Tickle us pink, we were right

Remember how we were afraid that Etsy was "branding" the wrong image - remember how we always call them hipsters and people laugh. Remember the shit some of you gave us for it.* Well, guess what?! We were right!

Last week, New York Magazine did a shop local feature with their fave items from Etsy, which, in the writer's own words, is about what exactly?

When Etsy, the Brooklyn-based online marketplace for all things handcrafted, launched in 2005, it sounded like another small-time, doomed-for-failure venture trying to capitalize on homespun hipsterism. Why not just sell and buy stuff on eBay, like the rest of the world? And who wants to buy other people’s crocheted pot holders, anyway? Hah. By 2008, Etsy’s sales had reached $87.5 million. And to its 2.1 million registered users, Etsy is much more than a virtual warehouse. Etsians, as regular buyers and sellers call themselves, want to live in a handmade world, from the clothes they wear to the forest-life stencils on their walls.

The Etsy lifestyle has a recognizable aesthetic, which looks remarkably like that of skinny-jeans-wearing, Slow Food–eating, bike-commuting hipsters. The site has pushed this aesthetic global; its vendors represent 150 countries.

Wow...way to ignore the majority of sellers who don't fit that aesthetic! What about all the metalsmiths and artists with years of experience and/or training? What about the potters who actually know how to make stoneware? What about the non-hipsters (which is just about everyone but admin)? Now granted, other NY hipsters like NY hipster ware - so NY mag was appealing to its own demographic. But this Etsy brand is out there - it's public knowledge - it's in stone.

This branding should piss off everyone who sells at Etsy because this makes Etsy it's own brand, attempting to attract only a certain type of buyer - they don't know who their sellers' audience or clients are. All they know is what they like - it's a fucking juried site! Only those they promote are going to benefit from being on Etsy.

My advice, and do take this as you will, but I would jump ship faster than rats when they set a cat loose. If you're going to be bringing in all your buyers anyway, might as well do it somewhere cheaper - say a free shop like ecrater or blujay, or on a handmade site like Artfire where a free shop is possible - or an outright juried site like 1000markets - there are lots of alternatives that haven't yet branded themselves into a corner!

When we told Etsy to advertise, it was to use their trademarked tagline (which is misused in the NYMag article btw) not to brand themselves. As a venue, their brand should be broad - instead they narrowed it down to themselves and their taste, 20-something delusion with a whiff of arrogance.


*Many of our regular readers did get it, but there were some doubters, some cupcakes, and some denialists - so to them: how's Etsy been with the vaseline? cause you have been taking it whether you realized it or not

From the Bitches Auxiliary: Quit Your Day Job for Welfare

Just want to put in my $.02 about this Quit feature. I wish it were gone-- it's so depressing and misleading. The Quitter now is a woman who has sold 818 pieces-- and they are nice, by the way-- but by my estimated calculations, if her average sale price is $50, she has sold a little over $40,000 worth since Sept. 2007. That is gross, not net. How can someone quit their day job for a job that pays them much less than $20 grand a year and has zero benefits? People who take these profiles seriously will be setting their course for the poor house, and retarding them from truly being independant. She would qualify for social services with that income.

This comment was not composed carefully enough for publication, but it needs to be said again and again. Poor, simple, naive little girls should NOT be propagandized into buying the idea that they can support themselves this way. It's disingenuous for them to believe it, but so many young and inexperienced girls will believe it-- just at the time when they should be out making the decisions that will make them successful and able to pay their own bills. Cinderella much?

Well Aux member, we feel that your final comment was composed perfectly for publication. The sooner that young and/or naive Etsy sellers understand that the entire "Quit Your Day Job" series is a load of hot steaming horseshit, the better. Get real with your dreams people.

Taking care of business

Just a heads up, we have a couple spots open for ads in the side bar on the left. If interested drop us a line. We're cheap as well as bitchy.

Second, we now have a RSS feed for just EtsyBitch comments. You can sub via rss, or by handy email and let the snark come to you! You can find that section under those fabulous ads!

"Look Honey - A Back-to-School Promotion!!"

Quicker than you can say "Oh shit, we forgot!" those fab Etsy Admins have slapped together a "promotion" for the Back-to-School and Off-to-College Etsy buyers.

