Etsy is for artists/creators. If you add curation to the mix one side needs to take a hit - and it ain't going to be your wallet.
Basically the reason for Etsy to exist is "direct to consumer" model, with low intermediary overhead and 0 setup hurdles.
(If you ever tried to get a product on a supermarket shelf, that's how it is to get onto a successful curated store shelf)
You don't go there. They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?
Let them fail. It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...
Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past they've done a great job living up to that promise for me, and I have to assume others have had similar experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium knockoffs and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose our business.
So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer Etsy over other options.
And my experience with Etsy is that it's a crafty people selling low quality handmade stuff.
Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.
Well, that's your loss. But it may be Etsy's loss, too, if they allow chintzy crap from overseas to drive the quality sellers off their platform. Amazon has embraced the race to the bottom, so I don't see anybody else competing effectively with them without (at the very least) being all-in on Chinesium.
There is no way around this in the free market. Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE. Its about making people consume. Making people want sh*t that in reality they could live without. Overloaded by stimulii, people break. People want the dream. They hear about the dream. People want the cheapest thing so they can 100x instead of 2x. People who knock things off want the most popular thing. This is competition working. Its a race to the bottom or we sacrifice infinite growth. There is no other way. You either create new markets, create new consumers, or steal other peoples cut of the pie. "Disruption".
Apple is not an ad company, Tesla is not an ad company, Microsoft mostly isn’t an ad company, Netflix isn’t an ad company.
There are very few of the large companies that are ad companies.
This past weekend I noticed a Dollar General had popped up nearby. They’re like weeds in rural Indiana.
I have no doubt that within a year or two the small grocery store will be gone, and I’ll no longer have a convenient place to buy that bread I like so much.
Yes, I do want to go back to mom and pop shops.
Dollar General pops up, where people are very, very, price sensitive.
That "mom and pop" shop is either for tourists or is taking an unreasonable rent off the local economy.
I now live in a rural area and I like my local artisanal stores. But they cannot sustain the economy, due to very high overhead.
They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're just a shitty ebay.
If that were so - then your local supermarket is a curated store. (which would be a preposterous claim to make)
Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not a good reason to ignore doing something that your business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with buyers).
Google has zero incentive to actually win that conflict, as frequently the SEO spam serves up ads from which google directly profits.
I understand the desire to make sure that goods are authentic, but that is the only reasonable argument in the whole strike manifesto.
It's totally possible on an e-commerce platform. Just nobodies quite managed it yet.
B) Are investors not allowed to make any return on their investments in form of dividends?
Because otherwise their brand is asymptotically approaching just being a more expensive Ali Express.
So no... They don't need to. And curated storefronts were many - I knew of at least 5 startups in that space - they all folded.
If they do not, many sellers will stop using them. Many buyers will stop using them. They will have competition.
Let them fail.
"Why?"
"Because if they don't they'll fail."
"Now you're arguing for a monopoly."
You can't possibly be arguing in good faith at this point.
PS: And then miss our further interaction
Whatever comes next will be small. They will lack some of the things I want for many years.
Also - monopolies are never good.
Etsy does listen to it's consumers, at least some times. The cost of complaining here is commensurate with the potential benefit.
So what is the bottom line? Consumers get to enjoy products that are 2x cheaper and 4x worse. Individual makers get priced out and have to join the drone ranks. And the corporate owners of trademarks and algorithms rake in so much cash they don't know where to invest it anymore.
Sadly, this is happening across every sector, and most people seem to be just fine with it.
Before manufactured goods were on the platform, you were basically browsing items that were either handmade or hand curated. It was a much better experience.
Based on my experience, curators add an extra 50%+ to the price of a product. Which is the cost of well curated storefront.
I still occasionally find small sellers on Etsy whose stuff interests me and I always wonder why they choose to sell via Etsy and I’m sure it’s: because it works and because it’s less hassle than the other options. The traffic to your shop is worth swimming in a sea of knockoffs and doodads. And that’s what you compete with on the internet at large anyway.
