Somebody sent me an Amazon gift card a while back, and I still haven't found reason to use it. The only thing I still find Amazon useful for is to buy small amounts of industrial supplies and parts that are usually sold directly from suppliers to businesses in large amounts, who often have terrible web storefronts (or only use Amazon for ecommerce) because they usually deal with their (buy-by-the-case, repeat) customers by phone or in person. If I only need two specialized bolts or two feet of tubing, I'll go to Amazon.
My cloud computing has moved to GCP, DO, and my homelab (built from eBay stuff!).
I still use Amazon if I have no other option. I just pay for shipping, but surprise… it’s usually still free over $25.
#cancelprime
It's crazy how these 2 platforms seemed to have switched places. Several years ago, Amazon would have been the place to do for scam-free purchasing, and eBay was the shady site that you had to do your due diligence on before buying.
More and more it's the opposite. I have to wrangle with searches and filters on Amazon to try and avoid the "fake" brands and knockoff goods. eBay is easier and often cheaper to boot.
Amazon, on the other hand, has nearly done the opposite. They don't do anything about scammers and have created an environment where even when you buy something directly from amazon you might get a knock off. You can't trust anything there.
Everyone knows the amazon reviews are garbage, even amazon. Yet they keep them because having 1000 garbage reviews looks better than having 10 legitimate reviews (and many of them negative).
Amazon has optimized for moving any and everything.
I'm not saying Target's implementation is justified, but surely there's a middle ground for scaling anti-theft ops and using technology responsibly?
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmkyq/heres-the-file-clearv...
We don't live in ancapistan.
I mean that's obviously not true. Otherwise they wouldn't have security cameras.
Amazing how Amazon wants to push me back into prime, heavy handed or subtile.
Seems like the free shipping and 2nd day shipping is all but a thing of the past.
A bunch of brands officially sell through Amazon and super fast shipping.
If you're in a metropolis - you get a lot of benefits, including 1 hour groceries.
It's interesting how without prime they tell me it takes one week to be sent (or some days), but then always after ordering correcting shipping date down, most often to the same as prime (which makes sense, holding back my order would only create costs to them).
Why'd you say free and 2-day shipping is a thing of the past? All my shipping from Amazon is free, and 2 day is the slowest it arrives usually. Mostly I get things next day, sometimes within 12 hours
Turns out my old PayPal account had a minor issue, and that meant I couldn't use ebay even if I didn't even have my PayPal account linked to ebay anymore and I was using a new credit card. I had to figure that out by myself, ebay was completely useless and unhelpful.
There's still a few items that are really hard to find elsewhere though, but that was Amazon's core value prop originally with rare books.
All of this is to say I’m trying various ways to limit my participation with dubious companies but I’ve had to pick my battles for myself and my family as we all do. Not using Prime has been a relatively convenient and painless change that I was able to do.
I invested heavily for years in getting various AWS certs. Leaving it behind for my personal cloud computing wasn’t easy to do, but my side projects and day job have recently lined up around GCP so I’ve been putting energy there.
I’m not convinced my choices are going to make much of a difference, but I would make them again at this point.
Unless Ebay has overhauled their reputation system recently, you will buy counterfeit/mislabeled goods from a merchant, and then either receive a bribe (as a partial return) to keep a five star rating or you have to open an incident to get a full refund, in which you can't leave a rating and tell other people to beware.
This allows terrible merchants from all parts of the world to push crap on unsuspecting customers.
The way to differentiate in my experience is the Chinese sellers often won’t have a city or post code in their ships from address shown on the listing, and more obviously the postage times are twice as long (or more) than an actually local seller.
I've sold on Etsy for a while as a hobby side business. The change seems to happen after their IPO. It felt like pretty quickly after that there began a trickle of incremental changes. A rule that allowed "manufacturing partners" really opened a huge loophole though, and in general things went down hill rapidly over the last 2-3 years.
There's only so much you can get from handcrafting.
