[HN Gopher] The Fall of the House of Etsy
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The Fall of the House of Etsy
Author : nutshell89
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-05-25 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (spy.com)
| Animats wrote:
| _" This pattern of scale > internal ad products > clusterfuckery
| > user exodus is generally referred to as "Enshittification," a
| very fun term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 to explain why,
| broadly speaking, everything on the internet now seems way
| worse."_
|
| That used to be called "pulling a Myspace". Myspace pioneered
| that way to screw up.
|
| Can anyone name a company that went down this road and came back?
|
| Someone should do a tracking site for companies which fail in
| this way. Something like "deadmalls.com", or "fuckedcompany.com".
|
| YC idea: develop a LLM model to detect early signs of
| enshittification and generate sell signals.
| stavros wrote:
| "Enshittification" originally had a very specific definition:
|
| > First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their
| users to make things better for their business customers;
| finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all
| the value for themselves. Then, they die.
|
| Nowadays it's just used as a catch-all for "made worse".
| resolutebat wrote:
| Etsy fits Cory's original definition to a tee though.
| stavros wrote:
| Maybe, I'm not too familiar with their story. Who were the
| business users on Etsy?
| mintplant wrote:
| The sellers. Doctorow's original article uses Amazon as
| an example; you could fit Etsy into the same framing.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| The prevalence of drop shipping is what killed Etsy for me as a
| buyer. I guess I was too trusting originally, but I was very
| disappointed when I found out that several items I had bought
| from them, all marketed as handmade, were just cheaply made
| pieces of garbage from places like Ali Express, then marked up
| 10x.
| acheron wrote:
| Where do people actually handmaking stuff sell now?
| haunter wrote:
| OnlyFans
| pylua wrote:
| Do people on only fans ship handmade contents to
| subscribers ? I thought it was a subscription website, but
| they may have more streams.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| you can absolutely purchase physical goods on onlyfans.
| it often comes in a ziplock bag!
| noodlesUK wrote:
| The real answer is where they always have: local markets and
| craft fairs. Most towns and cities have some kind of periodic
| craft market, which is often related to a farmers and/or food
| market. They usually have some kind of weird schedule like
| first Sunday of every month or similar.
|
| You can also see if your local arts
| centre/university/whatever has some kind of market. There's
| also usually different kinds of conventions for specific
| industries where people will set up booths.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| and online: niche, reputation-based forums probably still
| running phpbb that have been online since the 90s and have
| aging users with post counts in the 6 figures.
| ghaff wrote:
| As augmented by their own websites I assume. You lose the
| mass discoverability but you at least reduce the direct
| competition with volume, largely mass-manufactured goods.
|
| Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time but it certainly became
| so that your low-volume artisanal craft couldn't sell
| alongside manufactured Chinese goods going for 10% the
| price.
| grubbs wrote:
| If you enjoy beer basically any brewery is having some sort
| of makers market / flea market / local artist event on the
| weekends.
| derefr wrote:
| Why are you so sure that an item being sold at a local
| craft-market gives you any guarantee of its local origin?
| The "hobbyist jeweler" standing at the twee little booth in
| the community center on a Saturday afternoon, could just as
| well have 1000pc boxes of identical "artisanal" rings and
| pendants from Alibaba sitting under the table, ready to
| replenish your purchase.
|
| Mind you, you can at least be sure that food items sold by
| such vendors are domestic (if not local per se), because of
| import restrictions.
| Khartoum wrote:
| The sellers at craft fairs I trust most and purchase from
| most often are those who are sitting there making things.
| It's easier to match the quality of things there making
| against those they're selling.
|
| It's pretty much the only way I can be assured they're
| not (exclusively) selling dropshipped items.
| derefr wrote:
| Only really works for some types of goods, though.
| Someone selling e.g. end-grain wooden cutting boards
| would require a _very_ spacious booth to demonstrate
| their particular skill. Someone selling stained-glass
| pieces would require a fume hood to make any permanent
| progress! Someone making scented soaps? Legally, you need
| PPE to be within 50ft of the process!
