Rob White on Etsy’s Unique Brand of Forum/Seller Discipline

Rob White (RW) has spoken! With 5 consecutive long-winded announcements.

RW follows with cherry-picked “answers to seller questions” to further justify Etsy's wacky practice of locking, banning, muting and other actions Etsy takes against sellers and admits in the same breath that Admins throw the “rules” out the window to apply their own personal judgement:

RW: Context will always play a significant part in what a member posts and how we and other community members will view it. Sometimes we don't see eye to eye with the person posting, sure. But by the time we've reviewed a thread and have elected to take action beyond posting in or closing a thread, a lot of eyes have looked over that scenario.

As I implied previously, this doesn't mean we're mistake-free, and in a few occasions in which members have written in to discuss the matter with us, we've reviewed the incident again, felt that we were mistaken the first time out and rescinded the action.

Admins DON’T SEE EYE TO EYE WITH THE ISSUE/PERSON POSTING? Does that mean that Admins are taking it personally and responding personally, screw the rules?

If I were you Rob, I’d look at 40-50 of the latest THREAD LOCKS and read what Admins are writing in the Forums. Sure looks like they aren’t following any rules at all!

RW may cry mea culpa when mistakes are made but let’s face it. No other self-proclaimed “community site” has a lexicon like Etsy – ban, mute, perma-mute, lock, red-brick, close — and such a public history of changing the rules when they feel like it to “punish” sellers with 2 eyes, not “a lot of eyes” as you claim.

Sellers who’ve expressed concerns for years over the negative consequences of taking ANY part in the Forums can rest assured that the same negative attitudes towards sellers is alive and kicking at Etsy.

Circle Jerk Etsy

Dozens of forum threads started by sellers over the past 4 days shows that people are confused about the whole concept behind Circles, circling, email notices, opting out, and boy oh boy is that generating hundreds of thousands of clicks on Etsy!

Just what they wanted! More clicks, no sales.

The addition of Circles to a sellers’ Shopfront in the lefthand column above Feedback gives the impression (and no one knows because Etsy isn’t telling) that Circles are going to be used as and seen by buyers as a “rating system” for seller performance.

Since Circles were added, Etsy Admin have been hard at work posting reminders for sellers to rack up their Circles-numbers, but no one seems to know WHAT that means. Most sellers have no idea WHAT Circles are.

Are they a ratings system? Are they required? Do they get you accepted by Teams? Do they lead to FP and FS features on your store? If you have no Circles are you a deadbeat? If you have 350 Circles, are you a better seller? Have better products?

And no one seems to know HOW TO TURN CIRCLES OFF!

Many sellers are asking Etsy to REMOVE Circles from their storefronts. They don’t want this feature glued in place on their shop page. They don’t understand the feature and fear it may confuse shoppers enough to stop shopping.

What the hell do Circles have to do with selling and making sales?

No matter what, Etsy isn’t reading or responding to forum posts and questions, so we need to find other ways of publicizing how Etsy IS NOT LISTENING TO ITS SELLERS!

Tell us what you think.

Talking Product - aka Encyclopedia of Etsy BS

We were so awestruck by the pretentious head of product development, Sara, and her big-bag-of-wind "Talking Product" in this incredibly convoluted and novel-length Dorque post
that we almost thought we’d never get to the last paragraph! The only thing that made any sense was the long, laborious explanation of "code lockdown" and the importance of the holiday retail weeks. But what the hell? Etsy has NEVER paid any attention at all to holidays or, for that matter, paid any attention at all to 95% of their sellers! Heaven forbid a megasite like Etsy thinks about the retail calendar!

Not only is this the biggest piece of pure bullshit (yeah yeah we get it, you're working on it, just like you have been for 2 years), but it doesn’t include ONE THING on the list of sellers’ priorities pinned to a solid date of implementation... shall we repeat what we need? YOUR SELLERS KNOW THE LIST BY HEART!

