Today on the 5: Etsy started off as a fantastic place to find vintage and handmade pieces, and it found a lot of success doing so. Sadly, those days are long past and it feels like the company is outright admitting as much with their recent label reclassifications.
Ozone Nightmare
The Decline Of Etsy
Welcome to your daily five for Wednesday, July 10th, 2024. There was an announcement from the company Etsy this week that I think a lot of people, well, I don't know if they'd say it's necessarily the final nail in the coffin for the site, but it's certainly, it's certainly the latest demonstration of the decline for what Etsy started off as to where they are now. Now, if you've never bought anything, you probably have heard the name of Etsy. Etsy started off as a website that really allowed you to sell two types of things, according to your labeling system, vintage items or handmade items. And that second category, the handmade items is really, I think, what drew people to the site early on. It was certainly one of the reasons I used to go there. And you could find some really interesting, unique things from people who were clearly making these items themselves. And that was the power of the site. It really was built around the idea of we're not just selling something you can buy anywhere else. And in certainly the last five, three to five years or so, when I've gone to Etsy to even try to look for things, which I've done less and less frequently, it is very clear that that early ethos is almost entirely gone. One of the things that Etsy says they prohibit is the reselling of items, meaning that you buy, let's say, 1000 t shirts from somebody and then resell them on the Etsy site. But all you have to do is search a little bit and you'll find that that's absolutely not true. They are reselling things on there. When you see different items that are literal carbon copies of each other, I'm not saying similar, of course, you know, certain things are going to be similar. But when you see things that are literally the same items from multiple different sellers on a page, you cannot interpret that as anything else. But reselling doesn't make any sense unless all these people are just making up different shop names for some reason, which makes no sense. And so it has been clear that Etsy has been basically getting further and further away from where they started. And this announcement would seem to really kind of cement that because they've gotten rid of the vintage and handmade labels. And they replace them with the following four labels, which are designed by hand picked by sourced by and made by. According to what Etsy says, made by and sourced by sourced by would be the closest equivalent, I think, to vintage and made by would be the equivalent of handmade. But the fact that they've gotten rid of those labels specifically and most importantly, the handmade one really should signal you on what's going on here. This is just essentially becoming another website that is positioning itself as having something unique, but really is becoming more and more like anywhere else, which isn't to say, I mean, it's not necessarily that Etsy has just become Amazon or anything like that. But they're certainly closer to that than they've ever been. And again, all you have to do is search for just look through certain item categories and you're going to start noticing that I mean, it really is astounding compared to the earlier days. And don't get me wrong, there were always people that were skirting the rules. There's always going to be that. But it was far more minimal in Etsy's early days than it is now. And to some degree, look, this is what happens with I mean, we've seen this. This is the Corey Doctor idea, right? Every single one of these sites and companies is going to get here because eventually, and if you think about it, vintage and handmade is not going to necessarily be a growth leader every year. It's not going to have explosive sales for the till the end of time. It probably does have a somewhat limited amount of profit overhead that you're going to get from it. I don't know if I'm using that term correctly, profit overhead. Is that a word? There's only so much money you're going to milk out of that over time. And so if they're going to keep demonstrating growth, which is what the market wants, if they're going to keep showing increased profitability and new places to innovate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the buzzwords, then this was somewhat inevitable as it generally is. But it's still a shame because Etsy was one of those places early on that really felt like it was its own little ecosystem. It felt like it was doing something really unique and interesting and fun. And now basically, it is slowly turning into just another shopping site. And again, I'm not saying that that's necessarily means that it is now just another team or Walmart or whatever. But it's a lot closer to those sites now than it ever has been to the point where you can find many items that are on Etsy, supposedly being handmade on Amazon and other sites, the exact same items. So especially if it's a different name, that has to tell you something about the reselling that's going on. So this is not really a surprise. This is more of an admission, not not not an overt admission, but certainly a type of admission by Etsy that yes, they are not doing what they used to do anymore. So I'm sure for a lot of people, that's probably a sad thing. And it is for me, I used to like Etsy was a nice site. I'm not going to say I'll never buy anything from there again. But there's so little left to draw me there as a first place to look for something unique to know used to be. And I think that's a shame. It's a shame. It's something that I'm not, I can't tell you I'm really surprised by it, but at the same time, it's a shame to see it. But I guess that's just how it goes later.