred in March, 2011.

5. Have Not Ever announced any of these changes to the buyers or sellers on their site. If you want to wade through the Forums and newsletters on the site you might find the information but the wording they've started using for disguising these changes makes it very confusing to understand.

If you have an Etsy account, buyer or seller, I highly recommend you going into Your Account --> Settings --> Privacy. This page is where you make the necessary changes to protect your personal information. Browse through all the tabs on the Settings to ensure there aren't any other hidden 'gotchas' from Etsy waiting for you. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Save button to keep the changes you make. I have noticed that when Etsy makes a change to their policies, the settings that I have made changes can revert to Etsy's default settings.

It would be heartbreaking if the changes that Etsy's management decided on actually caused them to slip from their record breaking billion views in January, 2011 to losing both shops and buyers due to dissatisfaction and distrust with the policy changes that have been made. In January, 2011 AuctionBytes, The Independent Trade Publication for Online Merchants, polled 2600 online sellers about 16 sales sites asking them to rate the sites on Profitability, Customer Service, Communication, Ease of Use and Whether the Seller would Recommend the site. Etsy came in # 10 out of 16.

So with all this, why continue to have a shop on Etsy if I'm dissatisfied with their policies? The answer used to be economics, pure and simple, but with the changes of the past year my sales have fallen off so much that it's not making sense to continue to list items. Just as with eBay I'm doing this to make money for myself, not to pay money out with no return on my investment. I left eBay when their fee schedule went through the roof making it impossible to list a single item and make any money by doing so. Before leaving Etsy, I'm experimenting by changing the wording on the titles of the items I've listed to try to catch the Search Engines attention again. If sales don't pick up then I'll have to decide whether to try something else or close up this shop and move on to another sales site. My initial agreement with Etsy was that I would post items on their site and both of us would help to promote those items for sale so we could both get a portion of the money from the sale. With the decisions that management is making that affect the Search Engine Optimization for their site, Etsy is no longer fulfilling their side of that agreement.