Worried about resellers on Etsy?

Hidden among the Dorque garbage from a little over a week ago was this tech update outlining two programs with specific team leaders to combat resellers.

SCRAM and Atlas, headed by CB and Indec, not surprisingly it still includes other sellers doing admin's job (for now, I'll say hesitatingly).

A few details of interest from the article:

SCRAM, which is essentially an internal Etsy "bot" that prowls the many halls of shops and listings, looking for probable resellers and other troublemakers. Since SCRAM was introduced recently, it has identified several hundred potential resellers, each of which our Support Team is reviewing for appropriate action, ranging from gentle reminders to outright banishment. Furthermore, SCRAM pays particular attention to catching those reseller shops that seem to pop up overnight, stuffed with mass-produced products.

...

The Atlas project covers all the tools we use to manage the content of the site.
One of projects that we've prioritized is to rebuild the flag-processing tools we have. While CB's SCRAM tools work really, really well, there's a limit to what automated tools can spot. That's where flagging comes in: Etsy members can report listings that break Etsy's rules. These flags then come into a system within Atlas that allows our Content Team to review the flagged items and take appropriate action — anything from an email explaining the problem and requesting an edit to a listing to outright termination of the account for the most egregious violations.

So all in all, all Etsians can do is flag, and they've added a "report this shop to Etsy" option. In the Bugs thread, some are reporting that the slow response time is still a problem, but Indec has stated that it's only the beginning of a large overhaul (suddenly I'm overcome with deja vu).

Just thought you all should know.

Shipping tool - For European sellers only

I was very excited when I saw that the beta testing for the new regions shipping tool was complete...we could finally set shipping to the USPS zones in the United States, or handle the range of costs to ship within Canada, or set Continent to Continent shipping instead of hoping that the Everwhere Else covers the cost of actually shipping everywhere else!! *Loud Buzzer* nope. That isn't what it does.

So what did Etsy unroll with the new Shipping tool? You can now list Europe as a region. If you live in Europe, this is wonderful for shipping locally (geographically speaking). But for everyone else, this means you can add one more line on the shipping profiles, which may be somewhat beneficial, but is likely no more helpful than Everywhere Else, so no changes are needed.

This is a nice step forward, but really, if you can add Europe as EU and non-EU subgroups, why not Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, South America, etc? Also, what we NEED are the U.S. and Canadian regions as well. This is great for the European sellers you always shun, but you're ignoring the largest group of sellers on the site!

So, European Etsians, you are in luck. Let us know how it works so we know whether we should be drooling over a U.S. and Canadian add-on they're promising.