Did they make an announcement in the Forums? Yeah on page six of this thread. Send out an email announcement? Um, that would be like spam. Buy ad space in Bust magazine? Hellz NO! That would cost money!

So the fine folks at Etsy put up a Storque article announcing a Back-to-School showcase that goes on sale, tomorrow. But don't bother buying, unless you're selling clothing. Apparently, that's the only category worth promoting.

Truth in Advertising (or lack of it)

In an article on Friday by Tech Confidential, Etsy Chief Cupcake Officer Rob Kalin reports:


"There are 200,000 sellers making their livings from Etsy,"


ORLY? Let's check some facts. If you go to the Sellers page on Etsy and have a look at the list of seller accounts, you'll see there are 10,408 pages. At 20 accounts per page, that's 208,160 sellers. But oh, just wait a second... if you sort the sellers by number of listings, you'll find that the number of shops with at least one item for sale in them ends at page 4,551, meaning there are actually only 91,020 people selling things on Etsy, at the time of this writing. [edit: at the time of publication, these numbers are already inaccurate]

Huh. Wow. So Chief Cupcake is off by a mere 117,140 sellers. Maybe it's a misquote? Possibly, but given Etsy's propensity for inflating numbers and Rob's history of bluffing his way into jobs, we doubt it. He either didn't bother to check the numbers on his own site, or he didn't bother to tell the truth. You pick!

Let's examine the second half of that sentence. "Making their living from Etsy". Now apparently, in this thread, some people are defining "making a living" as buying some groceries and putting gas in their car. We here at EB tend to think of the phrase in the more old-fashioned way, as in, earning an income, not pocket money. How many sellers on Etsy are actually making their income from Etsy? We're not sure exactly how many, but we're pretty fucking sure it ain't 200,000. Seller Abitabite does a little math in the thread and points out that since in June the value of sold items on Etsy was $6.5 million, 200,000 sellers means that $32.50 was earned in that month per seller. Is $32.50 a month a liveable wage? You decide!

This is hardly the first time Etsy spins some incorrect numbers for PR fluff. Remember the big announcement they made about reaching ONE MILLION members? Except it wasn't one million members, it was one million registrations. Thanks to numerous people pointing out that little error they used the correct word in the Storque article three days later. Oh, and don't mind that little afterthought tacked on down at the bottom of the article in italics, the part about not accounting for users who have multiple accounts and the "one million" including accounts that have been closed.

Etsy isn't even above using sellers' private income as fodder for the PR machine. Several people in the thread recalled Etsy telling Martha Stewart that Emily Martin of TheBlackApple, one of Etsy's top handmade sellers, makes six figures, which Martha announced during her segment with Emily. According to Emily's blog, that figure is not an accurate reflection of her business, and was revealed against her wishes. For shame, Etsy. We thought you were all about respecting each other.

Etsy, could you just get fucking real, for a minute? You have half the sellers you say you do. Almost none of those sellers make a living just from Etsy. And those who do don't make six figures. Of course, we don't expect you to share any numbers that would be real eye-openers, like how many accounts have been closed, how many shops have been opened and never used, how many buyers have signed up and never bought anything. But enough with pimping a dream that doesn't exist. Figure out what's good and true about yourself, and sell that instead. Once upon a time you said you favoured transparency. The waters are looking pretty murky now.

We welcome our new Handmade Overlords

Today MaryMary posted an announcement in the Etsy forums, with an accompanying Storque article, describing some new staff and new roles at Etsy Inc. Along with it came a personal message from Rob Kalin.

I am grumpy to announce that, against my will, Maria has replaced me as Etsy’s CEO. She is now my boss. My new title at Etsy is Chief Cupcake Officer (CCO), a nice meaningless moniker that will allow me to focus on what I'm best at: lying about my experience, stalking private blogs, and reading children's books.

I will also be spending time developing Etsy.org, a money-losing organization that will focus on failed hammock videos, dressing up in silly costumes, eating cupcakes, and giving jobs to my unemployable friends. (More vague details about this are coming soon. Right now, I'm still licking my wounds from getting canned.)

