from Hacker News

The Fall of the House of Etsy

by nutshell89 on 5/25/24, 7:42 PM with 104 comments

• by sbierwagen on 5/25/24, 8:27 PM

  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...)

• by noodlesUK on 5/25/24, 8:39 PM

  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.

• by jonahhorowitz on 5/25/24, 10:05 PM

  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.

• by UberFly on 5/25/24, 9:40 PM

  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.

• by seattle_spring on 5/25/24, 8:19 PM

  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.

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 5/26/24, 1:00 AM

  I'm sad.

  When I saw "spy.com," I was hoping that Spy Magazine[0] had risen from the ashes.

  No such luck. :'(

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_(magazine) (It was the only dead-tree magazine that I have ever personally subscribed to).

• by A_D_E_P_T on 5/25/24, 8:27 PM

  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.

• by ilikeitdark on 5/25/24, 9:48 PM

  I thought this was in THE Spy magazine of long days gone.

• by majormajor on 5/25/24, 8:58 PM

  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.

• by gnicholas on 5/26/24, 12:06 AM

  Eh, from my perspective as a buyer it's still a decent place to look for customized or handmade items. I have many treasured items that were purchased on Etsy, and I wouldn't hesitate to buy items like these again. For example, I bought hand-turned knurled wood pens and razor handles (as gifts for myself and my groomsmen), with wood chosen based on my color preference. The seller is still on the platform, and I'd happily buy gifts from him again. I also have several carved/engraved wood items from other sellers.

  Is there tons of non-customized stuff that's drop-shipped from somewhere else? Yes. But you can ignore if what you want is the old-school Etsy stuff. I'm sure some sellers have bailed as they've been edged out by big sellers. But for me, it's still a useful platform that I enjoy using.

• by casenmgreen on 5/26/24, 12:06 AM

  1. Etsy far as I can tell charge a 20% mark-up on sale price direct from the merchant's own web-site. This is too high - this is Apple tax money.

  2. Etsy also look to be charging 4% for currency conversion (which occurs if you view the Etsy site in a currency different to the currency the store issues its prices in). Esty I think are deliberately hiding this charge; it is listed _nowhere_ in the invoice or in billing. Furthermore, Etsy base their conversion choice on the country the bank card comes from, which is not correct for multi-currency cards, and so you can end up paying Etsy 4% and the 0.5% to the multi-currency FinTech as well (when you should be paying only the 0.5% to the FinTech).

• by Animats on 5/25/24, 8:19 PM

  "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.

• by AtlasBarfed on 5/25/24, 11:54 PM

  Let me save you the reading:

  Enshittification.

  Next.