Etsy Fails in web 2.0

(Love the new blog, btw.)

I don’t have a lot of experience with Etsy other than as a buyer. It would seem that it shouldn’t be too had to allow Google Analytics or a redirect to an off-site website for purchases so artists can track information about where people find them, etc. Without this, it’s never going to grow much beyond an online arts & crafts fair, but maybe that’s all they ever wanted it to be.

Thank you Whitney. Really, it’s the largest online seller of handmade items. I think someone will over-take them. To me the stats to the user are more important than traffic generated to their general site. The users are what drive traffic. No users…no traffic.

Why are stats such a big secret?

I can’t tell you how frustrating this is to me. I ponder and lament weekly about whether remaining on ETSY is worth it for me. It’s great that people heart me, but hearts are not converting to dollars.

There are at least 2 stats they could put into place:
1) Individual store stats
2) Monthly trend reports that globally accumulate the most popular items being sold

in addition:
3) key word searches, and
4) Most popular buying months, weeks, days, hours

would be very helpful.

I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t a glorified site for a few of those who started the online shop but then needed others to help fund it for them. Meanwhile, the idea of seeing *supplies* list and sell like crazy over finished product really chaps my hide, too.

After implementing the ability for shopkeepers to view stats, they should separate supplies from finished work.

Stats would be great to have on Etsy. I had made a recommendation a while back and it never happened. I suggested using search friendly URLs but it was shot down.

@CreativeGoddess, I think a full suite similar to google analytics would be just perfect. I’m not sure if they dont want people i the back end? Not sure if they dont want people fining out the truth…..or if they are just information hogs!

@Shawn, many, many, many suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. You are in the majority.

This is a great article! As any business owner knows, stats and measurables are key to your success. It’s a shame that etsy isn’t following through on what could be action that could shoot them into orbit in terms of a marketplace. If they don’t someone else will probably come along and do it.

The other interesting thing I’ve seen on etsy (from a buyer’s perspective), that would help sellers build relationships and create conversations with customers, is that many vendors don’t have their policies filled out. As an online buyer, I always look for how a seller relates to their customer.

I realize it isn’t the solution that sellers are looking for with etsy but it is one way that sellers can increase the opportunity to develop relationships with buyers and keep them.

Nice to meet you Keith! Great blog. Etsy statistics are something I would love to see too. This is something that eBay has done really well and it has helped me to see where my traffic is coming from and how to tweak my keywords. I try to take that information and use it on Etsy too but it’s kind of a crapshoot.
Hey, maybe Terapeak or Hammertap (third-party eBay statistic guys) should get in on the act. I know I’d pay for this information.

@Rebecca – I agree with you whole heartedly. However, Etsy still needs to make provisions for statistics.

@Diane, thank you for the comment. Nice to meet you as well. I have bee perusing your blog and I see that you are a fan of multiple selling locations online. I guess for me, the jury is still out on that. I am thinking of running everything through http://www.magicwoodworks.com.

Hey Keith..

Congrats on getting the new blog up! Waving the pompoms here…

Interesting post. I do not sell my product on Etsy.. partly because up to now I’ve only sold wholesale. But I’ve been thinking about it, and also thinking bout doing my own cart/storefront, as I have the skills, technology to pull it off myself considering my day job. So what I’m hearing now is that it would be fairly hard to track sales, promotions and my seo efforts based on what they offer sellers.

I’ll sit and listen for a while, and if I do offer retail sales from my site, likely start w my own cart.

Congrats again on the new blog!

Sadelle

@Sadelle, fact is, they do nothing in terms of providing any SEO or Stats. Your better off starting small on your own site and building from there.

