Many thanks to ndnchick on Etsy (who has some gorgeous season's greetings cards for the upcoming festive season in her shop) for including my sterling earwires in her treasury of handmade supplies.
It is an amazing treasury, both for its content and also its timing. There has been a lot of debate about supplies on Etsy recently, with numerous threads involving whether or not they should stay, debating how much they interfere with exposure for the handmade items, pointing out how much revenue they must bring in for Etsy, etc etc etc. Some threads have become quite heated and been locked for "bickering" while others managed to gain comment and final say from the big guns.
IMO commercial supplies, in the enormous volumes of some shops, do not belong on Etsy, the "all things handmade" site. Apart from making the tagline look a little fluffy, they dilute the exposure of the handmade items in Time Machine, front page, search and categories (the latter two thru imaginative tagging), etc. I really welcome the idea that supplies will be separated eventually, and search will require an opt-in by the user.
However, where does this leave handmade supplies?
Not apparently on the handmade side of the website. I'm not particularly worried about my earwires being 'sent to Coventry' as crafters on the site will know to look/opt in for their supplies, but items such as handspun and hand-dyed yarn and fibre might become invisible to their buyers. Evidently 'true' buyers, ie. those with no seller account, only want finished articles and so would not be shopping in supplies anyway.
Where does this leave the dedicated handknitter looking for a unique hank of spun and dyed fibre for aunty's shawl then? Hmmmm ..........
... and PS: for any of you reading this and thinking, "How did I miss all of this action?" - it's your forum, use it to stay in touch/enfranchised with the website you sell on.
It really is a "use it or lose it" scenario.
Seriously.
or try UEN to stay current (though the Storque is starting to pull its weight too - put the news section on RSS feed to your Google Reader to stay up to date)
1 comment:
See, this is why I have so much trouble giving the forums up. And I do sense that Etsy is easily swayed by the more vocal members of the forums.
I agree that it would be great to see commercial supplies separated. I hope handmade supplies would stay on the handmade section of the site though.
Such a pickle.
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