As I understand it, in the beginning, a shop was one person responsible for everything. Design, purchasing supplies, making the products, promoting & marketing, shipping. Though I do have to believe that there probably was some undisclosed cases of family members pitching in.
A few sellers became very successful, and in order to grow needed to add staff to assist them. And I salute the sellers who worked themselves into this position.
Etsy then had to make a decision, embrace the successful sellers by changing the rules, or forcing them out. Well, to my mind, Etsy would have been foolish to force them out. After all, these successful sellers were generating a high level of fees.
So in typical Etsy fashion, they changed the rules without thinking things through clearly. In their naive idealism, they thought everyone would play by the rules, no matter how ambiguous those rules were.
The loopholes in the new rules were big enough to sail a Chinese cargo container ship through. It is now inundated with resellers of cheap mass produced trinkets. Then, rather than admitting they had made mistakes, they changed definitions, silenced dissent and in general tried to cover their butts. Their previous experience in the "everybody is special" society gave them no tools to use when suddenly they were faced with the fact their actions had consequences for which they were accountable.
I wish I had the answer to get Etsy back to its original vision (well, without the changing the world mumbo jumbo), while still embracing the sellers who became so successful.
But a good start would be to let an adult into the room.
As with anything I post here, you are free to tweet, copy, post on a billboard, whatever.
I'm certain the staff member assigned to answer those questions is busy covering their ass. When Etsy's CEO Chad Dickerson dismisses sellers' complaints as "baseless assertions and hateful rants," asserts that "in the last two years we’ve only muted 178 people," and states (apparently seriously) that the word reseller "is used (incorrectly) as a pretext for interfering with others’ businesses, harassing each other, or promoting hatred..." then you have a toxic corporate atmosphere. When sellers - who fund Etsy's very existence - are regarded as ungrateful, lying, hateful dissidents by the top dog, no meaningful change is likely to come soon.
ReplyDeleteI'm very glad to find you here, Doug and will be following you. I'm in the process of moving my inventory to zibbet. I have not been muted yet, but received an email quoting two of my entries in the infamous forum which were not within "etsy's rules" and followed by the link to the appropriate rule (ie book 52, page 1003, paragrah 200, section 5000, article 3) :+) Damn -- I didn't know we were supposed to memorize all 500 books of rules! LOL.
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