Whoever you think your audience is, Etsy, it clearly isn’t sellers. It’s ALL ABOUT YOU Etsy, and the sellers are nothing more than the means to an end, to your benefit and not much else.

No wonder you don’t have the time to come up with any solutions for what sellers really want you’re too busy crapping all over the site with a bunch of stuff that shows you have NO IDEA who your sellers are and what they need. You couldn’t care less.

Your capacity for arrogance is astounding!

Bitchables: the new dos and don'ts of Etsy

Etsy was quick, they said a week and it was only a week, to allow review of the new dos and don'ts. But they could do that because they didn't really listen. By the way, why wasn't a mass email sent out to all members about this? Even if it was just to point out that there have been changes? Communication is still on Etsy's to-do list it seems.

Some of the bitchable points of the dos and don'ts?

From Shops&Listings, formerly known as 'selling':

• "Etsy reserves the right to request that a seller provide policy information or require a seller to modify unreasonable policies at Etsy's discretion."

Hmmm what would be considered 'unreasonable'?

• "Listing prices must be reasonable"

This appears to be an argument against the market and letting shoppers decide what's reasonable, but it's just a bad way of leading to their old policies on the issue:

"You may price an item how you choose; however, a listing should not be created with an inaccurate price in order to keep it from selling"

and Etsy's way of preventing circumvention of their fees:

"The shipping cost must be reasonable for the item"

Why they couldn't just avoid the potentially troublesome header about reasonable prices is beyond me. How corporate of Etsy, reserving their rights to modify both your policies and your prices. It's not your shop, it's Etsy's, you're just the grunt making the pieces in it.

Then there's a whole new section on tagging:

• This is an old one
  

  "You may only use multiple words as a single tag if they comprise a single descriptive phrase"
  

But their example of what's unacceptable is "silver earrings" ?? What if it's a pair of, ta-da, silver earrings!?



• And then there's the blurring of tags and categories
  

  "Tags that describe the craft or process used to create an item should only refer to the processes that you personally used to create the item (for example: note cards should only be tagged "papermaking" if you made the paper by hand from pulp, a wooden shelf should only be tagged "woodworking" if you built the shelf)."

But what if you're one of the many sellers with, for example, woodburned items and you need woodworking - burning for your categories?...you may not have made the box, but you sure as hell made it what it is! In the dos and don'ts this is considered unacceptable.

Aren't updates to the policies supposed to help clarify them? We assume these will be optional as usual.

Quiet Time Might Be Good For You Etsy

We’re getting pretty sick and tired of the Admin random thought posts showing up every week in the forums that pose more questions than they answer. Most forum readers know what and who we’re talking about.

Is it all a massive diversion trick to keep sellers off of hot topics like the D&D’s and seriously lagging SEO changes? Pull sellers away from trying to get money out of NPB’s? Posting bug reports that have no Etsy response? Continue flagging stores and items that might never be acted upon? Market their stores (because Etsy sure isn’t) and twitter away like mad hatters?

Our advice is to cut the mindless chatter and cute streams of consciousness because sellers really aren’t interested in your pie-in-the-sky pointless whims. They’d rather see the site improvements they ask for year after year, clear as glass.

Stop asking what improvements we want, you already know. Stop asking what type of tools we need to run our shops, we've already told you. Stop musing on trends and themes... Just get to work!

Etsy's CEO is oblivious

She has to be to say crap like this:

On the technical end, scaling swiftly and keeping pace with consumer expectations and demand can sometimes feel overwhelming for a company with limited resources. Acknowledging that this problem exists regardless of stage, Thomas recommended the following tactics:

• Hire the best CTO you can find. Do not settle on this one!
  
• Make clear who is in charge of and responsible for development sprints
  
• Be deliberate in deciding upon and building a collective mindset around development methodology

Has she been in the forums lately?

