This is tougher than it seems on the surface.

A few years ago, I was involved in planning and running a maker "fest". We invited makers, and artists to the festival to show off their projects, and some of them wanted to sell things.

A not-insignificant number of participants who wanted to sell things were just reselling things you could buy at Michaels, or buy online (in bulk) for cheap.

Sometimes with just a little modification, or maybe a creative recombination, or repackaging.

The problem is that you basically have to examine every single item, and then personally decide if it qualifies as art or not.

That's a lot harder than it sounds, and can quickly devolve into a judgemental mess that nobody wants to participate in (we wanted to encourage makers, not subject them to some "must be at least this cool" test, which is scary for people).

Imagine the PR fallout for etsy the first time they tell somebody that their handmade widgets look like mass produced junk.

I think they're in a really tough spot. When they weighed the options, my guess is that they realized that it would be best to let the consumers just decide what they want to buy.

> I think they're in a really tough spot. When they weighed the options, my guess is that they realized that it would be best to let the consumers just decide what they want to buy.

...but then the problem is, what makes them better or different from any other storefront? If there's a ton of mass-produced product on Etsy, why would I want to shop there rather than on Amazon?

>what makes them better or different from any other storefront?

Brand, or...genre? I'm having a difficult time finding the word for it, but there is definitely a type of thing I go to etsy to look for. For instance, this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/159631469/aztec-death-whistle-t... (which is such a cool piece with such a cool story!).

I have no idea where else to go to even look for something like that. When I wanted one, etsy is the first thing that came to mind.

So I think that the mass produced stuff hurts browsing, but if you know what you are looking for, it's still easy to cut throgh the noise.

I tend to think of Etsy as being the place to go for cultural, rather than mass-produced consumerist, goods.

The problem is that most products only pretend not be mass-produced, when in reality, they are.

Perhaps the pretending is what people are paying/looking for. I certainly see a lot of that kind of thing when surveying supermarket shelves.

Do you really think so, that people don't want, say, a unique piece of jewellery but just to pretend - through what appears to be a fraud on behalf of the seller - that some over-priced mass-produced jewellery is unique.

I couldn't disagree more.

In part if I buy something on Etsy I'm considering that most of the money I spend will get re-spent in that person's local community. In part I'm trying to encourage them in their craftmanship/art.

    > Do you really think so, that people don't want, say,
    > a unique piece of jewellery but just to pretend -
    > through what appears to be a fraud on behalf of the
    > seller - that some over-priced mass-produced jewellery is unique.

I guess you haven't been to Pier One.

People do want an authentic, unique piece of jewelry. But they also want something affordable. Sometimes, buyers are a little willing to believe what they want to believe to accomplish both of those goals. And there is no shortage of sellers who will tell them what they want to hear (i.e. lie) to enable that.

For buyers who really do want something authentic, achieving that requires trust in the seller. That trust is something Etsy used to have in spades, and it's something that's been dwindling over time.

I mean, there has to be some level of overlooking the obvious going on. There's no way a person could sustain themselves on the prices that these items are going for, if they were actually hand-made.

I know someone who sews cute things; she'll post on Facebook about the progress, pictures of work-in-progress plushes, or purses, or coasters. She'll then go sell them on Etsy, and also post on FB for friends to buy. It's not a lifestyle business, but it's a way to recoup the cost of materials for doing something she enjoys doing. Often they're made from leftover fabric scraps from something she already made, so this is a way to recoup a little bit more from what she already sews.

It's really hard for small scale artisan workers to sell at a sustainable price _for a full-time occupation_.

Price are anchored lowered by comparison with mass-produced products and artisinal goods made in countries with lower cost of living.

I know people personally who sell on Etsy but only as a side-line. To me that's where Etsy and other craft marketplaces - Folksy, NOTHS - fit best.

Anthropologie makes a ton of cash from it.

Maybe if there was a system where consumers could identify the wares as manufactured themselves. Like a "legitimacy" rating system

They should really just add a rating system, I dont know anything about etsy but if customers say that they found it on alibaba with a given link then the seller would probably lose all future sales. Sounds like a very easy problem to solve...

But then Etsy lose all those sales, which presumably is why they don't do that.

Are they more committed to their morals or their profit?

That would be a very short-term perspective of them to take. If it becomes common knowledge that it's mostly repackaged chinese goods, then the storefront as a whole would collapse. In this case, preserving their morals I believe is very important to their business as a whole.

They probably only need to maintain the perception to keep most of the profits though, so look like your trying but don't do all you can.

They need to maintain their customers' perception, which is not so much about trying as actually having an effect...

Just have a 'reseller' category which users can filter our when searching if they desire, and allow reports like this to force a vendor into this category.

Likely easy to game.

And hard. I wear cufflinks. Half the good ones you can buy are artisan stuff built on aliexpress basics, and very difficult to distinguish from boring artless stuff build on the same basics. You can tell by looking, but difficult for software or for a bureaucracy. I imagine there are many categories like that.

I think parent commenter talks about crowdsourcing labeling, not software.

Yes, and when the median number of labelings for a given article is near zero (as it will be for handmade artisanal articles), it's very easy to spam in a few five-stars. The crowd you want isn't the crowd you get.

So you have to filter or supplement the user ratings/labelings/reviews using either software or inhouse people, which runs into the second problem I mentioned.

Ebay seems to do okay with their buyer/seller ratings..

Yes. And so could etsy for rating buyers and sellers. You can't spam easily if you have to spend money to do it.

But the grandparent suggested crowdsourcing saleable articles, for the kind of articles that are meant to be (simplifying) handmade.

When your store is flooded with garbage, consumers may decide what they want to buy is nothing at all.

It isn't really possible to sell a handful of random handmade things on Amazon, and that was clearly something you were interested in: it might be annoying as the stuff you want gets buried, but at least it is there?