This is excellent Keith (& like your re-design of blog too ). I have been studying the various avenues for selling on the web over the last 6 months for our non profit Chordata and my original thoughts remain the same. We will likely go with Amazon for various features.
Etsy, while a wonderful community (that Etsyians built !), just can’t match the services. it is far better to build your own site and custom approach.
I’ve also noticed lots of new Etsy people on Twitter who are trying to use Twitter to promote their work but don’t yet see that Twitter is a kind of organic community and you first have to build the real connections with people. Keith is a great example to follow in terms of how to do this. I also try to respond with Twitter tips to new Etsy followers. Etsy should also (like Tech Soup for Non Profits), be giving out this information to assist its members.
BTW:on Twitter I’m @anodyne2art if I can help with anything. I am focused mainly on musicians & sustainability for a life in music as well as the arts in general through Chordata.
Thanks Keith for a brave, open , honest airing of these issues.

Dear Keith (and others),

My name is Maria Thomas and four months ago I became Etsy’s CEO. To those of you selling on Etsy, thank you. We appreciate your business. Keith, i apologize for any emails to Etsy that were not answered.

I wanted you to know that we are listening, and we do know that Etsy sellers would like more stats. At the moment, we provide only the number of views to individual item pages. We would like to and intend to provide more.

Three weeks ago, I published this article on our blog:
http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/talking-shop-with-etsy-ceo-maria-thomas-2853/

In it, I listed our near-term (3-4 months) priorities. About stats, I specifically said,

“And, right about now, some of you are thinking seller stats, Maria, seller stats. Yes, I know they are important to many of you and that they’ve been promised in the past. Etsy is serious about providing them. They are not on this list because – although we are evaluating ways to offer sellers more complete metrics for your shops — I am not sure if we can come out with an offering in the next three-to-four months. Please know that this project is on our radar screen and under evaluation.”

You might also be interested in reading a relatively recent update from Chad Dickerson, Etsy’s CTO. He joined Etsy at the beginning of September. http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/tech-update-an-honest-beginning-for-etsys-new-cto-2578/

I appreciate that Etsy sellers want to better understand how customers are getting to their shops and what they’re doing there. I hope to offer an update on Etsy’s progress towards that goal soon in 2009.

In the meantime, if any of you wants to reach out to me directly, you can “convo” me on Etsy. My user name is “pesmou”.

Sincerely,
Maria Thomas
CEO, Etsy

Maria, thank you for your response to the blog post. Again, I am not here to bash etsy, but I am concerned about the Welfare of the people selling there.

To say —

“And, right about now, some of you are thinking seller stats, Maria, seller stats. Yes, I know they are important to many of you and that they’ve been promised in the past.”

— is a bit of an understatement. Statistics are important to everyone. Many sellers are just not aware of how stats could help them. Also, I think a yes, or no, or target date, or something would be better than just pushing back the date every time the subject was brought up. The sellers pay the bills and deserve to know how their marketing efforts are working.

You also say—

“Etsy is serious about providing them. They are not on this list because – although we are evaluating ways to offer sellers more complete metrics for your shops — I am not sure if we can come out with an offering in the next three-to-four months.”

— I think everyone is ok with the fact that they might not come out in the next three to four months, but when will they? When will stats become an important piece of the puzzle? Forcing sellers to operate in the dark is wrong.

Maria, like I said in my post. I am not here to create a shit storm of complaints. You have just started at Etsy, and the problem goes way deeper than four months ago. However, I can’t recommend to people that they start up an etsy shop if they cant track their progress. Frankly, It just would have been nice if someone was straight with us. If someone was in the forums giving straight answers, if someone was on twitter when I asked if there were any stats available on etsy. I pinged, and messaged many times to no avail and thats why this post was written.

These are the messages sent to Etsy, by me in order on Twitter. By the way Etsy has an account there. So this is just public time line, doesn’t count the number of times I sent Direct messages.