I’ve been filling many roles since Etsy began, all of them new to me. That's because I have no actual experience in anything useful. It’s been an embarassing and exhausting education, much of it public. Watching Maria, with her experience and expertise and sanity, has made me realize what a failure I really am. I’m excited to get back to what I enjoy most, (living in my fantasy world) and maybe even check Etsybitch less than fifteen times a day for the first time in a long time.

Ok, he didn't really write that - thanks Bitches Auxiliary! By the way, it's amazing how many people saw "CCO" and thought "Chief Cupcake Officer". Grumpy minds think alike.

To be serious for a moment, we here at Etsy Bitch are hopeful that Maria's leadership and Chad's technical expertise will usher in a new era of professionalism and progress for Etsy. Hopeful that amateurish tutorials for shoddy workmanship will be banished to the Rainbow Land of Etsy.org. Hopeful that practical, useful tools that will help members market and move their wares will finally take priority. Hopeful that obnoxious, discourteous staff members will be duct-taped and locked in the janitor's closet in favour of pleasant, knowledgeable communicators. Hopeful that resellers and mass-producers will receive the swift kick to the ass they deserve, and that Etsy returns its mission statement and original principles that have been so subverted and abused of late.

Good-bye Rob. Hello Maria and Chad.

Blast-fax kudos, all around!

Far be it from us bitches to refrain from giving credit where credit is due. Etsy has announced a useful (gasp) new feature - related items showing up in sold listings! (Don't panic if you can't see them- they don't show up in your own shop when you're logged in, but you can see them in someone else's shop.) More information can be found on Marymary's announcement thread.

While the feature probably won't be any use to people already browsing through Etsy, since most shoppers would not sift through already sold items before looking through a shop, it will really help sellers who have items linked to by blogs and outside websites, or buyers who are looking through the "just sold" Time Machine or Pounce. This way there's an eye-catching, easy way to click through to the shop from the sold item screen.

Of course, there are lots of things that could make this feature even better. Here are a few quotes from the thread with great explanations and suggestions:

Ivydee says:
I think its less for those who are coming into your store through the "front door" than it is for those who may have linked directly to a sold item through either a blog, favorites page or google search.

It would seem to be more useful if it linked to items within the same category, though. So if someone ended up on a page with a pair of your earrings, it would show them other earrings from your shop.

eclipse says:
I really like this.
The best part is that if a sold item is relisted and has the identical title, it's the item shown. That is much smarter than just showing the 3 featured items for example.

I go through my favorites periodically to clean out sold items and this way it really helps me find the relisted identical item quickly! (I used to have to search the shop)

Is there any way to get a similar thing for expired items?

glittercritter says:
System pulls from tag matches after the title match.
* System pulls from same shop section sold item was listed in (love this one).
* Move "this item sold on..." text below the three active items.


Please add

*suggest items on shopping cart page

*suggest items that have sold out in our favorites

As nice as this update is, it does come fairly hard on the heels of Rob and Maria's little chat where they floated the idea of a "see similar items" widget that would NOT pull exclusively from a seller's shop. It does make one a bit suspicious that they were planning this all along and then changed the plan midstream when they realized that doing so would turn even Team Cupcake against them.

From the Bitches Auxiliary: The numbers

Etsy gave us some stats today - something we've been asking for for months, and months. This Auxiliary member punched some numbers, in the face.

"Here are the rest of June’s key numbers:
"$6.5 million of goods sold - roughly the same as May. That represented 442,000 items sold, a slight drop from May’s number. 742,000 new items were listed, up from 730,000 items last month. 80,000 new members joined the Etsy community, including 15,000 new sellers, both slight increases from last month."

Here's what I can figure:

1. Page views is internet-ese for just what they are, page views. The total does not break out what views are being counted in the ecommerce realm, and how many views are being tallied for Labs, newsletter articles, tools and toys, forum visits and all the other non-store sections of the site. And how many of the page views are sellers checking in on their stores to add, delete, edit, etc. their inventory.
   
   
2. The drop in (or stagnant) sales totals from June compared to May is the first sign that things aren't so rosy for Etsy, the money collector.
   
   
3. Do remember that they added 15,000 stores, BUT SALES were stagnant, or in reality, dropped. 4. 742,000 items listed means what? 742,000 new items or 742,000
   
   
4. RELISTED items? And it's only 12,000 MORE than May, which means a huge chunk of the listings are from 15,000 NEW STORES.
   