In theory you'd go there because there still is some genuinely cool stuff you can't get elsewhere. Of course, as has been stated, the problem is finding it.

They are cheaper for sone things: my wife and I bought our wedding rings from there for a fraction of the cost of going to a jewelry store. Plus, in the case of both the the style of rings we wanted and also bum bags (I'm forgetful and women's clothes don't have pockets), some goods aren't available anywhere else.

But can you get those same rings for cheaper on AliExpress or eBay or Walmart or discountringsdirectfromchina.com or something? The point is you're going in with the expectation​ of a handcrafted item whereas half the stuff comes straight from a Chinese factory. The market for mass produced items is pretty saturated with many options, Esty originally differentiated itself with hand made items and buyers are willing to pay a premium for handcrafted items.

> They are cheaper for sone things

Cheaper than what, though? High street stores? sure. Without commenting on your specific example, the point is that much of the "hand made" stuff is just purchased from AliExpress and sold on with a markup, so it would have been cheaper for you to have bought it from AliExpress

> The problem is that you basically have to examine every single item, and then personally decide if it qualifies as art or not.

This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which was written ~80 years ago. Not sure there's any "solution" to what you or the OP are describing.

Turns out you can't mass produce individualism.

I mean, you can mass produce the appearance of individualism with a large enough data set and a well constrained ecosystem. Look at all the IoT-toaster bots on FB and Twitter scamming real people out of money. To some, the appearance is as good as the real thing.

This is exactly the same problem as fraudulent goods in any storefront. You solve it via a combination of policy and user flagging.

Etsy should put it in their terms that you're not allowed to resell goods there acquired from somewhere else. Then they can have a user form where people can file a tos violation with link to the original store.

It's a lot more complicated than that.

For one, they've always allowed some goods made by others - vintage, defined as anything 20 years old or more, and craft supplies.

Then, how much does of something has to be made by you? Taking an old suitcase and painting a bird on the side makes it just as 'handmade' as making the entire suitcase from scratch, as far as etsy could figure out.

And then, having user reports is not easy either. People may be wrong, or report their competitors. Or the store may lie about their goods.

Etsy has tried to do this already for years, anyway. They will investigate and ask store owners to send photos of their workspace.

That's a really good point. Even taking mass produced art and modifying it is in a way it's own art and I've seen some really, really good ones.

Seems a bit unsolvable.

Maybe if they were required to mention categorical suppliers it would further inform consumers

That's an interesting idea, and it has a secondary benefit of informing buyers about sustainability.

I like this idea. I'm not quite sure how to enforce it though but it's an interesting approach nonetheless.

I think that if people find a seller's stuff on Aliexpress and they reported otherwise, a simple "report this seller" with a link to the aliexpress item would literally put a peer powered approach to enforcement. By reading the comments here, it's already happening. This would just put a system in place for consumer to protect each other (which is kind of great!)

So much this. Folks should just be honest about it.

'Folks should just be honest' is unfortunately not a solid policy for an international marketplace.

It should be a rule liable to punitive measures when broken.

Of course, and Etsy has tried many rules that have punishment attached. Like most communities or marketplaces the punishment is removal of your listings or suspension of some account privileges.

Unfortunately my experience is they were very inconsistent with application of their rules, and often closed stores that didn't deserve it, sometimes repeatedly, while obvious rule breakers operated for months. Sometimes they remove items, sometimes esp. in the past you just come to log in and your password doesn't work and your store is gone.

While they also had issue forming reasonable procedures and rules, much of the problems are with application of their rules, as in having enough employees and managing training them effectively.

Wow, genuinely interesting to see all the stories here about what's happening to the store.

I had forgotten that Etsy changed its policy on allowing mass manufacturing several years ago: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/etsy-embraces-mass-manufacturi...

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/etsy-ceo-ipo-mass-production-...

Alibaba-resells has had a detrimental effect on Kickstarter and Indiegogo-type platforms too. Many of the things submitted to r/shittykickstarters seem to be resells. Indiegogo doesn't mind them, and Kickstarter only stops them when the negative publicity about a campaign gets high enough:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/3gm8xj/...

The amazing thing about Kickstarter knockoffs is that there's a huge market for simply stealing an idea and beating it to market. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this. It's completely absurd, Kickstarter product transparency is, in hindsight, almost ideal to steal products from.

Reminds me of this: "Your brilliant Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before you’ve even finished funding it"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724096

That said, there's still vibrant opportunity in the other direction, i.e. finding items off of Alibaba, claiming to not only have made those items but that they are best-in-class/first-of-its-kind, and attracting people who don't bother double-checking on Google or Amazon, nevermind Alibaba.

That "other direction" is much more significant, at this point.

For every Kickstarter/Indiegogo project that's cloned by a Chinese manufacturer (e.g, Fidget Cube), there's probably at least 10 or 20 "projects" created to resell something that's already available. It's a huge issue for the credibility of both sites.

What's truly fascinating is all of these innovative products made in Asia which aren't officially marketed in the West (thus allowing people to market it in smalltime ways, like Kickstarter). If you go to the right parts of Asia now you will see a wild array of amazing, futuristic products that you can't find anywhere in the US.

A lot of them are kind of misleading junk though.

Yeah, I see a ton of these stand-alone VR headsets that--on the surface--look amazing. But if you really start to scrutinize the specs, you realize they are two-generation-old Android phone guts slapped inside a cheap plastic box. You're getting a glorified Google Cardboard with probably a janky OS, and not anything up to the standard of even the now-2.5-year-old Samsung Gear VR.

like what? selfie sticks?

(i live in asia)

I remember being on holiday in Thailand and seeing selfie sticks about 3 years before they hit the mainstream in the UK. I wish I'd started importing them myself.