@bre do you know if Etsy offers any kind of personal store stats?
02:05 PM October 19, 2008 from web in reply to bre

UNANSWERED

KeithBurtis: @conniecrosby problem I have found with etsy is, i haven’t been able to locate a good stats generator, they don’t seem to provide

No Response

KeithBurtis: I think @etsy just blurts messages, i guess they really have no brand or community manager

No Response

KeithBurtis: @kaymatthews also, brands like etsy basing themselves on the web 2.0 technology should answer simple questions, or direct to info

Comment to a friend

KeithBurtis: Ive sent messages to @bre , and to @etsy , I get no response… maybe thats not @bre ‘s role anymore, I dunno.

No Response

KeithBurtis: IF I SCREAM LOUD ENOUGH – DOES ETSY PROVIDE ANY STATS FOR IT’S SELLERS??? Think they’ll hear me??? I doubt it

You can see that my tone in the beginning, was very nice. Just asking a question. I proceeded to etsy forums and got no answers from that. I also sent Etsy email and Direct Twitter messages. Still no response. The last Twitter message is what lead to this post. I guess they are listening now. Maybe, this blog post will help advocate change. I hope so.

Keith Burtis

Sounds like Etsy needs a social media community manager yesterday. Probably more like a whole team from a quick Twitter search.

The argument that it cant be done in 3- months sounds like the iPhone’s copy and paste issues. Etsy is aware that there is a rabid desire from core users for a feature and thinks that simply acknowledging that desire is enough.

Providing statistics can not only help satisfy this group of crazies (come on Keith, you know it has to sound a LITTLE crazy), but it can help boost sales across the board.

I’m not sure why Etsy is so behind on this issue. It would seem that just like my blog if they allowed you to insert one string of code from Google then Google could provide me with all the information I would need. At the very least they could provide how many people viewed a listing before it sold.

Well said ” Etsy, is not marketing individual sellers they market etsy. ” I have been watching etsy for a long time and I’ve come to a conclusion that they are just another type of web marketing scammers running this website trying to take advantage of unsavvy internet users. All these small businesses are just sending web traffic to Etsy’s website and paying for it , how funny is that. Ive seen jewelry vendors promote their etsy subdomian on craft show booths…wow. Great post.

I totally agree that stats are something we need as sellers at Etsy, but I also think Etsy is rocking in the web 2.0 department — Web 2.0 was a term coined to describe the ‘new’ web that allows people to express their creativity through the internet. (as with YouTube, blogging, etc…) One thing I think Etsy is totally doing is allowing us to share our creativity with the world. So, just thought I’d pipe with what my understanding of what ‘web 2.0′ is

Suze, thank you for the comment, but I have to disagree. Web 2.0 is an environment of tools that allows two way communication. Yes, it allows us to show off our creativity, but we have always been able to build a web site and share our wares. If all we wanted to do was show off creativity we could have an Ebay store and many of you do.

Etsy’s is in that they are on web 2 services like twitter, facebook, and the rest, but they failed to utilize the channels as a means of communicating. It would be like you commenting on this blog and me not giving you an answer or not acknowledging the fact that you were ever here.

Etsy has forums of thousands of people that are asking for stats. These forums are left largely unanswered. The question is posed over and over and they continue not to deliver or even provide answers.

Web 2.0 fail, in my book.
Keith

Hey MARIA, since you are probably reading this… you need to WORK IN BROOKLYN. Your staff is doing stupid shit and you aren’t there to manage the store. They need supervision. Many just need fired. You axed a few, keep swinging girl!

What Etsy, and that includes you still at this point, fail to recognize is the sellers are your money. You are selling a service to them, not your personal tastes, wants and desires. Everytime you come up with some “improvement” that no one one asked for you just continue to prove that you do not care about them.

So prove you do. Give them something they’ve been asking for… give them ANYTHING! How about fixing search? How about offering feature tweaks to make sites like EtsyHacks not need to exist? What he’s doing isn’t major chnages but it’s making a huge difference in workflow for users of it. Why can’t ETSY do it if a guy not even on the payroll can do it? Answer: You don’t want to. You don’t a single ounce of respect for any of your sellers. You don’t think we need it or deserve it. You think we’re stupid, illiterate housewives or worse, yokels.

