Etsy Took a Wrong Turn Down the Wrong Road

Etsy in 2011 is a completely different company than it was in 2006. While it still touts “all things handmade” in its logo and mission statement, sellers who have been on Etsy since the first year know that in 2011 it’s not about handmade and for heaven’s sake it isn’t about selling a damn thing.

It’s about a popularity contest to be the next Admin darling amidst gobs of nonsensical, forced “social tools” that have nothing to do with selling and buying handmade online.

What Went Wrong?

All the recent press about Etsy including some precautionary quips about its financial future got me thinking about what went wrong at Etsy.

Despite public acknowledgements that “sellers are not happy with the changes”, don’t go to the restructured Forums for clues about what sellers really think.

Etsy has scoured the Forums to be a mere ghost of Etsy-past with even more aggressive censorship. Any and all posts are subject to immediate lock down and commenters are swiftly punished at a faster clip. In the past, Etsy showed how nervous it was about public criticism and reacted poorly - now they just cut it off at the knees and go on with their own agenda, damn the sellers’ questions and opinions.

Etsy has been known to blatantly ignore any and all sellers’ request for changes and improvements for years, so it’s not new that Etsy continues to take the site in a direction that is divorced from the real seller experience. Arguments that it meets the needs of its most successful sellers is not the real picture either since these sellers (few and far between) are treated to free editorial promotion on the site that all other sellers are not.

The Social Experiment That’s Failing

Before sellers were silenced even more than usual, they did make several issues crystal clear – they don’t understand, need, like, or use the new social tools, including Circles, making personal info public, joining Teams, Suggested Shops, Taste Tests, and Shopping Local. They aren’t happy with the weekly changes in Search that have made Search worse than ever before, if that was even possible ---- Etsy made sure that it was!

Sellers are also clear when they complain that all these social tools just click customers right out of their shops to shop elsewhere or completely off the site, so fed up are they with the convoluted, nonsensical, totally crappy navigation. Search for an item, are you kidding?

Etsy’s facebookization of the site has been one big dismal experiment, and you know why?

Etsy had its own social structure built up over years by sellers who had both a personal and business interest in the site, including an intense interest in the handmade product.

Instead of adapting those strengths, Etsy decided to IMPOSE ANOTHER SOCIAL STRUCTURE on the site that doesn’t fit its users or its users’ goals - which is to sell handmade products with the side benefit of a social structure that developed along with the needs of a growing seller membership.

The ecommerce mission of the site became subservient to the new mission to click, connect, and pick favorites for a popularity contest within the site that hasn’t improved traffic or real sales but has worked to send sellers and shoppers chasing their tails with a lot of forced navigation that never ends up in a shopping cart.

Etsy picked a bunch of tools they saw popularized on other social sites, gave them a zippy title and funny icon and foisted them week after week on sellers without working through one damn consequence which may well turn out to be less traffic and less real sales.

People don’t join Etsy, set up a store on Etsy, and shop on Etsy to run around socializing — they go there to SELL and SHOP.

Forcing the wrong social tools on Etsy has consistently pushed eyeballs away from selling and shopping to doing everything but ecommerce.

We need to only look at the growing pains of social networking sites that are adding ecommerce components to their sites. They were social first, so the ecommerce part makes little sense; it may catch on, it may not. But it is not their core strength.

Etsy was originally an ecommerce site that dumped that whole concept to jump on the social networking bandwagon without realizing what a bad fit it is.

Social and ecommerce is not an easy fit. Instead of building on the strengths of the social-Etsy that already existed before Etsy started throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Etsy dropped ecommerce for social.

No wonder sellers and shoppers are shocked and dismayed and going elsewhere fast.

Etsy got it wrong and gets it wrong with every new trick they force on the site. While outside critics and watchers may predict “slower revenue growth” for Etsy, how about no growth at all? Etsy is strangling the very foundation of their business which is to sell and buy handmade.

I’d take a much more critical look at the statements Etsy makes about its sales profits because it’s not the real story.

I’d take an even closer look at a business that forces new tools on its users without giving them a Scorecard (both internally and externally) about the results of those new tools. The least Etsy can do it to take a quantitative look at each change it makes — and if it doesn’t improve traffic and real sales, Etsy needs to admit it’s on the wrong path and drop the social tricks pronto.

I don’t think sellers who voice their concerns are on the wrong track – they suspect that the new social Etsy has stifled both traffic and real sales because that’s what their store stats tell them. Just because Etsy doesn’t admit its mistakes doesn’t mean they didn’t make them.

When the numbers start running in the negative direction, Etsy may pay attention. I’m with other sellers who have voiced their concerns over the last 3 years on Etsy and off — Etsy may admit its mistakes so late in the game that Etsy is no more.