Way more than that. A large portion of the Fulfilled By Amazon program is imports like this. If the subreddit is representative, nearly all of FBA is AliBaba imports.

Stupid question -- isn't that (usually) good? My model of Kickstarter projects is "I wish this product existed so I could buy it", not "I would like to personally profit from bringing this to market".

This is what it was originally intended to be, but Kickstarter long turned into a marketing platform for companies to get pre-orders for their new products.

Ah, that makes sense. But it still seems mostly benign to me: it accelerates the transition from non-obvious demand to purchasable product, thus doing better on the "I wish this product existed" metric.

I can see how it's effectively leeching off the efforts of those entrepreneurs who are trying to get pre-orders, but, as long as they haven't started building the product, it's a relatively small amount of work lost, in setting up a kickstarter page.

My main problem is that because it is billed as an "investment" (where your return is maybe a slight discount on the product), you have no recourse if the product is never delivered.

Many kickstarters are made by people with no experience in actually delivering product and are almost certainly doomed to fail from the start. Another large group are established companies that have investment already, and are using it purely as marketing because it is impossible to build their product at the funding levels kickstarters reach (outside of the big ones like Pebble). There are very few kickstarters that have non-obvious markets and are run by someone I would be willing to risk money on to have made, and zero where the return is worth my risk.

Yeah, what we need is a patent system that only gives 5 years, maybe some lower barriers in terms of how it's enforced. Maybe where a jury is asked 'does this feel like a knockoff of what the patent was generally describing or does it really do something new.' The risk of going afoul will be enough to keep people innovating.

I'd really love to see a common sense approach to patents.

Import tax from China would solve these issues.

Killing the UPU subsidies might be enough on its own.

So kickstarter is close to what could be the ideal platform when you primarily want the product to exist, with actually selling that product being a secondary goal at most. Unfortunately, only very successful kickstarters would be cloned and by that point one would be far too deeply invested to be content with the product existing.

Put a great idea on kickstarter, with the "rewards" orders at a high price point to make it more attractive for cloners, then if it succeeds fulfill rewards with rebadged knock-offs. What a gamble that could be!

Could a zero-cost kickstarter fully refund backers if the founder capitulates after finding formally succeeds? Can kickstarter fees be postponed until the funding is actually used? If that is possible, this charade could be a surprisingly light shade of grey, "we try to find manufacturing, otherwise you get your money back" would hardly qualify as a lie if the only omission is that you intend to look no further than alibaba.com .

Kickstarter for ideas, anyone, with the established crowdfunding model on the C side and open bidding for design and manufacture on the B side?

Yep, I found this with the Fidget Cube.

I heard about it after the Kickstarter closed, "aw chucks". A few months later I found the parent company was accepting purchases but wouldn't ship for months more, I bought one anyway (over $20!). Then a couple months later I came across knock-offs on Amazon. I forgot I ordered the authentic one, so I bought one on Amazon for $10. It arrived promptly. Then this week, I got the original cube in the mail--It took so long I totally forgot about it.

And honestly, I like the knock-off more... (granted, might just be a timing bias.)

I had a friend who had a similar experience but he feels the $30 one is better, the cheap knockoff is lighter and some parts have stopped working...

That's the business model of Zara, and there's nothing wrong with it. You can't "steal" something if it's public domain.

If you die off because some Chinese seller "stole" your idea which by the way you came up with first, then you deserve it because it means you didn't execute well enough.

I think this kickstarter culture has done more harm than good for makers because it made them chase instant gratification instead of substance. If you look at what happened to all the ambitious Kickstarter hardware companies, there is not a single one I'm aware of that's on their track to wild success.

People used to actually pour in their time and money (not just a slick youtube video) and risk all their reputation to build something that matters to them. I think at some point people decided to believe that you can take the shortcut via Kickstarter, but it's increasingly becoming clear that there is no such thing as shortcut.

It still sucks for them that these inventors are not rewarded for their brilliant ideas, but then again, I think if you are really serious about your product, you should invest more into it and make sure things like this don't happen.

> If you die off because some Chinese seller "stole" your idea which by the way you came up with first, then you deserve it because it means you didn't execute well enough.

Okay, I think I understand this idea. If somebody else can cut corners by cheaping out on materials, or skipping testing, or relaxing tolerances, and their product still sells, then clearly your own standards were simply too high.

> I think this kickstarter culture has done more harm than good for makers because it made them chase instant gratification instead of substance.

This seems in contradiction to the first statement. If you take instant gratification, you're a symptom of more harm than good. If you take your time and do it right, you deserve to die because you're not going as fast as your competitors. ?

> If you die off because some Chinese seller "stole" your idea which by the way you came up with first, then you deserve it because it means you didn't execute well enough.

I won't argue that copying ideas and reimplementing them cheaper/faster doesn't have upsides. But one worry is that the immediate downsides are felt by the original inventors. Sure, cheap copying is nice for the consumer and reseller, but they're dependent on original inventors being incentivized. It's not impossible for inventors to go the slow, substantive route, in which they come up with a business plan and an idea, but that limits the work of creation to those who can manage that kind of timeline.

There are very few original ideas, and you'll just drive yourself and everyone around you crazy by fretting over originality. Don't fool yourself into believing that only Chinese companies are interested in ripping off ideas; this has been a major function of large companies for a very long time.

We have to pop the fairytale bubble that some of us live in. Marketing and sales will win the day. No matter how fancy your technology is, there will be competitors and rivals, and it won't really matter who was "first". Being first can, in fact, be a substantial disadvantage, since you don't have the response/feedback from a competitor's prior attempt to gauge and reference.

I don't know about "wild success" but the 3doodler is now sold in ToysRUs, so that seems like a reasonable metric for entering the mainstream given their area.

MicroPython seems to have acquired a reasonable level of traction in the community too.

