Etsy promised shopping with a soul. Then the scammers came

16 points by Futurebot 2 years ago | 6 comments
  • ummz_ok_techbro 2 years ago
    Not mention the way they treat sellers - like highly interchangeable cogs in their marketplace profits wheel. Not much different these days to how Ebay and Amazon treat sellers or how Google treats their publishers.

    Etsy-specific Examples:

    While mandating 24 hour response rates to buyer inquiries for all sellers or else penalized, Etsy takes _weeks_ to reply to seller inquiries such as reporting a hacked account.

    Etsy routinely "permanently bans" seller accounts with no reason, no warning, no response to appeal and a stated SLA of 'about two weeks'

    Platform risk is alive and well on Etsy make no mistake. If it's perceived as good for Etsy everyone else is disposable.

    • boeingUH60 2 years ago
      Etsy promised shopping with a soul...then they held a public listing and had to bow to the Wall Street religion of endless growth, no surprise they tolerate scammers because it juices seller figures in the short term.
      • JohnFen 2 years ago
        I seriously can't think of a platform that went public and didn't become a shadow of what made it great afterwards.
      • wackycat 2 years ago
        I understand that people expect a lot from platforms that claim a lot like Etsy, but enforcing policy at scale is difficult. At some point, the consumer has some responsibility to be an intelligent consumer. I use Etsy a lot and it's not incredibly hard to figure out the dropshippers and stuff that is not handmade. Usually handmade shops will have a more curated inventory that is all related to a certain material, craft, or skillset. When a shop has a ton of different items, many generic and modern looking, and many different materials and skills needed to create them, the likelihood they are a legit handmade or vintage seller is less likely.
        • blargey 2 years ago
          > it's not incredibly hard to figure out

          When you’re a core user / minor subject expert, yes. But malicious actors wouldn’t be on the site in the first place if there weren’t a hundred naive consumers for every keen-eyed user like you doing Etsy’s most important job for them. Not sure how that’s supposed to be a defense for this sort of practice.

          “Scaling our value proposition is hard, so let’s just stop maintaining it and ride out the brand name we built at low scale and enjoy the bigger margin”. It’s the website / “tech” equivalent of physical-good brands letting their product quality deteriorate through rampant cost cutting.

        • Futurebot 2 years ago