Email a copy of 'Etsy to Change Certain Practices Following Report by BBC' to a friend
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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
I saw the link to this article on the AuctionBytes Facebook page. The post started with the words “That was fast…”. While Etsy may have been quick in responding after the BBC article appeared, they were actually incredibly slow in responding to the thousands of seller complaints that have been posted for the past few months.
What I’ve learned in watching this unfold is that Etsy really doesn’t care about how its policies affect sellers, whether those policies are being implemented properly, or whether they are even reasonable business practices. Apparently what Etsy cares about most is how they appear in the media. Sellers have been complaining about this issue for months, but it took a BBC article to get Etsy to pay attention and make changes. If the article had never been published, Etsy would still be scooping up innocent sellers in its draconian dragnet of reserves.
Etsy’s implementation of reserves has been sloppy and misguided, to say the least. I’ve been a seller on eBay for almost 15 years and have seen my share of ill-conceived and poorly implemented policies from that platform. Then Etsy said, “Hold my beer…”