Etsy sellers began experiencing problems with Intagram, Facebook, and Wanelo on Thursday, highlighting the impact of glitches on sellers’ businesses as well as the love-hate relationship between marketplaces and social networking sites. Sellers who were blocked from the sites discussed the issue at great length on the Etsy boards, with some revealing the extent to which many rely on such sites for traffic to their product listings.
Sellers said they were being blocked from Instagram and tried to figure out why. In this thread, a seller with a major business presence on the site wrote, “I have a business Instagram with a link with my Etsy. Today I can’t post, like any photos or reply to people’s comments asking about prices etc for my jewellery. It comes up with a little comment saying it’s blocked and refuses to let me do this because I have an Etsy link in my profile?!! This has NEVER happened before and I use my Instagram for 80 percent of my sales!!!! Anyone else having this problem I’m almost freaking out?”
Sellers on another thread reported similar issues. Some theorized it was the formatting of the URLs linking to Etsy, with shortcut links that redirected as one suspected cause.
“Since like half an hour ago, every time I try to like a picture, a window pops out saying: “It looks like your profile contains a link (etsy.com/shop) that is not allowed. We restrict certain content and actions to protect our community. Tell us if you think we made a mistake. Tell us – Ignore”! What the hell,” an Etsy seller wrote.
And while another seller wrote, “I had to remove my link from my profile to be able to use my Instagram,” some other sellers said they had links to their Etsy shops in their Instagram profiles and were experiencing no problems.
EcommerceBytes reached out to Instagram; a spokesperson responded on Friday, stating, “I can’t comment on an individual account or this specific case, but we would not block an account simply for linking to Etsy in their profile. That’s not against our policies.”
Sellers also had problems with Facebook last week. In a thread about the problem, an alert reader pointed to an article in the UK newspaper Daily Mail that reported on a bug. “An unknown bug on Facebook is blocking millions of news links from being posted on the site. People around the world are reporting posts disappearing and links being removed for “violating the security policy,”” the newspaper wrote.
There was no response from Etsy to seller concerns on the threads we reviewed. When asked for more information, an Etsy spokesperson told us, “We’re looking into these but can confirm we have not made changes to our site that would be affecting traffic. This appears to be an issue with Facebook and Instagram unrelated to Etsy specifically. We’re waiting for more information.”
While the problems with Instagram may have been due to a bug, some Etsy sellers also had problems with Wanelo, a site that started as a “community site where people post, find and collect their favorite products. Wanelo began adding ecommerce capabilities last year, and it appears it may now be trying to get Etsy sellers to sell directly on its site rather than linking to their Etsy listings.
In this discussion thread, a seller pasted a response she received from Wanelo that described a change last week that was “due to a change in our relationship with Etsy.”
The email went on to state:
All Etsy stores on Wanelo now have decreased visibility in our community. Please feel free to reach out to Etsy to let them know that you value the traffic and sales coming from Wanelo and that you would like them back.
One possibility that we’d love to explore with your stores is to actually invite you all to sell your products directly on Wanelo. This feature is currently only available to Shopify stores, but in the future (hopefully soon) we’ll be adding a way for sellers to list their products on Wanelo directly.
If you were interested in setting up a Shopify store and selling on Wanelo right now, you could get a free trial here: www.shopify.com/ and then you’d simply install the Wanelo Shopify App: apps.shopify.com/wanelo. Wanelo takes a 10% commission on every sale, but there are no listing fees, so a commission is paid only when there’s a sale.
One advantage of selling on Wanelo directly, is that we are continuously giving those stores and products greater visibility on Wanelo. So if you were to sign up via Shopify to sell on Wanelo directly, you should expect to see more product views, saves and orders.
The seller’s post containing the Wanelo email was removed from the Etsy thread (presumably by Etsy or at its behest). The Etsy spokesperson has not yet addressed our question asking about the “new relationship” Wanelo mentioned in its email to the seller.
Some sellers were philosophical about the change, others said they missed the traffic they had been getting from Wanelo before the change.
Others said they expected other social networking sites to make adjustments as well. “Just wait until Pinterest adds a buy button,” said one seller. “Etsy’s had a great monopoly on the artsy craft ecommerce crowd, but I think that will be changing soon.”