If you look at how hard it is to pitch products like these and raise capital, then kickstarter is certainly living up to its name.

Formlabs seems to be on its way there. (I'm biased though, since I did once work there.)

That's a rather harsh and Darwinistic view of things. Remember, the main purpose of Kickstarter is to raise funds to be able to bring this thing to market. If I have the idea, but no money, I deserve to have my idea stolen because I wasn't able to execute on having more money well enough?

> If I have the idea, but no money, I deserve to have my idea stolen because I wasn't able to execute on having more money well enough?

Nope you totally missed my point if that's your takeaway.

No, that's precisely what you said. If I have not the money to execute, then I deserve to have my idea taken from me. That is what supporting the idea of knockoffs taking a kickstarter product means.

Indiegogo doesn't mind? That's way too funny, I emailed Indiegogo a few weeks ago before starting a group buy from taobao. I still can't find a platform to organize something like that.

Since, this is HN it might interest you all: the top six on https://shop57714512.world.taobao.com/ . Tripod mountable 10"-17" travel monitors.

Why not MassDrop? They are optimized for group buys of things that already exist. Sometimes it is short production runs of niche goods, but I have also seen (and bought) goods available elsewhere.

Massdrop is branded around group buys of premium goods, not batches of random crap off Alibaba. I think they would see high quantities of listings as spam/polluting their listings/damaging their brand.

Traditionally that sort of stuff just happens in a thread on a forum somewhere - but I have to imagine that there's a pretty significant incidence of non-paying users or organizers who get in over their heads, so perhaps there is a niche there for basically organizing private group buys as well, that are advertised through another medium apart from Massdrop's storefront.

Hot take here but since you brought them up: I think Massdrop has their own branding problems. I used to do them quite a bit but have stopped at this point because the discounts are just not good enough to justify waiting 6 weeks to get my item (and I've had some items that were delayed out to more than 3 months from drop completion to delivery). I now make it a policy to compare against Amazon or the retailer directly - and since you have to wait a month through Massdrop you might as well compare against Seeedstudio and the other source vendors directly.

Usually the discount is pretty insignificant ($5-10) so I don't do it unless they are truly unique items that just can't be had elsewhere. And often those unique drops are limited to ridiculously low unit quantities and they're sold out before I can even order.

Not sure how quantity limits make sense on pre-orders, which is supposedly what Massdrop is doing. Is there only enough plastic left in China for 20 sets of crappy vacuum-formed keycaps or something?

It's a really nice model for Massdrop since they don't have to worry about fronting the money for inventory and waiting a month for the items to show up - their customers will gladly do that. But they're still very much taking the profit regardless of the fact that the customer is the one fronting the money - so it ends up being a terrible deal for the customer.

This has been my experience as well. Etsy in just a few years has gone from a artisan marketplace to a bunch of mass produced junk.

From the articles I've read they've done this to increase the number of sales (cheaper items = more conversions) but I think it's been slowly costing them their customer base.

Hopefully they realize this and start banning mass produced items and listening to their artisan stores feedback again.

I wonder if they can police the reselling of mass produced junk. I'm imagining initial efforts, making a notable dent in the problem, and then kicking off a "Made By Me" social media campaign. If resellers stopped seeing Etsy as a easy way to sell dollar store items at artisan prices, made that'd curb the problem a bit more.

Etsy gets multiple thousands of vendor sign-ups per day and needs a dedicated team to filter out vendors that attempt to game the marketplace by flooding it with thousands of listings for cell phone cases and other junk.

A lot of it is driven by Chinese middlemen and get-rich-quick schemes that are more than happy to burn the marketplace to the ground if they can make a buck in the process.

The challenge is that in the beginning the revenue is good and it's hard to say no to revenue when you need to beat the street every quarter. It seems so manageable at first. But unless you've lived its very hard to wrap your head around that you've planted the seeds of your own destruction.

it wouldn't take a dedicated team to detect if a seller is uploading a high amount of items.

Whatever you set your limit as it's pretty trivial to bypass if they are willing to create a thousand accounts. Close those thousand accounts and they will create a thousand more at the same rate you close them.

Add velocity controls for the IP address and you'll get a thousand sign ups from a thousand IPs. Limit it by device and you'll see a thousand devices. Flag the images using a perceptual hash and the images will come back superimposed on random pictures of food.

At some point you find that your accounts are now traded as a commodity on underground markets at various prices by teams that specialize in creating accounts, aging them and selling them for x cents. Add enough restrictions to new accounts and you'll find existing shops being taken over and flooded with listings.

And do all of this while still having an "effortless" signup experience for new legitimate vendors.

Are you really sure they are that sophisticated? Genuine question. THis sounds like an extreme worst case scenario

The example of cell phone case pictures superimposed over random pictures of food was from an Etsy presentation at a conference I recently attended.

Routinely (i.e. daily) I see activity that may involve 500+ unique IPs and 2000-4000 attempts. The type of activity that I see isn't close to what would be considered an extreme-worst case scenario in the industry.

Assuming the right economic incentives these groups are over time able to duplicate about any behavior that would be seen by a typical customer. For example, they can effectively remote desktop into a device and create a sleeper account and then come back to the exact same device a week later once the probation period has expired and execute a larger attack.

Also it is hard to fully understand that markets where labor isn't scarce fundamentally organize themselves differently. For example one recent attack that I'd see involved multiple attempts from multiple IP addresses and multiple devices all within seconds of each other and using the same credit card for registration. For a while I marveled at the technical skills that would be required to orchestrate such an attack until I realized that it likely was likely a dozen people in a room sharing the same credit card number and launching the attack in a coordinated fashion. Low tech, but extremely effective when labor is cheap.

Until they went public Etsy had a policy against mass manufactured products [0]. They opened this door willingly in the first place.

[0]http://abcnews.go.com/Business/etsy-ceo-ipo-mass-production-...

