well i can’t do the etsy strike thing, as a seller, as i don’t own the store, but what i can do, is that the boss has been wanting me to raise prices on there, so i just jacked all our prices up a bunch. might go back through and do it again.
Firstly I just want to remind you, never click on an Etsy ad, ever; if you do, clear your cookies afterward. if you buy from my shop with a click from an Etsy ad of any kind in your browser history, they’re dinging me an enormous percentage fee off whatever you buy. I have a repeat customer who’s now ordered from me six times, and Etsy charges that fee every time she buys, because she clicked on an ad sometime before she made that first purchase. that’s how it works.
but secondly– i haven’t seen many people talk about this but one of the unpopular things etsy’s done is they’ve instituted this new “star seller” status thing, right, and it’s exactly the same mechanism as the metrics Amazon uses to nebulously weight a seller’s virtues in a way that makes them turn up higher in searches and stuff (or, ~*ooh*~, get the buy box), and on Amazon it’s very explicitly not transparent and the seller is not allowed to know the criteria (and in fact in many cases the criteria are that you have paid for placement), but if they have jumped through all these hoops to meet metrics, then they’re eligible and in the running, and if they don’t meet those metrics ( again, this is the existing system on Amazon), they’re dropped entirely from search results, or removed as a seller. (Source: I am also a seller on Amazon. I sell different stuff on Etsy, but I’ve been on both for many years.)
Etsy keeps saying this is optional and it’s fine and it’s not going to get you shadowbanned or whatever, but–
one of the things they want, just like Amazon, is 24 hour response time to all messages.
Think about a five-day work week. Think about a part-time Etsy seller. There was a help question related to that, where people were like “how am I supposed to do this,” and Etsy’s official response to that was to encourage sellers to install the app on their phone, so that they could answer questions anytime, anywhere.
yeah. fuck your work-life balance, right? if you don’t have staff, you’d best be answering Etsy questions from your kid’s soccer game or from your dialysis machine or wherever the fuck you are, Etsy does not care and there are no excuses. and you know it’s a matter of time before Star Seller status does, in fact, determine whether you show up in searches at all. This is inevitable.
so, pretty transparently, Etsy is trying to horn in on Amazon’s niche, and is therefore optimizing things for the large-volume resellers that built Amazon. That’s where the money is, because it’s all markup on mass-produced crap produced overseas exploitatively. It’s not about letting small producers connect directly with customers to earn a living, it’s about making middlemen and stockholders rich.
like this isn’t even getting into the fee hike, this is just the experience of attempting to sell things on Etsy.
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