Seller Eviscerates New Etsy Top Seller Program

by: Ina

One of the readers who reached out made an interesting point:

"I am a small time seller, precisely the kind of seller that Etsy is trying to shove off the site. Their new rating system will probably end up very much like Ebay's, in that "poor sellers" will be slammed with extra or higher fees. They don't say this now, but it's obvious that things are headed there. They also say that "at this time ratings will not affect search"."

eBay imposes a penalty fee, explained as follows: "You may be charged final value fees if you violate our policy of buying or selling outside of eBay, or we may apply additional final value fees if you are not meeting our performance expectations."

Is Etsy heading down that road?

by: Rexford

A) Now sellers will have to respond to spam merchants who are trying to sell them something

B) Etsy's customer service is among the worst in ecommerce (my opinion, my experience) and yet they will hold sellers to the highest bar.

Little eBay lives.

by: The End

Etsy has no idea the legions of websites that will appear overnight to bury them.

by: Maranta

Etsy is discriminating against non US sellers who don't have access to affordable tracking.

In particular, postage in Canada is expensive for anything over 2 cm thick so anything that can go untracked oversized letter mail within Canada saves domestic buyers a lot of money.   It's the difference between paying an average of $20 CDN for postage (it can be more) and paying $2-3 dollars.  Etsy already tells me all the time that my domestic postage is 'too expensive' even though they must be aware it is the standard rate (I can send stuff cheaper to the US than inside my own country).  The only way I can lower it is to send domestic small stuff untracked.  We don't have tracking on letter mail.  Adding tracking to the US items can make the overall price unappealing to US customers who don't expect to pay a lot for tracking.  Etsy also counted one of my items as late because it couldn't ship on a Sunday so it went on the Monday, so my shipping metrics look terrible.  Communication 100 per cent; reviews 100 per cent; shipping 38 per cent!  And they didn't inform us ahead of time that they were gathering info so they could use this terrible rating system.

Meanwhile I sell in US dollars not Canadian, and they want to punish me for that, because it means I have to include tracking on cheap items as if I am a US store.  Even though I pay them extra in exchange fees so I can sell in USD!  So I should change my currency and add tracking so I sell less and pay Etsy less fees and Etsy makes less money.  Is this really the result they were looking for?  Or I could move items off platform, and they get zero.  

They literally set the shipping metric so I can not achieve it.  

by: The End

Etsy is no longer an American entity and does not offer anything in the way of American protocols.
Etsy is no longer a good fit for America.

by: Sierra

@The End - I noticed that this week!

"Copyright 2021 Etsy, Inc., an affiliate of Etsy Ireland UC. All rights reserved."

Etsy is now an affiliate of Etsy Ireland!  

by: Stone Cutter

Last week, Pinterest came out with a dismal earnings report. Analysts on CNBC believe that consumers are not currently interested in ''craft products''...while they believe that sites like Etsy are in the same boat. Etsy will deliver a Q2 earnings report soon and it is suspected it will be bleak...the U.S. economy has opened and consumers are spending their money in different ways. This new marketing Etsy Top Seller schema feels like a ''desperate'' move to increase sales and slapped together at the last minute without any common sense critical thinking. There are SO many flaws with the new system what so ever...it makes my head spin.  

by: RealHandmadeGal

Everything Etsy does is a desperate move of one kind or another. They haven't cared about the sellers for a long time. Don't fall for their platitudes.

by: an American in France

Unless I missed it, I didn’t receive information about the new program, but noticed a new menu item when I logged in. Their communication wasn’t stellar.