Sure. Require a refundable deposit of $1000 (replace by some magic number) which is forfeited if you're caught selling mass produced junk. Other after-the-fact punitive measures can be in the contract you have to sign to get on the site.

Something along these lines must exist where legitimate sellers can live with it while the cost to the spammers must be unacceptable.

A lot of sellers on etsy couldn't afford the $1k to start.

That's why I had the (replace by magic numbers) in parenthesis. There may be some number where you can still attract legitimate sellers but is high enough so people taking a risk to just peddle junk will turn a loss on average. The only way you get rid of the junk is to make their expected profit less than zero.

that would go over really poorly.

nobody would spend $1000 on what is essentially a gamble (since etsy is determining whether you're 'selling mass produced junk').

sellers already feel like etsy is way too buyer-friendly (at the expense of sellers).

Etsy has to invest effort in making sure that legitimate sellers don't have this gamble. They have to be sure they're only penalizing the spammers. It's not unlike insurance fraud, do you feel it's a gamble that you're getting insurance because the insurance company won't pay out or will pursue you for fraud? Probably not. Yet they still try to identify and prosecute the fraud. If the site is dominated by spammers selling stuff from the dollar store everyone loses. You have to make it so that it's not worthwhile for the spammers. A deposit is one way. Pursuing legal action for contract violation could be another. Another industry with similar issues is banking.

It's not easy but you have to invest in maintaining the credibility of your platform. Machine learning helps but these problems have existed pre machine learning and can have more traditional economic solutions.

EDIT: The deposit could also depend on your prices and sale volume. This way really small players can pay in with a lower deposit. There are probably many variations but again the key is to make it a losing proposition for the spammers/dollar store guys assuming you want them off your platform. If you're only doing machine learning/filtering the cost to attack the system and try to get in is too low.

Doing that would decrease their sales and ability to grow drastically.

Hand made does not scale.

Scale isn't everything. first if you're a good marketplace you attract more and more diverse vendors, each of whom does low volume.

Besides, when the point of the site was unique handcrafted items, selling manufactured stuff undercuts the one thing that makes you different from your competitors.

I can't understand the argument you're trying to make. It's like saying that fine art doesn't scale because painters are so slow, so art galleries should postcards instead. Perhaps that would indeed be more profitable, but then you're not an art gallery any more, are you?

I agree, re-selling mass produced Chinese crap goes directly against the entire concept of Etsy and everything they supposedly stand for.

However they've sold a classic Silicon Valley "high growth" story to investors that they're now beholden to as a publicly traded company. That growth story can't be delivered on grandma's handicrafts.

Hence the site being slowly transformed into yet another generic online marketplace for drop-shipped junk.

It's ultimately a giant recipe for failure. The company DNA and core brand are at odds with the investor expectations around tech companies.

> they've sold a classic Silicon Valley "high growth" story to investors that they're now beholden to as a publicly traded company.

Less so than most - they're a B corp (is that the term?) with higher priorities than shareholder value.

Interesting detail, thanks for that.

"Hand made does not scale."

It most certainly can if you have the proper equipment. You can facet two or three stones by hand on flat grinding surfaces, or you can get a rotary lap wheel and spend a day making ten stones, then you can get a mechanical precision arm for the rotary lap and now you can pump out 20-25 high-quality stones per day that sell for good money.

It all depends upon your tooling and experience.

Not surprised. That's the story of eBay. eBay decided to embrace it.

There seems to be some natural law of Internet shopping that ensures that every "Specialized marketplace for X," will, once it becomes popular, inevitably devolve into a flood of thousands of sellers all reselling identical cheap junk from AliExpress for $0.99 + free shipping--to the point where it's impossible to find anything genuine or non-counterfeit.

Perhaps "Where it's easy to sell goods, it's easy to sell counterfeit goods"?

On the plus side, it should be exceptionally easy to identify since they probably don't have custom photos.

That works on day 1 of the crackdown, but not on day 15.

A magic number analysis of the images used in accounts would handle pretty much every duplicate found (which would highly hint at mass-reselling) unless the people got smart enough to figure it out and start jacking with the color palette.

Gresham's Law?

Like issues arising in most multiparty content aggregators, whether they're social networks or marketplaces, Etsy's seller situation reduces down to a discovery and reputation problem.

- How do you highlight "genuine" artisan products without some laborious process to inspect the seller?

- How do you allow new sellers to build the requisite reputation to be trusted as good and legit? How do you do this in a way so they don't get drowned out by more established sellers who have been around longer?

- How do you process incoming reviews to prevent voting rings and voting abuse, while nonetheless accumulating information on the seller's performance and trustworthiness?

These are difficult, inexact problems that can't be solved from a book and to the best we know, have to be trial-and-error tuned to the particular community in question. Much more so than anything solely technical, the way these problems are solved end up being the secret sauce behind communities, and similarly often responsible for their decline.

We recently purchased a handcrafted rustic patio set from an Etsy seller in Michigan.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/naturalcrafting

There are definitely some legitimate artists on there.

Ditto. I recently upgraded my EDC multi-tool to a Leatherman Surge. I also wanted to carry the bit kit and socket extension. Leatherman's own belt pouch for this is laughably bad:

http://www.leatherman.com/surge-premium-leather-sheath-314.h...

After searching around a little, I did find this guy who makes really heavy duty sheaths:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/Nayscustomleather

It is a bit bulky, but it is likely to last the lifetime of the tool itself. Very good quality.

it's trickier than you think.

a VERY common complaint i saw while i was at etsy:

"i make bracelets and someone on aliexpress is ripping off my designs and even my photos, what do i do?"

i'm not denying that someone would do exactly what you're describing (purchase on ali and resell on etsy), but it's sometimes way more complicated than that.

This is something which is really a challenge.

