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.