But if i am selling someone elses stuff, then i am in the business of curation.
They also decided to be way more lax, than some people want it to be.
Our biggest electronics chain Conrad however... oh jesus they have gone really downhill some years ago with their website design - the search is broken, metadata for parts are (sometimes completely) wrong, and to make it worse even the in-store staff has to rely on the website instead of a dedicated ERP software which means if you are searching for a part with specific specs (e.g. temperature) even the store staff can't help you any more!
What the fuck!
I just left and bought something online.
(I know there are high end hifi shops that will let me try headphones. But I wasn't looking for 500€ headphones, I just wanted something that didn't sound like shit. Thomann is perfect for that.)
Record player sales are booming though, according to the shop I went to.
It still puzzles me how much of a disconnect exists between e-commerce and brick & mortar, almost 25 years from Gates's "Business at the speed of thought".
Those people who come in the store should be converted right there and then, by making it trivial to order in-store a home delivery option that is price-competitive with non-b&m-equipped businesses. Keep razor-thin local inventory that commands a premium for the fact that you get it there and then, and everything else can be ordered. This should allow you to offset a decent amount of showroom costs while still competing with web-only operations.
If the price difference is small enough and the friction low enough, making the order in-store becomes a better option than leaving, sitting down somewhere, searching again for the item on some other store, etc etc.
There are still big opportunities out there for retailers who can figure out that sweet spot.
I mean, I get your pain. But on the other hand I'm just sick about the Mittelstand complaining that online is eating their lunch... they have all sat on their wealth and glory and thought they had carved out their forever niche guaranteeing themselves profits without having to do anything any more, and every single one that collapses fills my heart with a bit of joy.
I think that's a good thing. The business of "holding things in a building" that are occasionally purchased and don't benefit from last-mile caching should go the way of the dinosaur. It will be good to get the space back. The thing that's really needed is a community space but the economics of it are hard unless you're selling stuff. My city tries to promote this stuff with arts council grants.
This is tough, as a lot of artistic items have quality control that is purely subjective. But, often these places are not much more curated than the vendor room of a convention. There will be some nice things; but claims of curation are all too often over sold.
I'm an Apple One subscriber. I only listen to Apple Music during my morning three-mile walk (45-50 minutes). The rest of the day, I'm working, and I don't listen to music, then.
I use their "Create A Station Based on This Song" feature, like Pandora. It generally works fairly well (I think Pandora works better, but they also limit skips -even for paid subscriptions).
I like to hear obscure, indie, music, from artists off the beaten path. I tend to immediately skip, when I get a song that is in my library, or that I've heard a lot (like the song used to create the station). I also tend to skip a lot, anyway, because a lot of undiscovered music is obscure for a reason.
One time, I was listening to relaxing, wordless, techno/trance, and a freaking Lady Gaga pop song plops in, like an airborne gift from a dyspeptic, incontinent, buzzard. The only possible relation to what I was listening to, was that one of her band members was maybe playing a sampler. She's a talented artist, and all that, but that was not what I wanted to hear. It was quite jarring.
Someone is selling eardrums. That was probably an AI hiccup.
In any case, my suggestion was to create "Undiscovered Music" stations, so you say "Play more songs like this one, but ones I've not heard before, and are definitely not in my library."
I would want to hear indie tracks, and songs from obscure artists. I listen to a lot of different types of music, and most of my tastes are heavily represented in the indie space. I often find it difficult to discover music that I'm not already familiar with.
I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless. They'd probably kill it, soon afterwards, because "Nobody uses this service."
The current push for "Bigger, Louder, MOAR!" is something that does not favor craftsmanship, Quality, or independence.
Why would they do that? It would be massively unpopular, per your own comment, so I can't understand why that would be a commercial move.
It's not even like an indie radio station selling out, because a radio station is at least (usually) an independent competing entity. It's more like a record shop inexplicably filling its death metal section with madrigals.
It would simply lose those customers who liked it, and not even gain any others, since pop customers want the opposite thing (and are already amply catered to) so wouldn't even click on it to begin with.