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| A lot of people sell through instagram and facebook groups.
| I've bought a bunch of art (blown glass, embroidery mostly)
| through IG
| threecheese wrote:
| Shopify has implemented much of Etsys value as a selling
| platform, though it doesn't serve as a marketplace for
| discovery. Social media (TikTok and Insta) can easily
| offboard to a website shop, and lots of product creators sell
| there (and some use TikTok's Shop, which admittedly is
| competing more with Etsys garbage dropshipping than anything
| else). Clearly there are gaps here, as not everyone can
| create a Shopify site, and social media isn't exactly an
| e-commerce marketplace.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Yeah, I began to notice this a year or two ago.
|
| Etsy used to be a place to check out artisanal craft goods. Not
| necessarily antiques, but the sort of small-batch stuff that was
| hard to find elsewhere on the internet. Exotic jewelry, one-off
| wooden carvings, semi-custom knives, etc.
|
| Now it's a place to check out mass-produced Indian and Pakistani
| merchandise. It has become worse even than eBay in that regard.
| It's superficially the same stuff it has always been -- exotic
| jewelry, wooden carvings, knives, etc. -- but the quality is much
| lower and the value just isn't there. And it could well be that
| you buy something on Etsy only to see it later on Amazon.com.
|
| Also I feel like prices on Etsy have risen in an unusual and
| remarkable way over the past few years. Could be because of
| higher platform costs to vendors & the forced advertising scheme
| mentioned in the article.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| This isn't new. The Regretsy blog extensively complained about
| dropshippers in _2010._
|
| The problem is that operating a two sided marketplace connecting
| small makers to customers just really sucks as a business. Tons
| of churn, intractable problems with quality and fulfillment,
| having to pay for a lot of customer service agents who
| fundamentally can't solve any problems, since they don't actually
| work for the person who makes the stuff, and can only hit the
| "refund" button.
|
| Etsy has every reason in the world to want to get away from small
| sellers and move to high volume manufacturers, (who have actual
| QA and customer service departments, which a guy hand carving
| chess pieces in his basement doesn't have) and nothing to stop
| them. So the obvious thing happens.
|
| (Except then you're competing directly with Amazon in its area of
| greatest strength, which historically has been corporate
| suicide...)
| marcinzm wrote:
| > and nothing to stop them
|
| Except Ebay and Amazon already existing.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| And Amazon having rather high fees.
|
| Jeff Bezos used to say, "Your margin is my opportunity", but
| I'm not sure he even cares anymore.
| derefr wrote:
| > intractable problems with quality and fulfillment
|
| * Re: fulfillment -- why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock
| everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers
| like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that _is_ made-
| to-order to a fulfillment center _first_ , where it'll be
| inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped _by_ the fulfillment
| center -- with the buyer 's card only having a hold, not a
| charge, on it until the seller's goods are inspected by the
| fulfillment center as good? (In other words: turn the process
| into a goods-for-money mediated escrow.)
|
| * Re: quality / drop-shipping -- I feel like a lot of this
| could by solved just through simple semi-automated
| verification. Require for a product to be listed, for the
| seller to upload a video of themselves making the thing. Then
| pass those videos to MTurk workers to evaluate them for tricks.
|
| > Etsy has every reason in the world to want to get away from
| small sellers and move to high volume manufacturers
|
| Except that... that's their whole niche.
|
| Specifically, 90% of Etsy's value at this point is in the
| market of buyers they have slowly marketed and engaged and
| cultivated brand recognition with over decades -- and those
| buyers are people looking for low-volume goods. They don't
| _want_ to buy high-volume goods _from Etsy_. That 's not the
| association they've been painstakingly educated to have.
|
| If Etsy wanted to get into Amazon's business, they'd have to
| create a new brand to do it with, because that's just not the
| business that people associate with the Etsy brand. And that
| would mean starting from scratch.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you sell your goods at fairs or cons it's not uncommon for
| the site to go dark for a few days while they haul all their
| goods to man a booth. Anything that doesn't sell goes back
| up.
| derefr wrote:
| Since it _is_ by definition a low (sales) volume process,
| you 'd only need to keep one or two of each thing in stock
| at the Etsy fulfillment center. Items in stores run on
| "tight logistics" would just have their items constantly
| going in and out of stock as they alternate between 0-2
| copies in stock at the warehouse.
|
| Of course, if things were constantly going out of stock,
| then you'd want to create a system to allow people to put
| down a hold on their card to reserve a copy of something,
| waiting in a virtual line to be the first to get it when it
| does come back in stock. (Which would actually work much
| _better_ than Etsy does today, as it would give makers the
| ability to know how many of each thing to target making as
| a batch to _attempt_ to satisfy upcoming demand -- without
| money already captured forcing them to work to a
| potentially-impossible deadline.)