In many markets discovery is a challenge (how do you create visibility to all of the customers who might be interested in your product) and then operational costs when your concept is discovered.

When brainstorming things I heard an idea which I thought was pretty cool, create a "trademark" registry in these bespoke market places. It would work by sending the market maker (Etsy in this case) pictures and a description of an item you are going to sell on the site.

They would take those images and descriptions and first verify that nothing else on the site already had both the same look and application, and then they would issue you a "trademark" for the product which you could start selling and advertising. If it was popular and someone tried to make copies, they would not be allowed to sell them on Etsy because when they submitted pictures and descriptions it would be apparent they were too similar to an existing product.

It is interesting to consider what the overall effect of such a system would be, we know that it would give a strong 'first mover' advantage (+1 to the sellers) but also prevent price competition (-1 to the buyers). It would help prevent counterfeits (+1 to the buyers) and might limit a seller selling their own product because the copy had already gotten to the market first (-1 to sellers).

I put trademark in quotes because while this is exactly the role of trademarks in the US, it is too expensive to pursue trademark violations for a $10 bracelet that you sell may 20 a month of. So you need a locally implemented system that can reduce the cost to implement and as much as possible automate enforcement through policy.

interesting idea, but i don't think this will solve the problem i'm describing.

the hypothetical person on aliexpress isn't really interested in selling on etsy, they're interested in copying something successful and selling it where they can maximize their profit (in this case, aliexpress).

it's basically the same problem that more established brands like ray-bans face (with cheap knockoffs), except because it's on a much smaller scale most buyers assume the worst (that the person is just buying on aliexpress and reselling on etsy).

i mean even amazon is facing this problem right now (with counterfeit goods), so one can only imagine how bad it is for a significantly smaller operation like etsy.

enforcing trademarks is difficult enough even within the US, and enforcing it globally is insanely difficult.

Essentially, it's riffing off of Youtube's ContentID system? The "might limit a seller selling their own product" problem is one of the issues with ContentID as well.

There are even more complications.

My SO makes a living selling hand made party supplies on Etsy, and has for years at this point. I assume she's fairly successful for an Etsy seller since she makes multiple thousands a month on hand made items (all made to order, a fair portion customized to specification). Even so, with all the work she puts in it's not significantly better than minimum wage after expenses and the time she puts into the shop. She has for a few years considered buying cheaper party supplies (plates, napkins, etc) in bulk and selling them in addition to her hand made crafts because customers generally need and so are going somewhere else to buy these items anyways. This is a case where allowing mass produces items would be a win-win, as the customers could get their custom and generic items in one order (they specifically ask if they are offered), and she could make some additional money from each order. Without the ability to resell mass produced items, you constrain this positive aspect of the system.

Its interesting to see the path Etsy has taken. IIRC, around 2007 or so they closed all of the 'vintage' shops because they weren't handmade. They quickly went back on that and restored those accounts. (In 2014 they also tried removing 'vintage' from 'browse', which resulted in a lot of backlash.)

Its a shame to see them relaxing the standards over the years. In 2007 their blog even acknowledged the mass-produced items and the lack of support for these products [1]

[1] https://blog.etsy.com/news/2007/cultivating-a-strong-communi...

Maybe the future of Etsy is with Vintage instead of handmade? I think it is easier to distinguish between vintage and factory made then handcrafted and factory made.

For example: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BonjourBizarre . I'm pretty sure you could not find any of those items on AliExpress.

Definitely. I think a combination of handmade and 'curated' is fantastic --- just not 'curated items from AliExpress.'

The overarching issue is that Etsy doesn't appear to recognize their users and what they're actually looking for. They've allowed for too much noise over the years.

The overarching issue is that profit trumps everything else.

I don't think Etsy "allowed noise". It's more that becoming a stick-on-folksy tat [1] bazaar was infinitely more profitable than trying to be a genuine source of lovingly crafted artisanal hand-mades.

Etsy seems to have enough users who are just fine with this.

I wonder if the real story is that other sources of tat have become more competitive and more widely known. Maybe there is no mass exodus of outraged craft buyers - Etsy's customers are simply shopping for the same things elsewhere, and paying less for them by cutting out the middlesite.

Etsy's profits didn't seem unduly harmed when they opened up their market, so the exodus theory seems unlikely.

[1] In case "tat" isn't a thing in USian English:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tat

This hit the nail on the head for me. Etsy was all the parts I loved about Ebay mashed with the parts of an art fair I loved. It's been on a slow slide to another Ebay in my eyes.

And their new CEO is the former head of eBay shopping, here to finish the job for the investors who can't understand they missed this boat already.

I only started looking at etsy last year when I was looking for a unique gift for an anniversary present, having spent a lot of time on ali express and the like I noticed lots of items being sold as handmade and as a result avoided the site entirely. I wouldn't trust any of the sellers because I don't have the time to check them all and if I have to do that I may as well look elsewhere, I also caution people against etsy for this reason.

That's a real shame. My wife has a store on Etsy and is downstairs right now sewing up another handbag. So it's kinda tough to hear that the reputation she's worked hard for on Etsy with the solid ratings, and with the hard work she's put in, the Etsy brand itself is turning people away. Etsy provides just enough to make it easy and worthwhile to use the system, but I wonder if she's legitimately losing sales this way.

Handbags? Oh my god, why isn't she selling on Facebook?

I know a very wealthy woman in Thailand selling custom $400-600 handbags to New York yuppies and literally her entire business is on Facebook.

I normally don't advocate this sort of thing but their ad platform and social network are basically made for this kind of business. Custom/Handmade luxury goods for upper-middle class women over a certain age? Facebook, every time.

Hrm, never really thought about that. When we started her shop, Etsy was the natural fit. There is a community around that. I'll have to look into this. Thanks for the idea!

