Etsy 101: Seller Tips on Spending More Money Than You Make

Otherwise known as: How to lose a lot of money on Etsy, fast!

Lo and behold, Etsy continues to rake in record profits on listing, relisting and Showcase cash, AND on items that sell for an average of $15.00!

The site is fast filling up with doodads and trinkets priced mostly in the $5-15 range, and we wonder WHO’s really making the money here!?

Especially now, with DXO’s latest project with 3,590 tips for spending more money than you make!

That’s it, folks, the Etsy holiday formula for losing your shirt in that distinct Etsy style! Follow their wacky advice requiring huge gobs of time and labor and you too can get 10 slots in the GG’s, 62 repeats on the Front Page, be included in 29 repetitive Dorkies and those ever obnoxious Etsy Finds! Just keep it cheap and stock up on ric rak for clever, wasteful, but cute packaging!

From your pocket to Etsy’s (free labor included)!

It’s an Etsy Branded Holiday Season!

It’s ALL up to you, sellers, to jump on the Etsy Brand "formula for success" & brush up on your Etsy-fication by making your reservations for the rest of the Virtual Labs listed in this post from you-know-who!


We're just thankful that we missed the "better photos" Labs since we already covered them.

Clicking on this intriguing "holiday" topic in the Storque (which is so painfully obvious on the top of the new Community Hub page), we thought we’d see a list of new Etsy promotions designed just for Holiday’09 open to ALL sellers to help them promote sales in a year when most sellers need all the promotion help they can get.


Alas, our hopes were quickly dashed when we saw who the advice was coming from and what topics were included. Aren’t there 350 tips just like that in the never-ending "Etsy Handbook"?

We can add our own seminar for the "Etsy holiday rush" — "If you make and list what Etsy likes to promote (so everything on the site looks the same) we’ll promote you for free!"

The rest of the sellers can do what they always do - forget about getting ANY HELP AT ALL from Etsy for the holiday shopping season. Another Etsy "holiday season" that usually starts on December 15, too late to ship one damn thing.


(And how ridiculous is it that they have a jump page between the community page and the Storque? Why can't they just link directly? They already have server issues! -Righteous)

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.