Unfortunately, I met the response & ratings criteria but missed the qualifying sales amount by only $2 (& an order came in a few hours later that would have qualified me). Now I have to wait until the end of the month to see what happens then. My main reason for wanting to qualify is to see if it enhances my search ranking, or if *not* qualifying demotes me. Time will tell if it affects fees & charges, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

The majority of my Etsy sales are digital items, so it takes quite a few sales for me to reach their $$ threshold. If # of sales was an option, I’d easily qualify. Are they penalizing us for that? On the other hand, no shipping is involved with digital items, so meeting their criteria is easy.

by: epuise

Until ALL Buyers are Req'd to leave Feedback, ANY Rating System that counts % of Feedback of 5 Stars is useless... HAPPY Buyers will often NOT leave Reviews... They 'talk' w/ their dollars... UN happy ones, esp the ones who wanted an after sale refund... will be sure to leave LESS than 5 stars if they don't get their way.

by: epuise

@StoneCutter - Analysts on CNBC believe that consumers are not currently interested in ''craft products''... People are INTO 'crafting'... they just won't PAY for another's work.

by: 1 Angry Artist

The guy who wrote that analysis is a complete pro and in my opinion, his report is by far the best thing I have ever read on Etsy including the forums and everything else.

He nailed Etsy on every single point of this misguided extortion because that's just what it is.    It seems that they really, really want you to buy Etsy labels as that will help you get your gold star.  

Why do those creeps insist on treating the sellers like we are in  kindergarten??

I am so glad that I do not depend on Etsy for any serious amount of money.  Let's face it- making a living selling online is probably harder than becoming a  Supreme Court justice.  It just ain't happening for most of us.

And Etsy can put all the lipstick on that pig it wants to but, everyone knows the truth.

by: kelly2000

If you want to track metrics on response times, you need to implement a "no response needed" option, period. We can only say "thanks again" so many times to get the last word in.

I urge everyone to take the survey that was available in the seller dashboard. I did, and my sentiment was - if you, Etsy, are truly concerned with the buyer's experience and ensuring they are working with reputable sellers upheld to a high standard.... "Star Seller" is off the mark as a starting point. Let's start with ridding the platform of all the non-handmade and non-vintage crap. That is sure to improve the experience for buyers and sellers simultaneously.

Now, I will say - I am generally very pro-Etsy. This is the first initiative I thought was truly ill-conceived and not well-executed.  

by: The End

It's troubling....
The number of people in here that apparently would not have a business if not for Etsy.....
This isn't the way REAL eCommerce is......
Break the apron strings and fly on your own.......

by: ShortSeller

The words hobby and business get used interchangeably.  

by: AnotherTime

I am thankful for the indepth post this vendor gave to Etsy.   He has wrapped it up perfectly.   Bottom line:  this program is not a valid measure and should be scrapped.

Actually, what right does Etsy have to judge sellers for badges anyway?  The current customer rating system does quite an adequate job of that.  I get very tired of Etsy trying to manage my business when in fact they would be better off making concrete improvements to the selling platform!   Etsy - stop second guessing everybody and every move!   Just provide a streamline, clean, efficient shopping site and the businesses will do fine.  Customers too!

by: all in the family

Oh another round of changes. Etsy took the wrong path, made bad turns, and wound up at Wall St, whereupon they jumped on the bandwagon of "bottom line" and big corporate. So what right do they have to judge artists, makers and creatives?

Oh wait, I just realized they must be trying to evict us. Yes, we should fly on our own, except that big corp etsy has co-opted the idea of being a marketplace for creatives. And the world believes them.

by: beccaanna@hotmail.co.uk

I’m very upset with the new star seller program I have not received this Etsy results state I have not responded to 2 messages within 48 hours. These messages are spam messages which have requested confirmation of process or advice of making my products or other businesses promoting products to me. I have raised a complaint with Etsy and not received a response within 24 hours. How can I be judged on a criteria they can not met by Etsy themselves as well as paying them over £100 a month in fees.  

by: rts148

I too am Canadian, and I run a large and popular shop on Etsy for the past 10 years.  I was making a profitable living at it 10 years ago and I quit my job to work on my business full time.  