NB: I imagine it's hyper-competitive. Instagram might also be the right choice now.

Well, you can always try your luck selling on wechat. According to my wife, she drops a few people a month because they start trying to sell her something.

She isn't marketing that way at all, she's buying Facebook ads and she has a page for her store. Her customers come to her through clicks or through asking their friends where they got their bags.

How does one sell on FB?

The community of glass artists I'm in has sold tons on facebook over the last few years. FB has always let you sell in Groups, and unlike many online venues, has zero problem with art glass pipes. It was the #1 place to sell online 2011-2013, then the community switched to Instagram. Instagram has since been the #1 place where people hold auctions and sell glass since then, and that's from $10 pendants to $500 tubes and up to $10, 20, 30k pieces.

So, to sell on FB, you say hey, i have this piece for $300, here's pics, I take paypal.

FB works with a handful of ecommerce platforms to enable this natively as well. https://www.bigcommerce.com/facebook/

For someone who is into vintage design and handmade interior design pieces, Etsy is still top notch, though.

There are some emerging competitors such as Chairish (overpriced), AptDeco (very little worth collecting), 1stDibs (hilariously overpriced) etc. And there's still eBay. But Etsy is still beating all of them. I have also yet to come across a bad seller there. Everyone I have bought from have not only provided a superb product, but also packaged it immaculately.

The search and discovery isn't great, I admit. (It's particularly hard to browse without being deluged with kitsch -- horrific "shabby chic" pieces made to look worn, or furniture made from old metal pipes or driftwood. They are lacking a "style" dimension.)

I miss regretsy.com. It had the ability to shame some of those vendors while being entertainment.

They need mass produced junk in order to have the revenue to be worth big money. I doubt there's enough genuinely artisanal product out there for them to stick to that business model and still have high growth...

I wonder how many viable product ideas have disappeared because the companies were too focused on exponential growth.

There's definitely a market for Etsy, but the concept behind it doesn't scale enough to meet crazy startup growth expectations.

If Etsy wants to moderate this, they can enforce GTIN verification. Google Shopping does this so they know how to rank bids for the same items by multiple department stores. Google Shopping requires that you put in some GTIN value (they verify it) or you make up your own Manufacturer Identifier (either you control manufacturing or you have a virtual item). The downside of using your own identifier is that they penalize you with worse cost / rankings but thats the cost of not having a GTIN.

How would that help? Each reseller could just create a unique GTIN for each item they resold. Nothing would force them to pick the same GTIN as other resellers of the same item.

My wife has a store on etsy selling handbags, and frankly, the traffic has gone done over the past year. She has a great reputation, and she still makes sales, but not because of Etsy. It's simply a store front for her where she can direct people that she finds via other avenues, such as Facebook and referrals. I imagine part of the reason of the decline is the fact that she focuses on higher end handbags, and doesn't try to compete on price. I've told her that she's isn't going to compete with Asia on price, so focus on quality and custom work.

Not to mention the fact that Etsy has done nothing to improve the sellers experience in years. Sure, they put out some new way to design your store front with something more custom, but practically speaking, it lacks critical features. She literally sent a customer to the store to pay for the bag via Etsy, and the customer couldn't find the PayPal button to pay because they didn't offer PayPal through the custom storefront.

It's really bad when your store prevents a legitimate customer from making a purchase, and that's literally what you are selling. Seriously.

Why not move to shopify?

Disclaimer: no relation, just a satisfied user.

Estsy is doomed because of this reason you stated. I call it '(downard) inflation of expectations'.

And there is a VERY GOOD information what happens with all this great 'do not eveil', do not harm, only for the consumer' startups the moment they have investors:

“The company’s historical pattern of ill-advised spending has completely obfuscated the extremely attractive underlying marketplace business model,” said by external activist investor in addition to: “We are fully prepared to take any actions we believe are necessary to protect the best interests of all Etsy shareholders.”

I remember the one-and-only time I used Etsy. It was for my wife for mother's day. I found a handmade ring that had holders for 3 tiny stones. I contacted the seller and asked if she could use 3 gem stones for each of our two children and pearl for their mom. It looked like I was gonna knock it out of the park for mother's day, she was gonna love it. I paid. Mother's day came and went, the seller's Etsy store went. After months of back and forth, Etsy issued me a refund. I lost that marriage, I guess it was the beginning of the end lol.

It sounds like this problem of fake self-made art could be prevented if etsy introduced a clause that prohibits sellers to sell items they haven't made themselves and fine any seller in violation. The fine could be a multiple of the last n months of revenue on etsy.

How would they ever enforce this?

I mean, maybe you can figure it out for the AliExpress case—but what about when it becomes one local "artisan" supplier supplying slightly-customized variants to each of its thousand Etsy-shop customers?

Or, beyond that, what about the case where something is 99% a pre-fab vendor good "base", and then 1% (or less) original work? Would an Etsy seller's signature on a store-bought mug make it "their" work?

Theoretically, Etsy already has that: https://www.etsy.com/legal/sellers/#allowed

The downside, I guess, is how to enforce it.

I was on the verge of setting up an Etsy shop (I have a bad habit of going to local auctions and buying china tableware for offensively low prices), but with this sort of thing going on, I'm conflicted.

Meanwhile, etsy is the only place I can shop for mens jewelry with any sense of success. Anecodtal evidence can point both ways.

Even if it's just a really effective store front, it works better for me than the huge retailers do. I'm gonna guess it depends heavily on what you're looking for.

I have to completely agree. The times I've bought something on Etsy I've spent hours filtering through the stuff that either didn't seem that interesting or unique or just wasn't handmade. So its more of a time commitment.

It seems like tons of things on AliExpress are just resold on Etsy. I was looking at plant seeds on there and just found and bought the exact same ones with same pics and everything without markup on AliExpress, so it isn't just jewelry and handmade items. That left a bad impression on me about Etsy.

