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tsk tsk Etsy - spamming your customers every time they spend 20 cents in order to get them to buy those ineffective "promotion" spots you call showcases.
Even your cupcakes are outraged.
Losing some money on renewal fees? Tired of hearing about favoritism and lack of promotion? Well, pushing your showcases isn't going to solve those problems.
For most users, showcases are useless for driving traffic and not worth the $7-15. For almost all users the spammy popup every time they do anything with their listings is a pain in the ass. If you do it once for informational purposes it would be less devious, but this is just blatant desperation and inconsideration.
Once again you're not thinking about what your customers need or what you can do to make them happy (this is the secret to keeping customers and is taught in Business 101).
Get a fucking clue and stop spamming us!
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Etsy Spams for Showcases
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22 Comments:
Oh yeah. this is completely outrageous. I seriously can't stand that they are doing this.
Totally ridiculous!! Shame on you Etsy for the SPAM!!!
Shitty shopping cart and now tons of spam while you edit, list and renew.
They took the time to add this piece of crap and sellers still can't offer more than one shipping option.
Etsy=Fail
They have clearly jumped the shark.
Etsy has jumped the shark so many times that SeaWorld should just consider it their Brooklyn location.
Hmmm... I'm new to Etsy ("found" it in late 2008, joined as a seller this year), but I've been doing lots of Ebay over the years.
Ebay has promos like this on EVERY SINGLE option (buy-it-now, gallery pix, more than one category, multiple countries, blah-blah-blah).
Hell, show promoters do this on every single form and app, too (want a corner? that'll be extra. want electricity? extra. want a booth that's not behind the port-a-potties? yeah, that's extra too).
And none of those options guarantee success -- they're just a few things that have worked for people in the past, usually by giving more visibility to the buying public.
Really, this seems like Etsy's version of "want fries with that?"
Yes, the shipping lack-of-options is a bit of a pain. (Ebay still can't get their automatic checkout feature to work properly when combining shipping charges, and it's been a friggin' decade.)
As someone who lives in a miniscule town in the middle of nowhere, at least 3 hours from "lucrative" shows, I'm just glad that Etsy exists (and Ebay, too, even though I would have to qualify as a card-carrying EbayBitch these days!)
Oh well, there are no easy answers. (Although I did see a cartoony fox on TV somewhere tell me I could sell 5 grand a week in my pajamas, never leave the house, heck, it's all done while I sleep. Maybe we should all check that out. ha. ha. ha.)
Well, I guess I'm just bitching to hear myself bitch here. I'd rather do it here among the jaded, cynical individuals here than vent in the Storque. There are some real fluffmuffins out there and, truly, they frighten me a little bit.
Although when it comes to customers I'm so frickin' perky you'd think I drank the kool aid.
They'd make more money if instead of asking if you want to buy a showcase, they ask if you want to schedule an automatic renewal every day for the next month. It's the same $7. Look for this new option once the admins have read this post.
Ah, it's just another round of buckshot in Etsy's collective feet. Badger and harass sellers to buy an expensive and elusive showcase spot THAT DOESN'T EXIST!!!
In any other ecommerce site, this would be a public relations disaster and their sellers would be going bazonkers. You want us to buy $7 spots that might be available 3 weeks from now? Or that don't even exist? Huh?
Etsy goes its way (blissfully unaware that non-fave sellers even exist until the monthly bill is due) and sellers go elsewhere, and the whole mess boils down to reality; Etsy is glad to see sellers go. They never got "that seller thing" to begin with. What the hell, 100 sellers leave, 3,500 new sellers set up next week. Who cares?
The showcases bring in big cash for Etsy every day without any of that cash being diverted to something like........hmmmmmm, customer support!
It galls me that we are not allowed on Etsy to even thank people that Heart us, or let them know about our sales. But that Etsy gets to do this to us on a regular basis. It sucks.
I am using my relist/showcase money to buy ads for my Etsy shop. *Ten Second victoy dance for sales.*
It really wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't a pop up. If it was just another thing that could be checked off or added on like eBay, it would be a lot more user friendly.
If there were ever showcases available, this might make sense.
it would just be an ebayish upsell "want fries with that" and thus annoying as hell, but understandable.
However, with the extremely limited availability of showcase spots, it's not even a good upsell. It's total fail on every level!
I think what makes me madder than them trying to sell me a product is just how unbearably misguided this is - they can't seem to figure out how to make money at all!
FYI
check your bank statement.
I have 2 pending charges from Etsy. One I didn't authorize.
Selling an item that's not for sale - (a spot in a showcase that's never available) - is against Etsy's TOUs, isn't it?
That listing should be cancelled.
When I type http://etsybitch.com/
I don't get your blog anymore. Did you let your domain name expire?
It's pretty amateurish.
Once more, they take an idea from eBay or Flickr, and implement it in a confused, poorly thought out fashion that is really annoying.
They should have added a check box to stage three of the listing, if anything.
The onsite promotion has never been well integrated to the site... I mean FUCK, the idiots that used to run the site denied for a long time that renewing was buying advertising, even though OBVIOUSLY it was and everyone used it as such. I'll never forgive that slimy Revolving Dick for how he acted on the forums, telling people that the renewals they purchased while the categories were broken would not be refunded because people 'got their four months' and a refund for 'the 1.5 days' would amount to a 'rounding error'. No, smarmy little boy, people with items expiring in 2010 were not buying another four months, they obviously intended ot buy advertising, and it was not delivered due to your incompetence.
Okay, so anyway... yeah, um, I think it's okay for Etsy to sell their advertising but they should integrate it in a more thoughtful way.
curious, we didn't have the domain name (I don't think). You must've had it in the memory of your browser to grab the blog when you typed that in
Did etsyhacks come up with something to block this lovely feature yet?
huh, it's true, etsybitch.com did used to redirect here, now it's a godaddy 'parked' page.
I find it incredibly annoying. The anti-spam police are spamming us. that's rich.
Here's what my interpretation of the SPAM is. Dear Etsy Seller, We would love for you to spend your money on a useless showcase. That way, we can continue to promote our favorite sellers for free. We love promoting the same sellers in gift guides, as well as in daily slots on the front page. But, hey, go ahead and spend $7-$15 on a false dream. Yes, the showcases are soooooo much more valuable than the free promotion we give to our favs. Since your art sucks, you have to pay for promotion on portions of the site where customers never visit. congrats to you!
ugh. this just makes me so sick.
I remember when I discovered Etsy. Everybody was really mad at Ebay and many people were boycoting. They hated Ebay and now Etsy is doing many things just like them.
Older users won't be fall in the trap, but the new ones, poor them!
I have never been in a showcase, but everybody says, it is useless. I believe it, I never go to the showcases.
For the questions regarding the domain name - we never owned it, someone else did and had it forwarding until recently. It wasn't under our control so we don't know why it changed.
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