   
5. Numbers can be deceiving, and why Etsy has chosen to "share" these numbers is also deceiving. They might mean something on the macro level, but what do these stats mean to sellers? Not a goddamn thing. Other than, retail isn't doing so good in the current economy, and Etsy is doing nothing at all to help sellers sell with new promotions, sections for special sales and bargains, something other than Etsy Finds to entice buyers to look, and ignoring constant requests for the company to run an advertising campaign. If, next month, Etsy decides to share stats again, what will they show?

From the Bitches Auxiliary

It occurred to me today after reading the latest Etsy Finds or some other promotional piece that Etsy is absolutely a juried site.

- To be successful here you have to be promoted from within and by Etsy.

- To be promoted here you have to be juried in, i.e.be a friend of or a relative of or in some kind of relationship with admin OR you have to be a cheerleader and in no way controversial or negative OR you have to be bringing in a lot of revenue for Etsy (eg. resellers and other shops which have been flagged repeatedly and somehow are still there).

-Then you are featured as a seller on the front page, in Etsy Finds, in the Gift Guides, in media releases ... and so on, thus successful and you can give up your day job.

Whoever says Etsy does not jury is deluded IMO or maybe they just call it by its proper name - favouritism. Not only that, Etsy has refined this jury technique to the point where, just like everything else Etsy does, they eventually reveal their real intentions.

From the Bitches Auxiliary

Forum Quote:

"Hey! Wouldn't it be nice if everyone who blogs would put a notice up in their blogs about these job openings? Then we could ALL help ourselves by helping etsy!!"

Bitches Auxiliary Response:

If this isn't objectionable, then I need Prozac

Am I just too bitter to get it? Seriously? I'm not putting an ad on my blog for their open job positions unless they PAY for that ad. I sure as heck won't be recommending people apply for positions there. And for pete's sake, why is this our job?

Oh wait, I know---now that my vintage store has screeched to a stop, I have time on my hands to PR and HR. Nevermind, clearly I should be happy for my new focus in life. Heh.

Please, tell me this is sarcasm and I'm too dense to get it!

Quotable Quotes: Vegas Baby!

Feel like gambling?

"If I was a seller on this site I am afraid I would feel like I was on
a slot machine, pumping in my 20 cents and hoping for the jackpot."

Quotable Quotes: What Kind of Site is Etsy?

Food for thought:

""I think people are despairing a bit because you get a very distinct feeling that Etsy doesn't need any of us, and it shows, and as the big sellers migrate elsewhere, Etsy might find itself with a lot of sellers but very little buyers, and there goes the revenue from sales."

This bears repeating. I hope the Etsy admins - and the new COO in particular - is paying attention to comments such as these.

And it wouldn't hurt for them to note why you, and others, are looking to go solo. You just listed some of the most fundamental selling tools that Etsy, after three years as a 'selling venue' still. does. not. provide.

If Etsy truly wants to be competitive, as well as live up to their mission mantra, they need to start listening to, and acting on, the feedback from their clients."

Don't talk business strategy, you might hurt someone's feeeeeeeelings

The big flat foot of Etsy admin stomped hard on a thread in business the other day, stifling a perfectly valid discussion about streamlining your supplies purchases.

stellaloella says:
Please be considerate of your fellow community members when posting ideas like this in the Forums. What may be beneficial to some could have a negative impact on others. It's important to balance these ideas to make sure that no one (or no group) is sidelined in the process.

What she really means is that if you whine, cry and snivel enough that your feelings are hurt by other people thinking of their bottom line, you can get a legitimate talk about business strategy shut down.

Grow the fuck up. Business is business and it ain't for the thin-skinned. No matter what delusions Etsy harbours about making things "beneficial" for all sides, people are going to do what's best for their own business. They're going to trim excess spending where they see it, and if that terrifies you so much you feel you have squash a discussion other folks are rightfully entitled to have, then maybe you'd better re-evaluate if you're cut out to run a business.

Shame on you, Etsy, for supporting that childish mentality. You made a Business board for people to talk about Business topics. Not all aspects of business are fuzzy-wuzzy kittens drooling rainbows. Stop serving the self-interests of one group by shutting down relevant and meaningful strategy talk. You actually might learn a thing or two yourself.