You really shouldn't be buying plant seeds off the internet. Invasive species is a big problem, and even if you buy legit oregano (or whatever) seeds, there's a high risk that a couple of the seeds are really something else that's not native to your region.

I don't think these Japanese Maple and lavender and Carolina Reaper seeds are going to become invasive. :)

They aren't seeds originally found in China, they were just obtained elsewhere and then grown there cheaply and put on AliExpress, I assume.

As to worries about seed contamination from stray seeds from other countries like China, where do you think all the seeds in your seed catalog come from?

http://themindfulhome.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-definitive-gu...

"It's safe to say, a fair amount of what we purchase from distributors probably was grown in China." -Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (rareseeds.com)

"depending on the seed variety and specific lot, we may have seed that was sourced from China." -GrowOrganic.com (aka Peaceful Valley)

What is 'native'? All apple trees are Persian, in the end. Just because there are a few species that outcompete others, doesn't mean that we need to freeze whatever is the current state of geographic dispersion of species to the 'gold standard', that we will defend and maintain at all cost.

I explicitly seek out exotic seeds to see how they will behave in my climate. Diversity is good. This whole 'native first' (or rather, 'native only') needs to die already.

Well, there's quite a few examples of invasive species that have constituted significant threats to human, animal or plant health, for instance. Like malaria, the bubonic plague, minor nuisances like that.

For some examples from more recent times, the US timber industry has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting the Asian long-horned beetle, the citrus industry has an extensive quarantine program in place fighting Asian Citrus Psyllid, invasive varroa mite are part of the reason for the strong decline in honeybee populations, etc.

Now you may say, "but I'm not importing mosquitos, just seeds", but really with Chinese seed suppliers with unknown QA and no knowledge of the ecosystem in your region, you run a real risk of introducing fungi, bacteria, insects etc. that can spread and do serious damage. Do us all a favour and buy seeds in your own country, where at least some QA and vetting for big risk factors has been performed.

Diseases are just that, diseases, not invasive or not. 'Invasive' is about competition, not direct attack. Goes for all your examples. So if you're saying 'don't import diseases' - well yeah. But that's not the point here.

Please tell which fungi, bacteria and insects spread through the vector you propose. Where do you think the seed you buy in your local garden center comes from?

I already gave several examples of bad stuff that spreads through the proposed vectors. If you would like some literature to back this up, here you go.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/070151/full

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800904...

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vbz.2011.0814

The second one of those estimates the economic damage caused by invasive species in the US as $97 billion during the 20th century.

If you would rather like something written for the general public, here is an info page from the Australian government - or you could just try taking your imported seeds with you in your hand luggage when flying into Sydney, and see how well that goes.

http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive-species/...

The seeds you buy at your local garden center are subject to national and international laws, regulations and agreements specifically written based on work of hundreds of scientists to prevent as much as possible the introduction of diseases and other bad things that don't exist where you live. The garden center has to follow these regulations (and document compliance) or they get fined. When you buy seeds on eBay or AliExpress or wherever, there simply are no regulations on the sellers. Do you dispute this simple fact?

Some facts:

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

Invasive species tend to be a term used for things that thrive and choke out all competition and ultimately come to dominate and severely alter the landscape. Ultimately they tend to be bad for diversity.

Sorta like humans, except in plant/other animal form.

Strawman. GP was saying 'don't buy overseas seeds because they are species that are not native to wherever you are importing them to'. Which doesn't make sense - whether a species out competes another doesn't depend on where it's from. Sure, when you introduce some species into certain ecosystems, those ecosystems will change. Nobody's saying you shouldn't think and/or manage. What I'm saying is that the whole 'exotic is bad' line of thinking ultimately boils down to the naturalistic fallacy.

Exotic is bad when it costs the US economy $167bn a year, which is a realistic estimate of the amount lost because of the effects of invasive species of all kinds.

If you think that's a "naturalistic fallacy" perhaps you need to brush up on your economics.

this change should occur naturally and not be man made- we don't understand complex eco-systems enough to make such servere changes.

there is a reason why certain things are native- I would suggest a more humble approach!

Right, because apple trees took a stroll across the Mediterranean to settle in Europe?

No, obviously humans brought them over. Those same humans also brought the rat all over Europe, and with it the Bubonic Plague aka. the Black Death - which killed a third of the human population - full stop. Think about that one for a while.

Agreed, I tend to stay away from anything taking more than a week to arrive.

I recently made my first purchase on Etsy for mother's day for my wife. Her father recently passed and I got his fingerprint on a necklace from https://etsy.com/shop/RachelRothJewelry I received terrific customer service, the shop owner went way out of her way to edit the fingerprint which was basically a blob. I received the print a couple days ago and for about 1/5 of what the funeral home would have charged for the same thing, even after editing. So there are definitely some great shops on etsy but I did have to look around a lot to find a shop which could deliver this in under 2 weeks.

Less is more. I think this case is a prime example of how chasing higher revenue gets you in trouble in the long run. Amazon also suffers from this, just look at the recent cases of fake products.

Just out of curiosity how much did you pay for the necklace from etsy?

Why are poor reviews not enough to combat this? (in the long term)

Every poor review represents a failure and an unhappy customer. You want to stop that before it happens.

Because reviews are extremely easy to game.

What's Etsy's policy in this sort of situation?

Amazon is also having this problem. Their marketplace is flooded with knock-offs and incredibly low-end goods masquerading as cashmere or wool. It's either wholesale garbage or drop-shipped.

My wife bought something at a "local artist fair". They didn't even bother to remove the "made in china" sticker.

All of my local farmers markets are full of aliexpress crap. At least they're smart enough to remove tags. I've asked what kind of solder they used for a specific piece. "uhhh. just the normal stuff".