And then there's the admittance of what we always thought. Etsy's marketing plan is simply to get it for free, from their own customers:

Etsy is known for its loyal and enthusiastic community, and accordingly, uses a customer driven approach to marketing. Thomas suggested the following strategies to develop community and enhance engagement:

• Create methods for consumers to engage one another. Etsy, for example, has forums, internal email, chat, and teams.
  
• Get to know, in person, some of your customers in order to really understand them
  
• If necessary, use a service like Get Satisfaction to ensure customers needs are adequately noted and addressed
  
• Measure loyalty through metrics like net promoter scores and repeat customers
  
• Take advantage of high quality, enthusiastic interns

We assume that the customers they get to know are the faves, or maybe the celebrities they show off (and try to ignore when they go crazy), or maybe she doesn't know who Etsy's customers are! Does she or any of the admin really get that the sellers are their customers?

And their customers bring them new customers. But grassroots works both ways. The negative word about how Etsy treats its customers can be spread just as quickly and easily as the positive words that built the site. If everyone were to suddenly spread the word that Etsy is awful to its customers, but the sellers on the site need help because of that, there will gradually be fewer new sellers and the current sellers won't go sale-less as they move off to other horizons.

Etsy's ship is sinking, and the CEO is out blowing air up the public's ass. Why are they inviting her?! She has done nothing to help Etsy, as far as it's actual customers go. But maybe she's done exactly what she was brought in to do - pretend it's ok so investors will still pay.

I think I see what Etsy has become. You have to sort of squint to see it. But first you have to erase everything we used to know Etsy to be. It's no longer a close knit community, admin are no longer one of us, the founders are no longer struggling to help their customers. Etsy is a corporation, now known as Etsy Corp. And they are doing exactly what they once stood against - promoting mainstream, in the box, mass produced, disposable and unnecessary crap that is a detriment to handmade and to the values of helping one another ("take advantage of enthusiastic interns" = "these people will do anything if you tell them it's good for handmade")

They are no longer about helping artists make a living. They are all about Etsy Corp making another dime. And the corporate world loves the fact that they can learn from Etsy - learn how to take advantage of their customers.

If you want to tell Etsy what you think, there's currently a forum thread where the link was posted and launchbox has commenting available at the bottom of the article. Edit: on 6/29 the thread was closed after anti-Maria sentiment caused HeyMichelle to remind the community to treat other members with respect. Also, it has been brought to our attention that Launchbox is not posting comments on the article and that some who contacted them have been muted by Etsy for older threads. There is also Twitter talk of at least 1 shop closure of a previous anti-Etsy voice. If you are muted, shutdown, or otherwise harrassed for flimsy or inappropriate reasons, send us an email or twitter.

(Thank you to the readers who brought the article to our attention)

Etsy wants to know...

What making a living means to you

Seriously? This is Kalin's new job, asking stupid questions?!

Making a living...hmmm...that would be MAKING A FUCKING LIVING. Survival, dumbasses. Not living in your parents' basement or eating ramen every day while tripping over the storage crates of crafts and Etsy receipts in your 100 sq ft closet with no heat you call an apartment.

What we all have jobs for...to make a living...to pay the bills....to eat...to have a roof over our heads...to take care of our kids.

And he even answers the question himself:

I'd like to know what "making a living" means to you. It could be anything from having a roof over your head, to having health insurance. Or it could mean working your own hours doing what you love, while having a family and teaching.

Ummm...doing what you love is NOT making a living. You can't survive on 'doing what you love' alone.

Will someone on Gold Street do us a favor and smack Rob upside the head?

September Etsy Stats Roundup

As per the normal, Etsy has provided some monthly site-wide stats to make sellers drool over how well the company is doing. But once again, it isn't good news for sellers (or 'sunny' as they call it) when you actually look at the numbers.

$7.93 million of goods sold — a 5% increase over August. 544,157 items sold, a 5.3% increase from July's stats.

This is an average price of $14.50 per item, and the number of items sold is half the number of registered members. So half of all Etsy members bought 1 item in all of September. I personally bought about 5. So less than half of all potential, registered Etsy buyers were active last month. And only 5 items sold per active shop (see below for that calculation). Ouch. Also, the equal percentage increases means that this has been the average price since at least July.