5 years ago, Etsy first introduced location based results which cut off over half of my sales as it no longer promoted shopping within the global marketplace.  I used to sell regularly to people all over the US and Europe, however my sales were throttled and within a month of the introduction I lost half my regular sales.  I rarely make international sales outside of North America now and my American sales are almost exclusively within close proximity to me.  It used to be good to shop and sell all across the world, but it is much more difficult with Etsy now.

Then came the advertising campaigns which miserably failed because they didn't generate any return on investment so they started penalizing more relevant search results so sellers would need to purchase advertisements.  Now it has become a mainstay for sellers to be noticed, but really didn't have any significance initially when searching, so they basically rigged their search to be dependent on advertising.

Then they introduced their own website building platform in an attempt to retain the migrating sellers (like myself) from having their own websites.  They contacted me several times to notify of me their website services (fully aware that I have my own site) and tried to encourage me with incentives and boosts in exposure which I thought was near bribery to get me to sell out my independence.  I feel my shop usually sells optimally, so I imagine they would need to penalize me as a result.

This last year they announced that they would now be making it mandatory for larger sellers to be in their advertisements.  Nobody had a say in this, Etsy simply released a statement saying so and now I receive an advertising bill each month which in many cases, makes the products I shipped now at a loss.  This is why I don't advertise with them in the first place.
They don't care about my profit margins and don't ask what I would like to advertise, they just do as they please and give me arbitrary bills that cost me dearly.  

And now the star seller system.  I agree in theory good sellers should be noticed for their hard work, but that was shown in their reviews.  Every buyer could read through any bad reviews to see what the issue was and there they would also be able to see the seller's response to the review.  Now Etsyis hoping to replace this by letting people bypass the reviews with something more arbitrary but determined by Etsy itself and not the actual buyer's experience with each shop.
You hit the head on the nail with shipping!  This is only a benefit for USPS users as most of the world does not have affordable tracking.  And yes, what happens when you now need to pay $20 tracked shipping on an item worth less than that?  And Etsy wants everyone to offer free shipping too!  Shipping services haven't really been as reliable lately with Covid restrictions and customs delays which accounts for probably 95% of my shipping setbacks.  What can I do about that?  Etsy used to allow bad reviews about shipping issues to be removed because it was not a seller issue.  Now I am expected to ship everything within their timeline.  Etsy actually includes their own estimated delivery timeline on my orders now (which is visible to each customer).  They didn't consult me or the postal service when determining when it would arrive, they just tell my customer it will be there in 8 days, when I specifically told the customer 12 days.  
As a large shop with thousands of products, I am on my toes at all hours.  I get between 10-30 messages a day and I work hard to get to every message as soon as I can, but sometimes it is not always possible.  Would anyone working in Etsy's offices like to have to respond to their work emails within 24 hours, 365 days a year?  Absolutely not.  In fact, I am sure that would be a big HR issue.  That's why people have weekends, and holidays, and vacations, and sick days.  Etsy sellers don't have rights and are not seen as people like the actual employees of Etsy, if we were then we would be allowed to set our own shop hours as to when we will be online to respond to people and we could target how large of a geographic area we would like to be visible to, we wouldn't be forced into their advertisement campaigns at our own costs told to work 365 days a year without any days off.

Unfortunately, Etsy is no longer a website catering to making a marketplace for craft makers and artisans.  It is now one of the largest publicly traded ecommerce websites in the world with a vigorous group of stockholders that are competing with giants like Amazon now.  

To be brutally honest, I don't know what else to do at this point and may have to shut down my shop.  My first 5 years in business consecutively generated over $100k USD in revenue each year.  Each new rule introduction to bring down larger sellers to a lower middle ground has reduced my shop to about $20k USD a year now.  I quit my job for this and have been raising my family off of it for a decade and now Etsy wants me to work even harder for less money, so it might just be easier to scrap it all and just get a real job.  I need to feed my kids and build a career, Etsy is just for US companies with customer service teams and shipping departments now.