this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Etsy Sellers
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A community for those who have a shop or shops on Etsy, to discuss issues, ask questions, and get help with your shop.
Rules:
-Don't spam too much please.
-Be helpful to others if you can.
-Don't make it necessary to add more rules please.
founded 1 year ago
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Thanks for your post!
I have actually messaged the Mods on the r/EtsySellers sub on Reddit to ask if it would be okay to post info about this community here on Lemmy. I have not heard back from them yet, but if they are okay with it I figure there will be others joining up once I get to post the info.
If you don't mind me asking, why is it that you are looking to move away from Etsy? It's always a good idea to use multiple channels to sell your products, but Etsy has a lot of benefits that you simply won't find anywhere else.
I suggest expanding rather than "moving away" from Etsy.
Honestly it's just not for me. The widespread scams (on both seller and buyer side), the way they pretend it's still supposed to be for handmade stuff but is actually just a higher priced Amazon, the frankly shocking nature of the "customer support". It's not something I want to associate with really and since my shop there is so small, I'm not really losing anything major.
That said I do still recommend it to friends sometimes, depending on their situation, because of the instant audience when your business is new. It's a lot easier to get started with than most platforms and I'll always appreciate the way it let me experiment with different products back in the day without charging massive fees.
Good luck bringing people over from Reddit but do be careful, we've already seen bans handed out for promoting Lemmy ๐ฌ
Honestly, I have never had a problem with a lack of "seller" support in over 8 years, but I do understand that there have been issues for others, both as sellers and buyers.
I think however that Etsy gets bad press in that regard simply because people tend to post on Reddit when they have an problem, but not when things go well. In addition, there are less than 1% of the total from all Etsy sellers on r/EtsySellers, so it's not really even a good sample size to base anything on really.
The whole "drop shipper" situation really sucks, and Etsy SHOULD HAVE kept on top of it from the start. But, it also needs to kept in mind that it's the nature of the beast. When there are over 7 million shops, and anyone can set up a new shop in just a few minutes, people are going to break the rules.
Etsy can't hire enough human beings to monitor every new shop, every new product, and every product listing that can change from something allowed to something that breaks the rules 24/7/365.
Well, they could, but our fees would skyrocket to cover the cost. Nobody wants that! lol
People talk about how there could be some sort of automated verification for product listings being hand made, but even then there would be so many mistakes made against listings that were actually hand made it would necessitate hiring many more Etsy employees to manually review those issues too.
I do think that it has gone too far now though, and Etsy should have implemented something to deal with the problem a long time ago, before it got out of hand like it has now. With the current way things are its going to be difficult for Etsy to rein in.
One things I know for sure is, if more people would actually document properly and report the rule breakers then Etsy would have a better chance to deal with them. If rule breakers aren't reported Etsy has no way of knowing who is breaking the rules.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of sellers don't want to be bothered reporting rule breakers. They don't see it as worth their time.
Well, the mods at r/EtsySellers gave me permission to post about this community there so we may get some new members. If you participate on r/EtsySellers maybe you could drop a post there sharing your experience with Lemmy in general to help encourage people to drop by here?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/EtsySellers/comments/143pufc/reddit_protest_regarding_their_policy_change_on/](My Reddit Post on r/EtsySellers)
If you read anything in my post that needs to be corrected please let me know. I'm new to Lemmy and I may not have explained it correctly
Added a backup comment to hopefully show that it's not all just nerdy nonsense over here. We'll see how that goes :)
Thanks! You're the best!