Forget about “Code Lockdown” Already Etsy?

Hey Etsy! It’s the start of the holiday retail season, and you can STOP with the daily announcments, tweaks, changes, buttons here buttons there and STOP STOP STOP everything until January 1st.


You should have done all your changes, tweaks and site "improvements" in August, NOT IN THE SECOND WEEK OF NOVEMBER!

What the hell are you thinking?


Do sellers a favor and go on an extended vacation for 6-8 weeks, we’ll maybe (and that’s a big maybe) see you next year.

Seeing is Believing Etsy, but.......

As of 6/18/09, saralouhicks has finally posted a lengthy response to the SEO debacle in this forum post

EB certainly applauds the corrections to SEO search titles that Etsy promises to put in place (though it is copying Artfire yet again), but we’ve been around the block a few too many times with Etsy. Promises that arrive many days after the issue became the hot seller topic in cyberspace just don’t come across as all that sincere. We’ll believe it when we see it. (And wait with bated breath for the next nutty idea.)

Meanwhile, the damage already done will live on, and the negative publicity surrounding Etsy’s latest faux pas will add to the pile of mistrust constructed by Etsy’s inability and stubborn unwillingness to communicate with their sellers BEFORE they implement dramatic branding and marketing changes that affect every single seller on the site. This time they went too far.

We’d like to point out that Sara’s conclusion is a little off the mark:

We read that some of you believe our initial SEO approach was deceitful or mal-intentioned. This is not true.

While Etsy’s "initial SEO approach" may not have been mal-intentioned or even malicious, it WAS DONE WITHOUT seller input and without beta-testing. Disrespectful and deceitful, yes.

It was also done with COMPLETE DISINTEREST in how it might affect the sellers on Etsy.

It was done with the explicit intention of benefitting Etsy’s merchandising and branding plan and boosting Etsy’s numbers in search and search results. It was NOT done to provide a better search tool to send buyers to individual sellers (since the seller names fell off the Search grid). The proof is in the fewer views and fewer sales pudding.

The complete disconnect between Etsy and its sellers couldn’t be more evident.

Search Improvements and Feedback Wanted

As Maria mentioned in her second talking shop article, Etsy was going to make only slight tweeks to search. There are now two Dorque articles of interest on the changes made yesterday - why they always spread this information out we still don't know, but at least this time it's more for redundancy than confusion.

Engineer Sean who appears to be the one attempting to integrate new ranking and search term weighting criteria wrote an article on the dropdown menu, price filter changes, and where they plan on going from here. Meanwhile, Chad wrote a general tech update, his first since September when he joined Etsy and introduced us to his plans (Has it really been that long?!)

Chad's narrative points out just how poorly Etsy's infrastructure was initially developed:

After a lot of hard work and planning, we rolled out a sophisticated monitoring system in November that today enables us to keep an eye on 700 services running on over 170 pieces of hardware, including servers, network gear and storage systems.

This is a system that wasn't in place until November though Etsy had been attempting to be an ecommerce site for more than 3 years. And it is likely the reason it took users screaming about issues for someone to look at it, and then why they couldn't find the problems to fix them.

He also elaborated on one of the priorities Maria mentioned - site performance. By using a network distribution system the following was achieved:

Our home page now loads 2-3 times faster in most locations around the world compared to October and as much as nine times faster in some places. Our average home page load time over a 24-hour period as measured by Gomez in the US in October was 4.6 seconds and today it is 1.5 seconds. Singapore? From 18.6 seconds in October to 2.2 seconds today.

As a whole, Chad's article is pretty optimistic and encouraging. It's unfortunate that Revolving Dick screwed it up so badly and that we had to wait this long for improvements!

With all of these acknowledgements of problems and explanations of what they're attempting, I think they're trying to give us Bitches a stroke. We, we...might actually smile a little. It's yet to be seen what effect on tagging the new weighted search will have, which then would affect current shop listings and the listing process, but the engineers want feedback as they move forward (See, I told you they're trying to give us a stroke!)

We’ve been busy testing search adjustments with users here in Brooklyn at the Etsy Usability Lab as well as remotely, and we’re about to begin a series of Virtual Labs where we’ll give anyone interested access to a test area to try out different searches and discuss the future of Etsy search with us. The first of these sessions will take place this Friday, March 13 at 1:00 pm EDT (check when this is in your time zone).

Make sure you stop by on Friday and let them know your thoughts - then let us know if they listened!

There's also this forum discussion thread that was still open at the time of this entry.