Etsy hurt my business for no reason
Other than what they called a “technical error”
Other than their own mismanaged, increasingly automated, startlingly inhumane systems
And I find that reason difficult to swallow
So I’m going to write about exactly the sorts of harm Etsy Inc. effectuates on small businesses like mine. I’m going to tell you exactly the damage this has caused in our business’s life. And I’m going to try to detail just how hurtful it feels to be wading through this damage now.
This has been a very human experience. That’s what makes it so hard. Big Tech platforms like Etsy cause harm to human lives; they cause this harm with total impunity, total disregard for the lived realities of the people whose work they profit from.
Etsy shut down our business for no reason
They forced Unfettered Co into “Vacation Mode” for 11 days. Vacation mode is a no-man’s land on the Etsy platform. In its intention, it’s a tool for shops to pause their business’s activity while they take a break.
But we’re algorithmically punished for putting our shops into Vacation Mode. And we’re algorithmically punished for our shops being forced into Vacation Mode too. Because Etsy’s platform works with the help of automated search algorithms, shops cease to exist in searches once they’re in Vacation Mode. The life of an e-commerce business depends on its visibility online, and that’s why my business has never taken a break. It’s not that we haven’t needed a vacation over the past six years. We absolutely have needed a break. But we haven’t taken one. We haven’t taken a break because we’ve invested all of our time, our energy, our effort, our money, and our heart into building and sustaining the quirky little life form that is Unfettered Co. We’ve wanted our business to succeed, and so we’ve never turned its lights off on Etsy.
And still, we were randomly punished by a bot-driven platform that understands nothing of the human toll of building and running a successful small business on Etsy.
I’m not certain that I can adequately convey the feeling of never taking a sustained break from work for six years because you fear the very real consequences of taking that much-needed break–only to discover that Etsy has suddenly and inexplicably strong armed your business into an 11-day Vacation Mode suspension (without just cause, withholding visibility from your business, withholding revenue, and withholding assistance). The injustice of that is real. The helplessness of it stays with you. It still makes me shake.
We built a very successful business on Etsy
As of the time of writing this, Unfettered Co has made 193,300 sales on the Etsy platform.
As of the time of writing this, Unfettered Co has 22,900 people who’ve favourited and followed our shop on the Etsy platform.
As of the time of writing this, Unfettered Co has received 31,800 5-star reviews from customers on the Etsy platform
As of the time of writing this, Unfettered Co has paid Etsy close to $900,000 in seller fees to operate on the Etsy platform.
The time it takes us to respond to a customer’s message or request for help ranges from 5 minutes to 18 hours on the Etsy platform
The time it took Etsy to respond to our cries for help when our shop was locked into Vacation Mode due to what they’ve now told us was their own “technical error” was 456 hours. I spoke with “Etsy support” call centre agents on the phone more than 8 times while our shop was wrongfully shut down. I pleaded with them. I told them this was bankrupting our business (because it was). I told them that my partner and I risked losing our home (because we did). I told them that our employees’ livelihoods were at risk (because they were). I cried. I got angry. I pointed to numbers and facts. I made all of the appeals I could muster. And the only answer I was given was to check my inbox and spam folder because that’s how Etsy would ultimately communicate with me.
When Etsy finally did communicate with me, they offered me 10 free 20 cent listing credits ($2.00 value) in compensation for their error, along with $100 in Etsy ad credits should Unfettered Co make future sales on their platform. In other words, Etsy offered me $102 in an attempt to compensate for their sizeable error that still might cost us our business. Their error that still might cost us our home. Their error that still might cost the livelihoods of everyone working for Unfettered Co.
The only way we were able to get Etsy to remove the Vacation Mode suspension from our shop was by making direct contact with one of their influencers on Instagram. The humans of Etsy Inc. are virtually unreachable by their company’s design.
My business has been successful on Etsy because of our customer service
No, really. That’s what it boils down to. Selling successfully on Etsy has very little to do with fancy photos, with branding, with social media marketing, or with copywriting. Success on the Etsy platform depends entirely on customer service. It boils down to whether or not you can repeatedly match a purchase with a product and an experience that a customer will appreciate enough to do one of three things:
- Leave a 5-star review
- Tell others about your shop
- Purchase again from your shop
The hyper visibility of a shop’s reviews on Etsy makes the experience of selling on Etsy very different than the experience of selling on a website or a different e-commerce platform. It adds a layer of transparency that is quite simply unavoidable.
I’ve always liked that particular challenge of selling on Etsy because I’ve always valued transparency and communication with customers. I’ve thought that rising to the occasion of this challenge again and again really shapes a business. I’ve thought that it’s in moments where something goes wrong with an order that a business has a chance to make a difference in a customer’s day (and sometimes, that can translate into making a difference in a customer’s whole outlook on businesses).
