> 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.