Busted

Dear Marymary, this was not the first or even the second occurence. This time it was Anda's turn to get her shop prominently featured.

Admin chimed in on this thread 5 times before shutting down the thread. Etsy, did your customers catch you with your panties down? Below are some of the defensive responses from Etsy Admin:

Thanks so much for expressing your concerns with admins that have shops and the possibility of them being featured on the site. To be perfectly honest, we have an internal rule that items from admin shops are not to be featured on the homepage or in the gift guides.

This rule has been in effect for close to a year now and if for any reason you see an item featured on Etsy that might be from an admin shop, you are welcome to send us an email to community [!at] etsy.com and we will have it removed.

A treasury with an item from an admin shop would not be denied a highlight on the front page. The item from the admin shop would simply be excluded from the list of item ID's that are loaded on the front page.

Admins must disclose all of their shops on Etsy in their profiles, yes.

If a treasury is selected and loaded on the front page, the admin item would simply be excluded and in it's place the first alternate would appear.

You can find a list of all admins right here: www.etsy.com/about.php

If the admin has a shop/s, it will be listed in their profile. While I can see how a public list of admin shops might be helpful to some, it also might be viewed as further promotions to admins or unfair in some way...so I don't see this becoming a feature any time soon, I apologize.

The items featured in that article were chosen by a guest writer from Domino magazine. We have since removed the item in question; it should not have been included, and we apologize for the error.

Etsy, Etsy...... tsk. You make it sound like this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. How stupid do you think your customers are? Tens of thousands of shops on Etsy. Yet the same people are highlighted in the Gift Guides, Etsy Finds, on the front page Etsy Admin curated treasuries. That, Etsy, is pathetic.

Screenshot credit goes to Eclipse, sorry I forgot to post that last night.

Quotables: Doublespeak

We'll look into it...

We know that a one-click vacation mode option is a much-desired feature for our sellers, especially those with lots of inventory. We agree that it would be super helpful!

We are hopeful that we will be able to provide a solution. However, I cannot promise a timeline or say with certainty how this feature would work. It's something we have researched (thanks in a big part to a lot of great community feedback from you all) and thought about a lot in recent months.

I said we'll look into it, now run along renew some stuff!

we have to figure out how features work best on Etsy. How other sites do things does not always provide a relevant solution for us. There's a lot of complex back-end work that needs to be considered for any change to the site, especially one as potentially complex as vacation mode. Plus there are a lot of other projects that took priority over this in the past 3 years. It's not quite that black and white.

So, how do you like being treated like a lab rat?

We here at Etsy Bitch recieved multiple tip-offs to this little gem of a locked thread. I'll simply let the opening post speak for itself:

This is a blog post from Caterpillar Cowboy.
http://www.socialstartups.com/2008/05/28/how-much-listening-is-too-much/

He started this thread some time ago asking if we would prefer improved search or improved view counters.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5635290&page=1

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How much listening is too much?May 28, 2008 at 8:31 pm · Filed under business, etsy

Customer forums are always interesting, particularly for e-commerce sites. There is something about staying at home and being bored that ultimately leads people to “window shop” online, which leads them to socializing with other people who are doing the exact same thing. The range of personalities is wild and wildly interesting.

Four hundred and twenty eight posts ago, I started a thread on the Etsy forums. The thread was intended to have two purposes. One was to simply get a sense of the community and introduce myself to them. Second, I wanted to get some better intuition as to how sophisticated Etsy sellers (the majority of forum posters) are about running their business and the e-commerce business generally. So I asked a basic prioritization question - would you rather us make search better or fix a bug that would occasionally reset the page views counter on your item listing pages? (For those curious, the views system is stored entirely in a cache, and when the cache gets full and a record gets evicted, the page view number resets to 0. Clearly, the system was not engineered to be used in this manner.) My follow up was, if fixing the view system is not a priority, would you rather we get rid of it entirely or keep it broken.

The danger is to get lulled into an urgency to please. When hundreds of users are demanding a feature, you may feel compelled to acquiesce and build the requested feature. Before you do that, stop and consider Henry Ford: “If I did what people said they wanted, I would have built a faster horse.” (or something like that.) Customers are excellent gauges as when something is wrong, but can be extremely misleading about both what exactly is wrong and how it should be fixed. Furthermore, customers do not (or should not) have better visibility than you do into strategic goals, key business metrics, engineering resources, etc. They don’t have your long-term vision nor your understanding of complex dependencies. So don’t jump the gun. Listen, follow the comments to the source, and solve the root of the problem.

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I don't take issue with the third paragraph. However, if the purpose of his thread was some sort of social experiment, I rather resent it. That thread strongly implied that Etsy would be doing something about either views or search. But apparently it was nothing of the sort. People are running businesses here, for some of them it is their livelihood. They participate in threads like that in the hopes that their feedback will help Etsy to improve the site and therefore help them sell. It's not cool to jerk people around like that, IMO.

Lab rat vs Guinea Pig

Discuss.....

This is Why Supervisors Exist

From the Bitches Auxiliary:

Once again, Etsy has let loose with a forum post directed to old fogies, old bats, old ladies, hags, little old ladies — otherwise pigeonholed as Etsy to be "traditional crafters" and people who make, well, products worthy to be sold to the public online! You know, like, ARTISANS.

Anyone at Etsy heard of supervision and management? How about Public Relations? How about proofing an extremely long and insulting Admin forum post BEFORE it gets posted? How about running it by the "Does this reflect the Etsy Image?" manager?

Didn't Etsy learn its lesson several months ago when the furor resulted in a blast in the Consumerist? Or is it a terminally short attention span?

If you didn't get your old hag dander up with the original post, you have to read the "apology" with additional snide remarks by — well, the same Admin group that were exposed the last time!

Another fine example of lack of thought, lack of integrity, and the widening gap between Etsy the company and Etsy the Sellers.

Pie in the face (or faces) does not do this one justice.

Quotable Quotes: No Shit Sherlock

Please Etsy, get a clue.

Storque article: "Dear Sellers,

Did you realize that the way you communicate with your customers can actually promote repeat business?"

Seller Comment: Um, is this a joke? You actually have the balls to lecture sellers about communication skills when Etsy expects its users to get critical information by digging through the forums and sifting the Storque guano? Not to mention all the crap that's been going down in the forums this week? This is why I'm moving to my own site, I don't have the time or the patience to deal with Etsy's hypocrisy anymore."