Don’t lie. It’s the truth. You don’t offer stats because you don’t want to. That why you push them back, keep excusing why they can’t be. You see money in that begging, you think sellers will pay for it… and you’re wrong. Two years ago they might have jumped at it. Two years ago before people were so beaten down, so pissed off, so dejected. Now if you bring it out for extra money you’re going to instead see mass defection.

Here is how you make it better. FIRE EVERYONE there longer than you have been there. And I mean everyone. The oldtimers have this cult of etsy ingrained on the brain, they don’t believe anything they do has repercussions. Just giggle and slap a picture of a cupcake with a mustache up and all is good. They have lost all respect of the community, and have no respect for it. Nothing they say can ever be trusted by us again. They are your biggest albatross.

You want to really show the community, your sellers, your customers, you mean business in turning this train around? Get your ass to Brooklyn, every damn day, see the shit they are doing (or rather NOT doing) and FIRE EVERYONE. Clean slate. Hired qualified people. People who know THINGS not know people. People with actual knowledge and ability. People who have experience and people skills.

We had high hopes for you Maria, we no longer do.

Etsy’s failures also have made these other selling sites possible, the ones doing what you will not do. These sites shouldn’t have had a chance agains the massive success of Etsy. But they are doing what your people do not. Listening, serving, delivering what people want.

Artfire has the potential to squash Etsy once they are out of Beta, they have come the closest of anyone yet. I hope you’re watching them as they are watching you – they are doing everything you are not. It’s already too late to catch up THEM. You are the one that will have to play catch up.

You staff all but invented EtsyBitch. ETSY madeus. Now give us a reason to shut down. So far I think we’re needed through 2009, if Etsy lasts that long. At this point, you haven’t done one goddamn solitary thing to deserve it.

FYI Keith, no one really knows who runs the @Etsy twitter. From following, all it seems to do is blurt out the latest storque post, plug admin favourites and recommend favourite treasuries plus carry on personal conversations. i don’t regard it as a professional voice, just a presence in twitterland.

Oh Maria… poor Maria. You can’t even see past yourself. The fact is that stats is a KEY feature. KEY KEY KEY. Why is it that I can go to Artfire, who is in BETA, and can get real stats. Yep, real stats, that include an incoming url link. Wow… you mean I can figure out if my AdWords are working!? Imagine.

Maria, I started an AdWords campaign a week ago and my sales went way up on Etsy. Well, that’s the end of the free promotion for Etsy. It proved to me that I can send traffic to my own website and Artfire where I can get stats. It also proves to me that paying $0.20 is absolutely worthless as I made twice as many sales in a few days than I did in two months. Why you ask? Because I started a very small marketing campaign. Very small… just as a test. So, if you think that my large marketing campaign is going to benefit a company who does everything they can to make it impossible for sellers… you’ve got another thing coming.

Maria, it is nice to see that you may have brought in a qualified Product Marketing person, god knows you need it. But, one person cannot fix the problems. The fact that everyone is cheering because you moved the site backwards and didn’t give them anything new is just a sign of how screwed up it is over there.

Also, I’ve run some numbers of my own based on some stats I was able to pull from a third party (yep… maybe you should talk to them, they appear to be doing your job for FREE). There is no way you guys are even close to paying back you $27MM investment, and I’m sure you’re barely (or not) breaking even on Operating expenses. You know what… if you had a search engine that worked, sub categories that worked, tags that worked, stats that worked, marketing campaign integrators that worked, etc. etc. etc. you would see a huge retention rate and higher revenues because there would inherently be more sales and more FVF’s.

So… if in four years Etsy has been unable to understand any of this, why in the world do I think you will now. Just because you were first to the party doesn’t mean you will win the big prize. In fact, many who are first to market don’t win because they don’t listen and their egos are so large they don’t even acknowledge that others may be able to do what they do… but BETTER.

Good luck… you’re going to need it!