In my experience, "monetization" people Just. Can't. Bear. To. See. Anything. Not. Making. Money.
It seems to be something that causes them physical discomfort, and they regularly destroy so many good things, by trying to make money from them.
Call me a cynic.
Asking for an all-new list is akin to asking for a HIIT workout plan, but without the pauses.
I've had issues with these. There's so many spammy, garbage playlists, that it's impossible to pick out the good ones (and I have found gems, but it's a lot of work).
Eg
*hello* there
hello there
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course, uppercase is appropriate for an acronym or initialism that actually is spelled that way, such as SEO in the comment we're replying to.
\*this\* becomes *this*.
And before you ask, to show the backslash, you add another backslash. \\*this\\* becomes \*this\*
This will never happen with Etsy, Amazon, or any other publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible. If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will. If you want a platform like you are describing it will have to be privately owned.
There has been this odd trend over the last few years of mischaracterizing what this means/what that duty translates to. People talk about it as if every CEO has to redline the company at all times and never think about longterm consequences for literally any reason. Every single cent that can be extracted right now must be extracted or the investors will rise up in all their anger crying out "FIDUCIARY DUTY!" as they drag the poor CEO off kicking and screaming.
Companies can think longterm. They're allowed to sacrifice short term profits for sustainability/longevity. I don't get where people get this idea that they can't. To me, "fiduciary duty" has become almost memetic - it's some weird hand wave-y line people throw out to excuse businesses being short-sighted, as if they never had a choice.
They act as if they have no choice, that there is some legal mandate to just wring out a company all day every day and damn all consideration beyond “I can make another dollar this second.”
I feel like this is in semi-myth territory. Yes, there have been cases where shareholders have sued company leadership because they weren't making them as much money as they could. But it's not quite as clear-cut and well-tested in the courts as you make it sound.
Management has a ton of latitude to run the business as they see fit. The "remedy" for bad business decisions is supposed to be divesting and starting a competitor, not the courts.
Cases like Dodge v. Ford or Caremark are odd because the board was basically not running a business at all: Ford flat-out said he was doing something not for the business, but in support of his philanthropic beliefs. Caremark was so asleep at the helm that they racked up a quarter-billion dollars in silly fines.
Anyone can, of course, sue over anything, but if it's even vaguely legitimate (and the "facts" in Shlensky v. Wrigley are pretty bonkers, IMO), they won't win.
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the
benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
number, to help them build up their lives and their homes."
It's been argued that if he said less ("No, just no"), or a bit more ("And this will let us recruit the best workers/expand our customer base/etc"), he would have been fine. This commentary lays that argument out nicely: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/603
It isn't a straight-forward call to make. The current status-quo with resellers might be making money now, but there will be long-term brand damage in exchange. Will their business still be viable in 5 years if they develop a reputation for being Aliexpress lite?
No. Optimize for shareholder value.
Amazon shareholders, for instance, are happy to make little in way of profit because Amazon management has shown an ability to increase the value of the enterprise.
In general though, the market is legitimately skeptical of most managers which is not a bad thing.
Of course. Because by definition you’ve sacrificed the short term and the long term for nothing. But I don’t think anyone here would debate that so I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at.
That is not accurate. They are required to operate in a manner that is satisfactory to their owners, who delegate that responsibility to the board of directors, who then set policy for management to execute.
There is no difference between a publicly traded and privately owned company in terms of the responsibilities of the management and board to their shareholders.
There are numerous incentives to maximize shareholder returns (eg taxation incentives, equity value improvement, dividends), but there is nothing in law or otherwise that applies a fiduciary duty to management or the directors of a company to maximize either dividends or capital value.
> If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will.
This is exactly what happened at Etsy when they fired the previous CEO and installed Josh Silverman.
Etsy could certainly argue their bottom line in the long term will be helped by curating a higher quality marketplace and getting rid of junk sellers, if that's a problem.
Most managers are not Steve Jobs.