Well, I’ve made a big decision. Maybe it’s not huge but it’s a big choice for me to make. I’m going to move my work over to Artfire. I’ll leave the items up on Etsy for now but as they run out of time I won’t be relisting them. Mainly I’m unhappy with Etsy’s decision to put their name and branding over that of their sellers and thereby terribly hurting the sellers chances of making sales through Google searches. While the economy is down and sales are lower part of this could, frankly, be biting the hand that feeds. But who is doing the biting; the angry sellers or Etsy itself? By hurting its sellers Etsy hurts itself and lowers its bottom line.
I’m not one of the Etsy sellers that made crazy sales; I don’t think I ever will be. I’ve got several hundred sales under my belt and 100% positive feedback over the course of 4 years. I’ve done well. I’ve been happy for the most part. I love buying stuff on Etsy and showing my support of handmade. I’m glad they’ve gone the nontraditional route and done as well as they have. Here’s the BUT; their choice to put themselves before me in the Google search is short sighted and fool hardy. Again, when it comes to bottom line dollars, putting the cart before the horse makes no sense. Branding is important but so is pushing sales. Sales are what make Etsy work, and keep the sellers happy. Make your sellers unhappy and you’ve got an uprising. Similar to eBay a few years back when they raised their fees to make themselves useless to smaller sellers. (I have a rant on here somewhere about the fee structure) If you head to the forums it’s full of vitriol and anger. I didn’t spend much time in the forums until recently and all it did was confirm my nagging worries.
AS a long time online seller I understand how searches work. The higher my listing appear in the searches the more likely I am to make a sale. Make the internal searches hard and you frustrate and loose buyers. This isn’t 1999, when the wild west was eBay and Google wasn’t a thought, it’s 2009 and searches are sophisticated and SEO is hugely important. Not only am I frustrated with the SEO management, I’m frustrated with the miss-tagging of items. Etsy writes in it TOU that they don’t tolerate misuse of tagging but yet when items are reported it takes weeks for the item to be fixed. More often than not, it never is. Items that are tagged improperly frustrate buyers. Ever tried to search for a ‘zine on Etsy, go ahead try it. Search for chainmail. Search for Leather Cuff. You’ll get a long list of items miss-tagged and have to go 3 or 4 pages back JUST to find something relevant to your search. Frustrate your buyers and lose them. It’s piss poor customer service to make the search hard to use. I’m a seller but I’m also a buyer. I AM really frustrated witht eh search. I can’t find anything when I search. I have to make multiple searches. It’s poor customer service but it’s also a loss of sales and bad for my bottom line and bad for Etsy’s too.
I like Etsy, and I’ll keep my shop open for quite some time I just won’t be as active about updating it with new products, but you can expect to see some new and exciting things on my Artfire shop. I’ll be doing more experimental work with my recycled goods. I’ve wanted to do some fold up paper books, do-si-do books and an assortment of other things too; similar to my square cardstock books with retro computer paper in the middle. You’ll see more specials, 10% off, 20% off and lowered shipping costs; because Artfire makes that easy for me to do. More than anything else I want to have fun making books again. I want to make more of the one offs like I used to, funky bindings and unique one of a kind items and of course upcycled as well as my usual mix of funky new material items.
I’m not giving up on Etsy, yet. I’ll give them some time to figure out how they are going to fix this mess they’ve made for themselves. My 2 cents: Honor your sellers and move the meta tags to the end of the listing title and make the search function work. When you do that I’ll be back in full force, because Etsy, I love you but I can’t be with you right now, I hope you’ll understand, and this doesn’t hurt too much. You see I've got this new chick, ArtFire.
This is a very interesting post. I can relate to your choices from one online store "management" system to the other. I have been a long time Ebay Seller and had done really well. Until they seem to have over seen the point of their market, the sellers. Recently, (2 years to be exact) I have been rather skeptical of other online selling systems. You have cleared up my skeptical thoughts on the matter with Artfire.
Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Nicholas | June 15, 2009 at 08:43 PM
Nicholas, I work for a large multinational retail company, in the past when I managed a product department I made them millions of $$$. I've worked retail in some form or another for 6 years now, not to mention what I've done in the past. Something that has been drilled into my head: sales cure everything. If you can make the sales, it pays the bills, pays your employees and improves morale. To make sales you need to bring in more customers and make it easy for them to sell. Open it up for Google Checkout, make the search work, and move the etsy meta data to the end of the listing title and you'll bring in more customers through keyword searches.
What etsy is missing is that customer oriented piece of the puzzle. When you make a place to hard to shop, your customers will go elsewhere. It's business. Etsy Admin needs to step back take a look at its customers and see how to make it work better. End of story.
Artfire is easy to use for the seller and buyer, searches work and well. Their admin is GREAT, hell the CEO is on twitter and answers tweets and sends direct messsage. He's personable AND responsive. I like that. They charge one flat fee and accept Google Checkout AND PayPal.
I KNOW I need to push my stuff through other venues, I always have, but I need the site itself to throw me a bone.
Posted by: leslie herger | June 15, 2009 at 09:03 PM
i certainly have lots and lots of reasons to dislike etsy, but i can't bring myself to open an account on artfire. the site's too ugly. i'm a sucker for good design.
may i recommend 1000 markets? they also have a CEO that's totally approachable and intelligent, they allow you to plug in your own SEO descriptions and the site is really gorgeous. also, they use amazon checkouts, which is nice and easy for buyers (and for sellers, too). i think your beautiful work would be a great fit for 1000markets.com.
Posted by: sara girlscantell | June 17, 2009 at 10:15 AM
Sara I agree etsy is pretty. It will take months after they fix the keyword issue for the site rankings to go back to normal, that is if they ever change them. I like pretty but can't reconcile the issues with the prettiness, substance matters a lot in this case. Artfire might be less pretty, but it's got more substance right now.
The search thing is huge. I used to be a top hit for journals and notebooks. Not so anymore. I'm going to have to do a lot of work to get my rank up there again. Artfire will help with that once I get my stuff moved over.
They did recently redesign the front page which look a little better than it used to but I think that no site will ever get that clean look like etsy does.
Posted by: leslie herger | June 18, 2009 at 03:55 PM