On the other hand, if you consider "scale" to be > $300k/year, then yes it's hard to do it without a manufacturing partner. And that can be a legitimate route even within the traditional Etsy framework! Design something, punch out countless copies w/ the "partner", and do final finishing/customization yourself. Or a few other similar models. The problem is this opened the door for sellers & etsy to rationalize keeping all sorts of definitively not handcrafted items in the marketplace. At best it's handmade by the "partner" through mass cheap 3rd world labor. At worse it's white labelled junk.
Anyway, the entire point of Etsy is that, even if "there's only so much you can get from handcrafting", that was what Etsy was for. The place where true, actual, real handcrafters were selling their items. Sure, it represents a cap on scale, but that was Etsy's mission. Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Scale is value and the potential to sales increase. Software license sales have infinite scale, Gwyneth Paltrow egg sales is high scale and $200 hand crafted in spare time earing sales is no scale.
> Not to become some front end for Aliexpress or the knockoff junk you find on Amazon.
Yes, it was intended a storefront for handmade junk for 2x the price... With occasional interesting things.
For my part, a fair number of my items are non trivial to duplicate without a distinct loss in quality, so I still get reasonable sales and could probably ramp things up of I wanted/needed to.
However some things I sell have been SEO squated with crap quality items that don't even look remotely the same quality, but I don't have the energy or need for additional sales to optimize my own SEO. So, right now, I sell items that mostly average out to $40/hour profit, which isn't too bad for a hobby I enjoy.
About 80% are items that are pretty routine but still fun to make knowing the recipient will like them. The other 20% are truly unique items that I love making as more of an artistic endeavor, even though the time:cost ratio is much less in my favor than the other 80%. But that's also why mass producers can't poach my sales -- the market is way too small for these niche items to create a production line to copy them.
I'm working in a medium (leather tooling) where you really can't reproduce handmade quality at a mass scale. At least not economically: custom die cuts w/ embossing plates and personalization aren't economical for unique designs where I can offer 50 variations even though some of them might only sell 1 every 3 months, and the handmade version looks better than the mass produced stamped-out design anyway.
It's very hard to find a niche like this though. A lot of things are easier to replicate in exact detail than hand-carved leather.
I'm saying that crafting community isn't large enough to produce enough goods to sustain Etsy. Therefore wholesale outsourcing of production is the only way.
These days you can outsource original product manufacturing in moderate quantities as well. Doesn't mean that you're not the artist behind them.
I make electronics and have most of my PCBs fully prebuilt by mass manufacturer.
I don't have a problem with "manufacturing partners" in this sense. It's when that loophole is used to justify or hide countless sellers simply white labelling items that is the problem. If I make a design and have a manufacture stamp out copies in the thousands, but then offer customization that I add JIT for each order (a hallmark of etsy) then that's fine. But if I take a $0.50 beaded necklace bought in bulk on Alibaba and resell then at $10 with not other value added, that does not fit the supposed mission of Etsy. Take that to Amazon, Ebay, & it's okay. But it's absolutely not within the handcrafted marketplace, even when "handcrafted" is loosely defined, that Etsy is supposed to be.
Credit where it's do though, the tools I bought from Romania are amazing, unique, top quality. For some reason there's a few countries in Eastern Europe (Ukraine actually is one of them) where leather crafting has become somewhat popular and there are a few Etsy stores with fantastic items. They don't use the absolute best quality leather, but it's good: orders of magnitude above what you'd find in stores, and the construction is solid
(also leather is an area where price increases near exponentially with quality. Cheap junk like PU leather is maybe $0.25 per square foot in large bulk. Lowest quality real leather is about $1, and is actually still a fine choice for certain type of items if used carefully. Okay leather might run about $5 a sqft, good to very good will be $10, $20, $50, and the absolute best can be $100 to $200 per sqft. Although it's important to know that not all leather is suited to ever task. And sometimes the price:quality ratio is about product consistency. You might pay $20/sqft for a side of leather that has near perfect consistency in thickness and lack of surface defects. Very important if you're making large items, and they have a usable portion of 80 or 90%. But you can also buy miss-split that are uneven thickness and have some surface defects for $3. The usable portion may only be 60%, but if you're making small items you're still getting the same very high quality leather, you just have more scrap left over. You can even find a use for that too: some people really like the "character" that natural imperfections add to an item. Or I use it as practice pieces testing out new designs, no Sorry, more than you probably were looking for on leather detail. But it's HN so I figured there's often people interested in the minutiae of non-tech fields)
Keep in mind Etsy only takes a cut, and it's close to 8%. If I sell a $100 item they take about 7% in transaction fees. Then there's merchant fees for payment processing. I'm sure Etsy take a cut of them, and they are about 3%, so assuming they get 1 point of that their total take is 8%.
