The Shop

A Place Where You Will Find Loveryly Gifts and a Few Personal Opinions

Monday, July 25, 2011

Disgruntled On Etsy~~MysticSilks

I was browsing the etsy forums this morning to see if there were any new changes coming up. I posted again to bring the thread alive, about etsy allowing feedback comments for buyers to be resurrected again. It does appear to be a lopsided system, when only the comments left for sellers are able to be viewed, but not comments left for buyers.
I am leaving the boosting up again of the thread regarding a petition for 'fine art' artists.
If you've read my previous blog you'll see what I am writing about.

I ran across another etsy customer, a seller, who is quite disgruntled and she wrote some valid comments in her post: I was impressed, so I requested her permission to copy and paste it here to share.
This is the question she posted:


Etsy admin, what is the seller's status/definition for you?


trinlayk says

Just for clarification:

Are we "customers", "clients", "employees" "assets" or "commodities"?

thank you.

She is asking etsy for an answer.

Etsy does reply:

lisajune says

Highlighted Post
Edited on Jul 24, 2011

We've referred to the people who use Etsy as 'members' for a long time. :)


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I personally disagreed in this posted thread, that we are not members. Members of anything have a vote, have a say in the policies and procedures of an organization.

This does not take place on etsy . We are customers. We pay a listing fee, then pay a commission to etsy for any sales.

This original poster of this thread posted another comment. Again I was in complete agreement:

trinlayk says Edited on Jul 25, 2011

Yelling, swearing and freaking out...

It's not going to happen, I have no yelling IN me at this point.
I think I've made myself free to speak lately because I JUST don't care if I'm muted or not. Heck, I'm doing better elsewhere, and soon I'll be selling in yet another location. So I don't even care if my shop is brickwalled anymore.

That's a sad thing to say, because I *used* to be ETSY's biggest cheerleader, I accepted that they were new, trying something no one had done before, and doing it better than ebay.... I knew there were flaws.

But recently the flaws and cracks have gotten so big, because there's too much new stuff in too short a time. the OLD problems have never been actually fixed... So the old problems continue to get worse as "new shiny but not really useful" get rolled out.

Old problems continue as the clicks between point A (thumbnail of item) to point B (page for the item) were increased. click on a shops icon and you land on the profile (at least for awhile I haven't kept up with that.) If people are saying: "i'm SHOPPING, I want to see the SHOP first, I'll go to the profile IF I want to..." no one cares.

So when features we desperately need are not working right after 4-5 years of us asking for them to be fixed, and we keep seeing new useless, and buggy features either being buggy or being abused... we're told to shut up.

When the MEDIA got hold of the privacy issue, Etsy's "fix" was to break the feedback system so that it's now easily used as an extortion tool on sellers.
The real privacy problem is STILL there and still not fixed and no one seems to care.
We've begged for a fully functional search since I signed up here 5 years ago, we've been begging for a direct phone number to get customer service we still can't directly, easily call Etsy, a function that SHOULD be in place with any business from the get go. If the business is serving clients globally that businesses needs to be able to be contacted BY PHONE 24/7/363 ... and if the business is global it needs to have that phone line available from the time it opens it's doors. A customer who can't get their log in to work can't contact you via chat.

I think it's way too late for ETSY to fix their spreading reputation as a buggy site with random rule enforcement....

I think it's way to late for ETSY to win back my trust.

When we've said "We need this problem/bug to be fixed" and get a reply that translates to "we'll get around to it eventually"

we feel like we're just employees with a boss that doesn't care, or worse "just the temp" or "just the intern", rather than customers/clients who rely on the services to support our businesses.

Posted at 9:51 am Jul 25, 2011 EDT -


As I stated, this etsy seller makes some great points!


PLease visit http://mysticsilks.etsy.com/



3 comments:

  1. She mentions that she's selling better somewhere else, but where is that? Are there any better options?? I'd be interested in trying them ;) Kathryn

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  2. Hi Angel, I used to do alright on ETSY but suddenly at the start of February my sales there came to a complete halt. As if someone turned off a spigot. (I suspect my concerns got me put on a list of shops to render invisible?)

    So currently I'm doing better for sales and views on Zibbet and Artfire... though I'm considering shifting from Artfire to BigCartel.
    I AM basically starting all over in the new locations.

    UPDATE on the privacy/personal security concerns: http://trinlayk.blogspot.com/2011/08/oh-crap-etsy-what-have-you-done.html

    I'm currently hoping to find a free removal tool for the kissmetrics that ETSY infected us all with... so in the mean time there ARE a few things you can do to help shield yourself from being tracked, even if you might not be able to remove the tag entirely from your machine.

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  3. OOOH and almost forgot to mention: I've always done better at LIVE shows than I have with Internet sales. I've found I do well at Scifi conventions, and doll meets, but these are also events that are directed very much for my customer's demographic.

    I don't think I'll ever be at "quit your day job" since I am limited by how much I can produce... The majority of artists will never get there, and ETSY has done well, raking in 20c per item from people relisting and relisting and relisting... How many of us are LOSING money on an unachievable dream? how many ETSY users are relisting relisting and relisting. The search hasn't been really functional in a relevant way, and that's a pay off for ETSY. the real product has be US and our personal data, not our artwork.

    ReplyDelete