The experience of being a consumer is an important one! We don’t really talk about our identities as consumers very often. Yet, it’s one of the things we do. We buy stuff from people selling stuff. In a way, consuming can shape a significant portion of our contact with the outside world.
Our two simple practices of customer service on Etsy
Ok, I’m dishing here. I’m dishing on exactly how we succeeded on Etsy. Take note…
Customer Service Practice #1: We’re accountable to our errors
I’m not saying that Unfettered Co has never erred in customer service. I’ve responded to some messages in ways I’m not proud of. But, I can count those instances on a single hand. On the whole, I feel incredibly proud of just how well I’ve shown care for our customers and attended to their needs. When it comes to customer care, we’ve abided by a few simple rules of thumb:
If we’ve made a mistake as a business, we take responsibility for that mistake by making it right for our customer. Every time. If something is not quite fully our mistake, but could potentially be sort of our mistake, we make that right for our customer too. Without fault. We do this because we remember what it’s like to have spent money on a thing that doesn’t pan out like you’d expected. That’s a helpless feeling to be left with: it’s the feeling of injustice. From running a small business, I’ve learned that it’s quite easy to prevent your customers from feeling that shaky, powerless feeling of injustice. Preventing that feeling will diminish short-term profits, but it assists with the greater public good, and it also helps the staying power of a small business. The choice to make something right for a customer when your business has erred is exercising a sustainability practice that aligns with choosing longterm gain over short term profit. Seeing that equation is how we’ve succeeded in selling on Etsy
Does Etsy live up to our customer service practice?
Etsy has two different facets of customers: their sellers, and their sellers’ customers. They benefit financially from both. Etsy Inc.’s current CEO, Josh Silverman is very fond of metaphor and he calls this two-sided marketplace “lighting in a bottle.”
In my relationship with Etsy, I was their customer. I was an ace-in-the-hat customer for Etsy. I brought people to their platform. My presence on their platform encouraged others to become sellers there. As a customer, I’ve paid Etsy close to a million dollars. Imagine that. Imagine having spent close to one million dollars on a business that refuses to respond to you when something about the product they’re selling goes horribly wrong. Imagine that, when that business does respond to you, their resolution feels like a slap in the face. Now imagine that you don’t even have the recourse of leaving a review for that business because there’s no process of review for Etsy Inc. The challenge that successful sellers on Etsy have to rise to is one that Etsy itself lacks the strength to even attempt.
I’m really hurt by what Etsy did to my business because Etsy Inc perpetuated this harm by violating the principle of customer service that Unfettered Co has worked really hard to uphold. The principle that’s brought us success on the Etsy platform to begin with. Just as it’s easy for us to prevent our customers from shaking with the feeling of injustice our mistakes may cause–it’s even easier for Etsy to do the same. But they won’t, and they won’t because they make money by choosing short term profit at the expense of the people who put them in a position to profit in the first place.
Customer Service Practice #2: We invest in the maker community that supports us
Customer service is more than simply attending to the transactional needs of the people purchasing your products. It doesn’t end when your customer receives their delivery, especially when your business specializes in products that people will create with. Over the years, I’ve worked hard to build community around the creative output of makers who build things with Unfettered Co’s fiber and metal. The act of maintaining a human presence in the lives of customers is really important to me. It fosters a business’s accountability when they interact with their customers’ creations/lives/thoughts/outputs daily on social media. We invest our time in social media less as a form of branding, and more as a form of customer care and customer engagement.
We’ve developed a creative product called the Mystery Box. It’s an art challenge and educational event which fosters interaction between our customers interpersonally (and between our customers and us). I’ve written more about why we mystery here. The long and short of it is this: because Unfettered Co is a businesses that supplies products to folks who work with their hands; because Unfettered Co is a business that believes in the tremendous value of slow-made-goods; because Unfettered Co markets to circles of artists, crafters, and hobbyists–we don’t just pay lip service to handmade communities. Our customer service has always involved building community around making things by hand and heart.
Does Etsy live up to our customer service practice?
In one word, no.
In more words, there’s a reason for this. Etsy’s origins as a platform are really interesting. You can read a bit more about them here
Josh Silverman, Etsy’s ceo, brags about the immediate changes he made to Etsy Inc. upon beginning his tenure with the company. Two of them that I’d like to have a closer look at are as follows:
- Silverman redirected Etsy’s marketing to remove terms having anything to do with “handmade,” and replaced them with the notion of “special” and “thoughtful” products for gifting.