In comparison Ebay w/ PayPal merchant fees is a few points higher at about 14%. Which if you're selling high volume low margin race-to-bottom Alibaba junk then the extra 3-4% profit explains why Etsy's loosing of seller restrictions has attracted so much junk. The bank payment processing probably isn't doing an even split, so I would guess that Etsy's take really is right about 8% of seller revenue.
That’s what Etsy’s board chose when they appointed ex-eBay executive Josh Silverman to be Etsy’s CEO: https://www.etsy.com/team/member/jsilverman (2017)
More background: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/8/1... (2018), https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/9/4/20841475/etsy-free-sh... (2019).
Chad Dickerson ran Etsy. Josh Silverman turned it into eBay.
Probably not great if you want the actual thing, in hand. No one spending 3x the price of a Steam Deck right now will want that price going towards launching it into orbit instead of having it in hand, playing games. Still, maybe there's a market for "owning" orbiting space debris contributing to Kessler Syndrome? Sort of like buying & burning an item to make an artificial scarcity NFT? Only this way you get to contribute to the destruction of mankind's ability to easily launch anything into orbit.
They can raise short-term profits this way. The problem is that there's only so much rent you can seek before it becomes unprofitable for sellers. It turns out that "industrial-scale" sellers, copycats and outright scammers have lower operating costs which means they can stick around and replace the independent creators that have essentially been priced out of the market. Of course, in the long-term it will be the death of the company, but by that time, bonuses would've been paid, raises would've been awarded, stock would've vested and lots of "shareholder value" would've been created.
They've also recently bought Depop for a significant amount of money and I'm not sure if it's profitable, so they might be intentionally cannibalizing their earlier product to make money to prop up the next one.
In a different context, someone made a great point that your first million users don't necessarily need to be included in your next 20 million. Maybe Etsy has or will cycle through all their early buyers & sellers. But that doesn't matter if the group cycling in is more valuable.
That's essentially what old-school furniture & home stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce and margins are low.
I also suspect that a lot of the industrial-scale producers & copycats use the artisans as their R&D department and only copy their successful designs. In this case, the innovation still comes from the small-scale independent sellers, which if they are driven off the platform would eventually kill off the industrial-scale sellers and copycats as they'd no longer have anything to copy (and designing in-house might make them unprofitable).
Eh, I can't think of a directly comparable site. The closest would be something like Pier 1, but there's no customization there and it's all sold by Pier 1.
What means is that these craftspeople don't produce enough value for the markets they are targeting.
Nothing really. Most people do not pay attention to how the sausage is made. They don't care if the car service they use was a total toxic fratbro culture using unsustainable pricing to lure in users. They just wanted "cheap" rides without caring about why they were cheap. Just as another comment on this topic suggested they don't care about original as long as the thing they want is cheaper.
So no, I don't really think that educated populace will stop supporting shit practices because they can't be bothered.
Like one possible story is that Etsy does this and it's shitty for sellers and maybe a lot of buyers too, but it ends up making Etsy successful in the long-run so they don't care.
That's not the story I'm telling though, it's one where Etsy chases medium-term revenue at the cost of their long-term niche and thus their long-term success. If me and GP are right, in theory Etsy itself ought to not want this to happen.