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Re: fulfillment -- why not ask Etsy sellers to pre-stock
| everything that's not made-to-order into fulfillment centers
| like Amazon's? And, in fact, to send anything that is made-
| to-order to a fulfillment center first, where it'll be
| inspected, re-wrapped and re-shipped by the fulfillment
| center -- with the buyer's card only having a hold, not a
| charge, on it until the seller's goods are inspected by the
| fulfillment center as good? (In other words: turn the process
| into a goods-for-money mediated escrow.)
|
| Because that costs money and most Etsy sellers sell very few
| things. We're not talking thousands or hundreds or even
| dozens per months. We're talking single digits per month. Per
| store. Not per item. With 7 million stores.
|
| > Re: quality / drop-shipping -- I feel like a lot of this
| could by solved just through simple semi-automated
| verification. Require for a product to be listed, for the
| seller to upload a video of themselves making the thing. Then
| pass those videos to MTurk workers to evaluate them for
| tricks.
|
| See the previous point. No one would use Etsy if they had to
| make a whole video and go through an automated process for an
| item that might sell once per year.
|
| edit: Amazon sells something like 350m products including the
| marketplace and 12 million directly. Etsy sells over 100m.
| Amazon has 40x the sales revenue. The economists are so
| different between them it's not even the same universe.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Amazon only works because they're centralized and full of
| uniform, neatly packaged groups of fungible units. Imagine
| having a super high turnover warehouse full of unique one-off
| items of different shapes, different sizes (from the size of
| your fingernail to the size of a large appliance, different
| materials with most of them being fragile, nothing being
| uniform enough to be stackable, different risk levels for
| everything from flammability to pest control...
|
| And even then, many people on Etsy sold antiques and vintage
| clothes. Maybe they even designed them and had them
| manufactured in small batches?
| derefr wrote:
| > Imagine having a super high turnover warehouse full of
| unique one-off items...
|
| Auction houses manage it somehow.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That's like saying people can fly by flapping their arms
| because birds can.
|
| Auction houses store items for a limited period of time
| before liquidating them. The time in storage is fixed and
| the fees are fairly high. It's a fundamentally different
| approach to an online retailer.
|
| An auction house that has to store items for years,
| charge no more than a 10% fee and only charge it if an
| item sold would go bankrupt.
| irq-1 wrote:
| Etsy should charge the sellers fees per sale, and make them
| post an expensive bond. Then Etsy can ban drop shipping, give
| instant refunds, pay return postage, and generally hold the
| creators to high standards.
|
| Etsy should also mandate the inclusion of a scan code in the
| package, which the customer can use to show they received the
| shipment but it wasn't as advertised. This would catch people
| lying about the contents, when the creators take a photo of the
| item & code in the box (and send it to Etsy before shipping.)
| Creators taking a photo and then changing the item will be
| caught because of the number of complaints, and customers can
| be refunded long after the transactions using the bond.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This would be a minor inconvenience for drop shippers but
| kill small businesses by drowning them in fees and paperwork.
|
| Etsy already charges fees, even just to LIST items,
| regardless of whether they sell or not.
|
| I've been wanting to sell some of my 3D printed designs, but
| I'm not paying a buck a piece for a listing that will earn me
| 5 to 10 bucks if I manage to sell.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Fun thing about a two sided marketplace. It needs two sides.
| If you make life hard for sellers then they won't join and
| then you, by definition, don't have a marketplace.
| tensor wrote:
| Shopify did very well connecting small makers/vendors to
| customers. Granted, to your point they are now trying to go for
| big vendors, thinking they can somehow unseat amazon. Probably
| won't work out well for them either.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If Shopify can avoid beating themselves up against the
| behemoth that is Amazon in a full-frontal assault, while also
| stay less crappy than Amazon, I think Shopify is on to
| something.