911,191 new items were listed, up from 869,000 items last month, a 4.9% increase.
96,473, new members joined the Etsy community, including 18,001 new sellers. Both of these rates of new sellers and new buyers are essentially flat from last month.

The number of items listed increased the same percentage as items sold, therefore, there was no actual increase in sales from the pool of items. Also, the sales per shop has decreased and the number of new buyers has not changed, yet more and more items are being added.
Only 60% of new listings sold if considering all old listings from previous months as unsold. The pool of stagnant sales has increased by almost 400,000. This means that net % of items marked as sold is actually decreasing.

344,000,000 page views were recorded on the site, a slight increase from
August.

This is an average of 632 views per sale and approximately 344 views per registered member (assuming the 1 million number they tout). So, once again, only half of the potential, registered buyers are viewing and then buying...at the end of their 344 views. But this doesn't tell us how many views were items and how many were just the front page, the Dorque, the treasuries, the forums, and what not. So this number and my calculations are actually moot...if only they provided numbers that meant something. Like how many people view the shopfront of an individual store but not any items, where the views come from, how long visitors stay on a page...you know, useful information.

A few things to consider with these numbers:
September has one less day than August, which makes a significant difference
as we start having $300,000 sales days (that’s right — even in these tough
economic times, we set a single day record on Sept 30th: $305,000!).

At an average price of $14.50, the best day in September saw approximately 21,035 items sold – one-twentieth of the 106,727 active shops (those with at least 1 item listed, 20 shops per page and those with zero items start after page 5336) sold something that day.

Oh yeah, that’s success
*rolls eyes*

Another Mute Salute

We had the unfortunate pleasure of being entrusted with the news that several longstanding Etsy members were muted in the forums once admins returned to work on Monday and others have been sent formal warning letters. Ooooh, big bad scary admin. 'Don't work weekends and carry a big stick' isn't exactly the Teddy Roosevelt quote you all are trying for.

Supposedly, this thread got out of hand around page 54, though we think if admin had shut it sooner, or muted one person preemptively based on problems in other threads over the course of several months, it would have solved the problem of muting 5, possibly more, people. Which begs the question, does Etsy have a troll on the payroll?

The following people are now entitled to use the EB star or overlay when they can change their avatars in a week (Some have emailed us directly, others have been included by fellow mutees, please correct us if we get it wrong):

SocoCreative

SherryTruitt

MorganSilks

Meringueshop

TwigandHeather

For taking Etsy to task and trying to make Etsy a better place, we salute you!

Maria speaks.. and unfortunately, so does Rob.

The Storque article from Maria and Rob has come out.

Why the hell wasn't this sent out as a email to every member? Isn't this majorly awaited statement worthy being sent out to the masses? Oh yeah admitting weakness and changes that are needed would be bad news. Whereas this is merely non-news. Same old words, no promises, no direction, no plan, no timeline.

No real info other than Rob and Maria reside in the same plane of existence. (And there is a picture to prove it!)

I do believe in Swimmy! I do! I do!

'Cmon everyone, clapping your hands and believing really REALLY hard saved Tinkerbell, didn't it? Maybe if we ALL clap our hands and believe in Swimmy, he'll be buoyed up by our sparkling power of positive thinking! If we all work together and hold our hands over our ears and sing "Kum By Ya" really loudly, unicorns and ponycars will frolic in the fields while bunnies ejaculate rainbows! Hooray!

HeyMichelle says:
Thanks for your lovely post. I know it inspires all of us to keep a positive attitude even in the midst of frustration. I know I think work gets done better and faster when we keep positive. Even though we all sometimes feel small and helpless when it comes to this place we all love so much, it's important to remember that with every word we type and every item we list, we are building Etsy. Thank you for your wonderful attitude and cheerfulness, I will let these words inspire all the work I do today...

*clapclapGAG*