throwaway61891
except they're trying to capitalize on the marketplace part too: https://about.pinterest.com/en/shopping-pinterest
> Certain Instagram networks are all about products
ditto: http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/152598788716/shoppin...
> former Etsy sellers who, once they achieved traction with their products, decided to build their brands on their own and not compete toe-to-toe with copycat sellers
yeah, this is etsy's real problem - they do a bad job of keeping top sellers on the platform. i haven't seen much attrition because of copycats, but more that etsy is just a really bad platform for managing a big shop. the fact that your sellers went to shopify is, to me, just evidence of that.
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).
i mean even if you look at major alternatives to etsy (like shopify), they still are "centralized" in that regard.
buyers also need some sort of discovery platform - even if it's just google, then google becomes the centralized platform, no?
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.
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.
that was not my experience at all. officially, open source was encouraged because it raised etsy's stock in the tech community, which was beneficial for hiring.
unofficially, middle managers discouraged it because it detracted from shipping quickly (which made them look good to upper management).
obviously the CTO/etc. could've just been paying the engineers lip service about open source, but they seemed to genuinely support and encourage open source contributions. they certainly celebrated when open source contributions actually happened.
lots of reasons, but around that time etsy invested heavily in infrastructure and tools like statsd resulted from it.
the last few years the focus has been mostly on product, and product teams usually don't produce the kind of significant technology contributions you're talking about (huge generalization there obviously).
this is more of a personal opinion, but my experience was that the last few years etsy has focused less on technical solutions to problems and more on "people solutions" - if something is inefficient they look for non-technical solutions to that problem, sometimes fruitlessly. as you can imagine in that environment, things like statsd don't get made.