|
| Amazon can't un-crappify themselves, it's not in their DNA.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| The automatic enrolment in the Etsy advertising program means the
| platform fees for anyone selling more than 10k USD increase
| sharply at that point to ~20% of total revenue.
|
| What that means is that any artists/makers that are doing volumes
| that represent anything even close to a full time wage are
| totally shafted. If I were an artist selling stuff, I would
| strongly consider a switch to something like Shopify, especially
| as you then aren't on a storefront sitting next to a whole bunch
| of drop shipped garbage.
| marcinzm wrote:
| > The automatic enrolment in the Etsy advertising program means
| the platform fees for anyone selling more than 10k USD increase
| sharply at that point to ~20% of total revenue.
|
| That seems to assume a very very unrealistic 100% of orders
| being from offsite ads. In reality it's probably 10% for most
| shops if even that many.
| lancesells wrote:
| I would do run both and try to port over customers to Shopify.
| The advantage of Etsy is people.
| derefr wrote:
| If I were an artist selling stuff on Etsy, my storefront would
| undergo mitosis under new PO-box identities every time it hit
| 5k USD of sales.
| majormajor wrote:
| There's still not a better alternative that I've found (searching
| eBay, Amazon, AliExpress) for specific niche items in some pretty
| broad ares, from fandom to vintage jewelry to 3d-printed or gray-
| market custom parts/accessories for cars. Ebay/sometimes Amazon
| seems better for electronics or manufactured parts; AliExpress if
| you're willing to gamble more, but for "accessory" things I've
| had really good luck with Etsy.
|
| Whether you can turn that into a profitable public company... eh.
|
| And there are certainly some blogspammy listings in all those
| venues (Amazon and AliExpress probably the worst for that), but
| good luck solving that without human curation - and then you're
| an even worse investment as a business.
| UberFly wrote:
| The best version of Etsy is long gone. Hand crafted items from
| their original source just won't satiate IPO investors. There
| REALLY needs to spring up a (good) Etsy alternative that's
| content to be what it is and not an exponential growth machine
| that poisons the roots they originally built on.
| readyman wrote:
| > _not an exponential growth machine_
|
| This is increasingly impossible under capitalism for
| fundamental reasons, which are illustrated most clearly in
| modern financialized capitalism by shareholder interests.
|
| Your desires (and mine) will require a reorganization of
| society as we know it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Your desires (and mine) will require a reorganization of
| society as we know it.
|
| So far every attempt to do this has done the exact opposite.
| readyman wrote:
| Nonsense. Capitalism was a great success compared with
| feudalism. It is outright defeatist, senslessly
| conservative, and frankly anti-scientific to insist there
| is nothing more to be done merely because it has yet to be
| realized.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It is outright defeatist, senslessly conservative, and
| frankly anti-scientific to insist there is nothing more
| to be done_
|
| Nobody said that. It's just that I haven't seen a better
| proposal to date.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _increasingly impossible under capitalism for fundamental
| reasons_
|
| Most of capitalism, historically and today, is about
| preserving capital and making a small return. High-growth
| ventures are a minority, despite how it feels in tech.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Hand crafted items from their original source just won 't
| satiate IPO investors_
|
| Plenty of public companies promise low growth but decent
| returns. (Some promise wind-downs amidst payouts.)
|
| They also pay low multiples. If you want a high multiple, you
| have to grow. Etsy's saga isn't a problem of public markets,
| it's one of a company choosing a particular cohort of
| investors.
| ilikeitdark wrote:
| I thought this was in THE Spy magazine of long days gone.
| jonahhorowitz wrote:
| Etsy is just an alternative storefront for Aliexpress at this
| point. I rarely find something on there that I can't also find on
| Aliexpress. It's cheaper to drop ship it myself.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _When you start charging $30 for things, you start to go head-
| to-head with real retailers_
|
| I'd posit a different problem: the cheap-crap buyers are being
| taken by cheaper crap, _e.g._ Temu. And the high-earning buyers
| want quality products. I'll pay a premium for a well-made
| handcrafted product. But it has to be well made. That isn't Etsy.
|
| In a country that's squeezing its poor while the upper and upper-
| middle classes see unprecedented wealth, catering to that middle
| may simply not be a business.
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