Etsy, it’s not all unicorns & rainbows.

I sell on Etsy. Never heard of it? You are not alone. Etsy is an on-line venue that started out with a great concept of handmade, vintage and supplies. Recently it has morphed into resellers, cheap factory imports and disappearing shops with trademark and copyright infringements. There is no control anymore that safeguards seller or buyer. Just chaos that reigns supreme.

Etsy has a CEO that baffles me. His name is Chad Dickerson. Chad is an IT person. There appears to be little in the way of marketing skills in his resume and he prides himself in hiring green-as-grass IT people to write code, implement it and watch the site go berserk. When things crash or release private information, a canned apology is issued and behind the scenes they hold their post-mortems. Issuing awards for the most spectacular goofs, there is little regard for the shop owner that depends on Etsy for an income.

This is the only site I know of that is constantly tinkering, releasing new formats, testing and disrupting the venue on a whim. They say it is for the sellers, the buyers, a better shopping experience and ease of navigating the website. As shopkeepers bemoan dropping views, sales, traffic and custom orders, the stanch few cry out, ‘change your photos, work on SEO, rewrite your policies and work harder on your shop’. Many give up, move on and close their shops out of frustration. It shouldn’t have to be that hard for a site loaded heavily with IT people. It should run smoother than any other selling venue. However, when you have X number of IT people, doing their own thing, it muddies the waters. Thus, Etsy stumbles through the cyber world, trying to become global and ignored by the CEO as he seeks to buy more companies to add to the confusion.  He is running amok with money made off the backs of the loyal sellers that think the world of Etsy will eventually become Utopia. I have yet to see a unicorn or rainbow…

If you want a glimpse of the unrest at Etsy, visit the forums. There you will find the cheerleaders, the Stepford-people administrators who censor, delete and scold in canned messages the masses that dare post about the topics that Etsy considers off limits. If you are too naughty, you are censored, muted and not allowed to post in the forums anymore. You are either relegated to bemoaning your problems in ‘teams’ or through convos to another seller (which Etsy can read and monitor!).

The problem as I see, it is most of the employed people at Etsy are very young, hipster and haven’t really paid their dues yet in the real world. They perceive things with a pie-in-the-sky attitude and censor the most benign things. They just don’t get it. They haven’t lived the decades of good and bad administrations, wars, poverty, civil rights and what has made this country strong in the last hundred years. They have a very scant view of history. Censoring is one of the first steps to anarchy and unrest. Somehow, this fact has escaped them and what is censored has gone off-site to blogs, comments to news articles and other websites, including eBay, putting Etsy in a very poor light. They are simply shooting themselves in the foot. (Oh, I forgot, they are pro-gun control!)

The latest attempt at search and promoting your shop has become an exercise in madness. To promote you must bid to get your items far enough forward to be seen. I am not falling for that one. Search has now eliminated many categories. If you are in a specialty niche, you just aren’t going to be found. Your shop is doomed.

In a year’s time we saw them try to kill off the wedding business by introducing browse. We have seen them remove vintage from search, and then eliminate babies, toddlers and children from browse. Then put the categories back in, pull them out and stick them in unrelated areas of search. Customers are frustrated and leaving the site for Zulily, eBay again and Wayfair or Overstock.com. The rationale is the number of clicks the site receives is good for business. Meanwhile befuddled customers try to sort their way through tons of unrelated items, manufactured resellers and categories that no longer exist.

Etsy has become the model for ‘how not to run a selling venue’ on the internet. As others watch their mistakes closely, Etsy will slowly fade into the sunset and emerge as another home goods site leaving handmade, vintage and supplies behind. The dream will have died along with the unicorns.