To the people inquiring as to what Etsy is doing that has us Etsy sellers worried...
The short of it is that, in preparation for becoming public (Etsy had its IPO this month), Etsy has become less and less focused on handmade goods and services, and more and more focused on mass produced goods. Etsy started out as a place to sell your SPECIFICALLY handmade wares and would crack down on any shop that fell out of that category at all. Recentlyish, Etsy grew a “little” more lax (purposefully, with announcements and everything), and expanded the definition of handmade to include wares that someone created somewhere, but were handed off to manufacturers to produce. This was under the guise of letting people whose work is very popular hand the process off to someone else; I mean, I understand if you make traditional/digital art that needs to be printed, and you want someone else to handle that for you, but that was already allowed under the original rules. This revision opened the floodgates to mass production of everything, including low wage, overseas mass production of products that had been designed specifically to be mass produced. And then Etsy redesigned its search system, which was already pretty annoying. Etsy has two sections for us to fill out called “tags” and “materials.” Tags are supposed to be words or phrases you anticipate people will search in order to find products like yours. Materials, obviously, are what your wares are made of. The majority of Etsy sellers I know interpret these as fields to ensure that people browsing Etsy will find their work. Nope! Guess again! The best way to get landings on your shop is through writing hella long, descriptive titles. Guess who gets the most titles? Shops with mass produced goods. Guess who gets to flood search results? Shops with mass produced goods. Guess who floods the casual browsing categories? Shops with mass produced goods. Guess who can make the least expensive wares? Shops that make their mass produced goods through low wage factories. Guess who will get the sales? The cheap, easily found, market flooding, mass producing shops. Etsy has hit the point where they no longer care about being a shopping site for handmakers. They just want to make themselves as much money as they possibly can. And yeah, that was the short of it, haha. There’s a lot more to it that I don’t have the time to write about and that I’m sure y’all don’t want to read, considering how long this already is. Honestly, I was intimidated when I first joined Etsy because I was awed by how many things one person/a team could make, and now I just want to resign. I cannot - we cannot - compete with this. THIS SAID - Storenvy pisses me off more actively.