Bitchables: the new dos and don'ts of Etsy

Etsy was quick, they said a week and it was only a week, to allow review of the new dos and don'ts. But they could do that because they didn't really listen. By the way, why wasn't a mass email sent out to all members about this? Even if it was just to point out that there have been changes? Communication is still on Etsy's to-do list it seems.

Some of the bitchable points of the dos and don'ts?

From Shops&Listings, formerly known as 'selling':

• "Etsy reserves the right to request that a seller provide policy information or require a seller to modify unreasonable policies at Etsy's discretion."

Hmmm what would be considered 'unreasonable'?

• "Listing prices must be reasonable"

This appears to be an argument against the market and letting shoppers decide what's reasonable, but it's just a bad way of leading to their old policies on the issue:

"You may price an item how you choose; however, a listing should not be created with an inaccurate price in order to keep it from selling"

and Etsy's way of preventing circumvention of their fees:

"The shipping cost must be reasonable for the item"

Why they couldn't just avoid the potentially troublesome header about reasonable prices is beyond me. How corporate of Etsy, reserving their rights to modify both your policies and your prices. It's not your shop, it's Etsy's, you're just the grunt making the pieces in it.

Then there's a whole new section on tagging:

• This is an old one
  

  "You may only use multiple words as a single tag if they comprise a single descriptive phrase"
  

But their example of what's unacceptable is "silver earrings" ?? What if it's a pair of, ta-da, silver earrings!?



• And then there's the blurring of tags and categories
  

  "Tags that describe the craft or process used to create an item should only refer to the processes that you personally used to create the item (for example: note cards should only be tagged "papermaking" if you made the paper by hand from pulp, a wooden shelf should only be tagged "woodworking" if you built the shelf)."

But what if you're one of the many sellers with, for example, woodburned items and you need woodworking - burning for your categories?...you may not have made the box, but you sure as hell made it what it is! In the dos and don'ts this is considered unacceptable.

Aren't updates to the policies supposed to help clarify them? We assume these will be optional as usual.

Etsy's numbers drop

It's official, June was a bad month for Etsy - sales were down 4% site-wide (both number of items sold and the $ amount sold). Page views decreased almost 3%. New members were down 2%.

BUT the number of items listed was about the same (0.1% decrease, about 1,000 item difference).

However, there were still nearly twice as many items listed per month as sold, which is not good for sellers.

Read all the stats in the Dorque article.

Are these lower views due to the SEO fuck up? Are they due to the economy? Nope, according to Sinohe:

Overall, June results were more or less comparable to May’s after factoring in that there are 30 days in June and 31 in May.

Really? 4% of sales occur each day of the month? So a full month is 120%? Has he ever taken a basic arithmetic class? Even if the average (3-3.3%) was an effect of month length - it never mattered before, Etsy was growing every month regardless (6% in May, 5% in April, 16% in March, 2% in February - which has only 28 days!!) and it still leaves a drop of almost 1%, which is a large number of items when three quarters of a million are sold each month.

Etsy - you've hit your plateau. NOW will you care about your customers?