Etsy's numbers drop

It's official, June was a bad month for Etsy - sales were down 4% site-wide (both number of items sold and the $ amount sold). Page views decreased almost 3%. New members were down 2%.

BUT the number of items listed was about the same (0.1% decrease, about 1,000 item difference).

However, there were still nearly twice as many items listed per month as sold, which is not good for sellers.

Read all the stats in the Dorque article.

Are these lower views due to the SEO fuck up? Are they due to the economy? Nope, according to Sinohe:

Overall, June results were more or less comparable to May’s after factoring in that there are 30 days in June and 31 in May.

Really? 4% of sales occur each day of the month? So a full month is 120%? Has he ever taken a basic arithmetic class? Even if the average (3-3.3%) was an effect of month length - it never mattered before, Etsy was growing every month regardless (6% in May, 5% in April, 16% in March, 2% in February - which has only 28 days!!) and it still leaves a drop of almost 1%, which is a large number of items when three quarters of a million are sold each month.

Etsy - you've hit your plateau. NOW will you care about your customers?

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.

On Etsy, technical glitch = permanent problem

As implied by Chad in his Storque article, Etsy's infrastructure is a hot mess of patches and hacks, fundamentally flawed and being crushed under an ever-increasing mass of sellers. Think of Bre's hammock, duct-taped and full of sumo wrestlers.

Although admin grudgingly admitted the issues in this forum thread and Storque article nearly a week ago, there are still sellers posting in Bugs and Business wondering WTF is going on with listings and categories. For those still confused, here's the straight shit.


The batch upload lags are permanent.


The problem will not be fixed before the holidays.


Now, dear EB readers, stop your wailing and rending of garments. After all, haven't you seen that little notice during the listing process stating that listings may take as long as 24 hours to appear? Etsy already covered their ass on that one, and, as Stella says, it's not that the system is broken, "it's just not meeting your expectations".

Your silly, foolish expectations. Your ridiculous expectation that when you list something at 9am it might show up in the system before noon. Your utterly stupid expectation that when buyers browse a category page they might see more than just the same 21 items sitting there for an hour. Your outrageous expectation that listing and browsing should be a swift, intuitive and simple process for a site with over 60 employees and millions of dollars in investor backing.

Expectations that have been encouraged and promoted by admin themselves, not only recommending renewing as a promotional method in the forums, but renaming "Expiry Dates" to "Renew Items" so that method of spending our 20 cents is just a little bit easier to find.

But hey, chin up! Etsy feels your pain. They're just asking for your patience and understanding... for the past three years. Oh, and they know it's "little consolation" to sellers who've seen their own sales drop - but Etsy's overall sales are doing great! Sales are up! Listings are up even more than sales! Never mind that when the rise in listings is greater than the rise in sales it means sales-to-listing ratios are actually dropping! Just chug that kool-aid and think of how much money Etsy is making and everything will be fine.

In the words of one sharp seller on that thread, Etsy, don't try to placate or distract us. You created this clusterfuck by exploiting a piece of bad site design that turned out to be profitable. Now your sellers are paying for it, literally.

How far is the stick jammed up there anyway?

We got more than one email about the locking of this thread, and we're as disgusted as the people who wrote to us. Every single person who posted in this thread did so because they enjoyed the OP's post. There was no fighting, calling out, abuse, trolling, or harassment, just eighteen pages of people having a good chuckle. And then down came the Etsy Hammer of No Fun Allowed.

marymary says:

While we can all appreciate some comic relief, we do ask that other members of the Community not be called out or mocked in the process (even if it is only meant in jest).

Calling out? Mocking? The only mockery going on was self-mockery by people able to reflect upon their own selves, identify with the OP, and find the humour in it. What happened, Etsy? Did you break your sense of humour when your crappy hammocks collapsed underneath you? Did someone piss on your cupcakes that day? It's pretty unfuckingbelievable that admin has the time to read through threads like these and lock them with some ridiculous excuse when there's actual abuse, harassment and trolling going utterly ignored in other threads. Maybe their priorities were also damaged in the Great Hammock Disaster of '08. Whatever the reason, Etsy, get with the fucking program and do something useful instead of making it your mission to crush any enjoyable aspect of the forums.