I'm totally amazed at the delusional hallucination that this chap is obviously suffering, Etsy is not facilitating artisans making a living from their work! Etsy is encouraging rock bottom pricing, contributing to the myth of handmade being on par with cheap and moreover is shoehorning sellers into frequent re-listing to stay on top of an inadequate search function. I nearly fell off my chair at the global marketplace analogies having witnessed the struggle to get Etsy to denote all prices are in USD (rather than the ten or more non US-dollar currencies around the world) and been completely gobsmacked at an employee recommending priority worldwide shipping for late purchases from Canadian sellers as an answer (see comments here) to the late timing of promotional efforts onsite (FWIW priority mailing costs more than 6 times the $15 price of an average item on Etsy). Let's not even touch the inability to comprehend different time zones outside of Brooklyn.
In addition, this incredible community visualised is not materialising because it is not being fostered.
sigh
Keep taking the happy tablets!
Saturday, December 06, 2008
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1 comment:
I could not agree with you more. Etsy will have done, in 4 short years, enough damage to the handmade community that will have long-lasting, negative effects on quality, pricing and even the precarious continuation of craft shows.
Etsy has reduced their "handmade world" to thousands of "sellers" willing to make products that are defined by Etsy as the "big trend" priced $15 and under, and quality is up for grabs.
Many of the new handmade sites are taking advantage of all of Etsy's glaring mistakes, including Europe-based sites that are built on the needs of their sellers (and buyers).
Pinkdoodle, based in the UK, has revised their site to deal with multiple currencies, and sellers can customize their shops to appeal to a wide audience.
Etsy will have sparked other sites to do so much better, but let's never minimize the negative impact Etsy has had on the handmade community.
It's fine if they end up being the Walmart of nifty crafty disposable trendy non-essentials, but they need to stop calling themselves as the place for handmade-------and admit that they really don't like sellers, artisans, or the handmade community. They just like to do things their "own way".
Their questionable ethics may do them in sooner than the economy.
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