Like what if you had a fine dining restaurant where things are going okay, and someone comes in and is like "Hey guys, I noticed we're spending a lot of time washing plates. We'd be able to serve X% more customers if we just like scraped off the food and did a quick rinse." The restaurant tries it, it works for a bit until diners see specs of old food on their plates, the restaurant's reputation tanks, they lose all their customers, and they go out of business.
I think most restaurants are structured such that this does not happen. The restaurants correctly see that even though it seems like doing this might make some graphs go up in the short-term, it will actually make everything terrible in the long-term, and so they don't do it.
And again, this isn't about like, benevolent restaurant owners valuing the custom experience even if it's bad for the bottom line. Washing the plates thoroughly is good for the bottom line; any sufficiently intelligent restaurant owner shouldn't listen to the bean counter even if the owner's just a greedy capitalist.
(This reads enough like a Scott Alexander post that I'm pretty sure I might just actually be copying one; I think he wrote something along these lines once.)
[0]: Again, all of this is precipitated on the idea that actually Etsy will fail once it loses its niche, since it'll just get beaten by Amazon/eBay/etc. when it's just like any other seller of goods. If what's really going to happen is that Etsy will do fine as a company, then this becomes a totally different shape of problem: "the market rewards things that we actually maybe don't want for society".
Fail means different things to different people, but to the stockholders that the bean counters are beholden to determine fail/success by stock price and profits. What definition the original users of the site expecting handmade/small batch type of items have of fail/success means nothing to those in charge. It's not really a hard subject to understand is it? You have to accept that the "leadership" of Etsy is different now than when it was created. Their ethos has changed. It happens. You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality. People still use Google now that "don't be evil" is no longer their ethos.
If Etsy can fit in just becoming another giant generic undifferentiated seller of things, then yeah, this all checks out.[0] But my question is how much room the market has for those kinds of businesses. If Etsy does become just another big generic seller of things, why keep using them over Amazon, eBay, or Walmart? What are they going to compete with them on?
It's true Amazon used to be more niche (books), but I think they were early enough that they didn't have to worry too much about someone crushing them.
Walmart was always a giant seller of things, just a physical one that went online, but I don't think they were ever really niche.
Did eBay have a niche? I thought they were also pretty much just selling generic stuff from the beginning.
[0]:
> You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality.
I think you're confusing not thinking this is likely with some kind of denialism/not wanting it to be true. I don't especially care a whole lot if Etsy ends up being a giant generic seller of things, I'm just not sure that'll work. At the point where Etsy is just re-skinned Amazon, what stops Amazon from crushing them?
OR
They remain a private business that keeps that long term aim in spite of the volatility they are bound to experience over time.
Etsy buys them to prevent a viable alternative to taking hold.
At the end of the day, there is typically a number that can be written on a check that will persuade.
I bought from Etsy once, but even then the items were recommended to me via Instagram. Etsy in 2014 was already filled with poorly made "artsy" crap at double the price.
No idea why people are so excited about it.
Most users of etsy do not care about source or authenticity. They just want what they see for the price listed.
Losing the handmade trinket shops is meaningless compared to the full scale China operation doing 100x more business. Customers by and large cannot tell the difference nor do they actually care too much.
In their niche, they had a smaller addressable market, but they had a moat from their brand within said niche. Outside of the niche, that moat doesn't exist, and they are competing against Amazon, Ebay, and many others.
Market for cheap Chinese goods.
Market for handmade trinkets.
I have a pretty good feeling that I know which one is more profitable. I'm sure investors know too.
The websites that function as clearinghouses (Amazon, Etsy, etc.) could figure out ways to prevent it but they have incentives to play along with obfuscation as to which market the consumer is shopping in.
However, there's not enough to demand to keep the shareholders of an IPO'ed company happy.
And there's the problem.
Is Etsy such a good aggregator, that setting up a storefront with Square is that hard?
These Etsy people sound like entitled brats.