- Silverman immediately cut allocated funding (and 18 months of work performed by several hundred employees) from The Etsy Studio: a marketplace tailored specifically for selling craft supplies on Etsy.
The shift from “handmade” to “special” is a warning
Handmade is a term that’s routed in the act of creating a thing. It illustrates a slow production model and the embodied nature of creation. Handmade is less mechanized and tends to represent an effortful process wherein labour produces an outcome that is attached to its maker.
“Special” means nothing. It’s so unremarkable and disembodied as a qualifier that it needs an explanation. In fact, the term “special” conjures more to do with “discounted” than it does with exceptionality. That, I would argue, is in fact the work performed by the term “special” as it’s now employed in Etsy Inc’s marketing.
“Nobody wakes up thinking ‘gosh, I need to buy something handmade today,” explains Silverman. “You need to furnish your apartment. You need to prepare for a party. You need to find a gift for a friend. You need a dress. Handmade is not the value proposition: unique, personalized, expresses your sense of identity–those are the things that speak to buyers.”
Handmade is no longer the value proposition of Etsy
The value proposition of Etsy is now the same as the same value proposition as any one of its competitors who hawk expendable drop-shipped products at price points that nobody can earn a living wage (or employ others earning a living wage) from selling.
Nobody ever woke up and thought “I need to buy something handmade today.” I totally agree!
You know what, though? A lot of people wake up every day and think “I need to make something today.” A lot of people wake up and think “gosh, I hope I can find the time to make something today. I hope that in those little moments where my kids are at school, I can work on making this thing that means the world to me.” And a lot of people wake up every day thinking “what if I could somehow sell that thing I made? What if that would help me build a life where I could create more often with my hands?” And a lot of people woke up, perused Etsy, and discovered wacky, wonderful, crafty, creative, beautiful, elegant, zany, kitschy handmade items that made them laugh, that brought them joy, that moved them to make a purchase.
Etsy came to prominence as a platform because it created a marketplace for sellers and products that precisely nobody woke up thinking they would buy. The point of Etsy was to delight customers into buying items they had no idea even existed. In so doing, those customers supported makers in building lives where creating things with their hands would be an actual possibility.
I feel really sad when I think about what has been lost here.
Unfettered Co was successful on Etsy because our customers, like us, believe in the value proposition of handmade. Etsy benefitted from our belief in handmade and from our customers’ belief in handmade.
The shut-down of The Etsy Studio should ring alarm bells:
From what I can gather, The Etsy Studio was a massive undertaking that the company had geared for release just after Silverman stepped into his role as ceo. Silverman details the timeline like this: a) he joined Etsy on a Friday; b) the Etsy studio launched on a Tuesday; c) he shut it down that same Friday he began with the company.
Silverman claims that he shut down the wing of The Etsy Studio for the good of sellers. “Sellers need us to be doing the things that drive their sales the most. Estimates suggest it will take three years before [The Etsy Studio] contributes materially to their sales, but they don’t have three years to wait.”
We did. We had three years to wait. More than three years have passed and Unfettered Co has been selling craft supplies on Etsy to customers who love making things, many of whom resell them on Etsy in their own shops. Building a community of artists and crafters who invest in the things they create isn’t a stretch! It’s the only ethical way to behave as a business who benefits from the sale of materials to create with. How much trust can we realistically put in a platform that’s unwilling to wait three short years for a return on investment? That’s not the approach of a platform that’s aiming to stick around long term.
Imagine what Etsy could have done if they built up creative people, supported creative acts, and invested in the sorts of growth principles that require three or more years of work.
Etsy harmed my business by profiting from it in the short term while retracting the supports (and by walking back on the vision) required to support it longterm. They didn’t just place our business in the strangle hold of Vacation Mode; they took the money they’d earned from our hard work and used it to systematically demolish what we stood/stand for.
That demolition really hurt me and I just needed to write about it so that I might heal from it, and so that I might warn you from being similarly hurt.
If you’ve been an Etsy customer, here are some simple steps you can take to help small businesses from being hurt like we were:
- Look for a way to contact a business off of the Etsy platform and ask them if there’s another way you can purchase from them
- Share this blog post with anyone who’s currently selling on Etsy. They might not have thought about some of these risks, and they might just think this will never happen to them.
- Don’t let handmade get lost as a value proposition. Encourage the people around you to make things and to think about how things in their midst are made.
Signing out with a picture of one of my fondest memories as an employer. We assembled the Unfettered Team for a day-long virtually taught weaving workshop. Together, we all laughed as we learned to weave. In so doing, we were able to financially support one of our customers too. Handmade work brings people together and teaches humility.