Interesting.

I don’t care as much about stats as I do about a working search function. The art category, my category, is a hot jumbled mess.

The page number thing this week was proof of trying to stop hemorrhage with a band-aid.
It’s always a band-aid. Never any real thing to fix the problem.

In fairness, some of the new admin people, such as Chad, Bec, Sarah, even Maria, do seem to be more professional and qualified to perform their jobs than others.

Besides ArtFire, there are other sites out there, watching and learning, to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes. A little shout out for a beautiful new site is
http://www.1000markets.com

The truth is, Etsy doesn’t want sellers to have stats. One Etsy seller created a site (etsyfeeder.com) in the past few weeks, and accessed the api to provide sales stats by product category (they weren’t able to do individual shop stats), both monthly and year-to-date.

Etsy immediately shut off api access, and posted some tech-mumbo-jumbo saying they want to provide info, but for technical reasons they just can’t right now. The word is Won’t, not Can’t, because the stats were there, then Etsy cut them off.

They don’t want sellers to have info which tells them things like the average sale price in the Art category is $21, or the average sale price in the Jewelry category is $9, or the average sale price in the Quilts category is $14, or the average sale price in the Pets category is $6.

I know this is the type of info that made me take my products to a higher end market. I think they don’t want stats because they don’t want their cheesiness to show. Andy: I think there would be a lot fewer people listing and renewing in Art if they actually knew the average prices Etsy buyers pay for art purchases. These stats also made it clear that the vast majority of what sells on Etsy is supplies, sold to seller-crafters.

And if Etsy decided to do the easy stats fix and put Google Analytics code on shop pages (we all sit and wait while our progress bar says “accessing Google Analytics” so we know Etsy is using it themselves already), sellers would all discover that buyers come in via their own advertising and Google search, not via an inherent buyer base in the membership. This would be another catalyst for sellers to set up their own URLs.

Wow, thats eye opening. Especially for me. I was just named the community manager for Best Buy’s Remix. It’s an open API that allows people to pull data from the API and create cool things! The fact that etsy doesn’t have an open API at all is odd to me. Especially in these times. What are they hiding? Why do they not want to give stats? I just don’t understand!

Maria, says she is listening. Have they turned their blinders on to this whole thing? Do I need to ping her on etsy to make her aware that this post is getting out of hand??? Whats going on here?? Seems all a bit fishy to me. Web 2.0 Fail. I am sorry to say this, I really am, but they are circling the crapper on this one.

Buddy… the things you point out are exactly why I’m in the process of setting up my own url integrated with Google Wallet. I will also move my Etsy store to ArtFire slowly this month, fully by end of January. My plan was to use Etsy for samples, and my own url for mass, but now I don’t even want to use Etsy for that. They are incompetent from all that I can see, they talk down to sellers, and basically ignore us when we point out obvious issues.

I really think they forget that most of us have day jobs, and from the forums I can safely say that many of us come from the tech world they are in so understand how hard or easy something should be. Problem is, Etsy treats us like we’re all in the dark, and can’t possibly know how hard it all is.

Blah… I’ve only been there a few months and am over it. I can’t imagine how some of the long time sellers feel.

I started a thread too.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5940201&page=1

After cafepress teamed with google and all we have to do is enter a very small account number so GOOGLE can track stats.
No need for user HTML which etsy has problems with allowing.
And no need for etsy to provide the tracking. Google will.

They did reply, (Page 3 on that thread.)
“stellaloella says:
Very interesting… I will pass this along to our development team.

As Maria (Etsy’s CEO) mentioned in her update last month, we know that shop stats are very important to sellers, and we want to provide important tools like this. You can read her article here, which explains very briefly our thoughts on stats right now (near the end): http://www.etsy.com/storque/article/2853/”

Again pointing us to their very old storque article where they basically say…. well. I still can’t figure out what “Matrix” they are talking about.
Just do it etsy!!!!

They don’t get it. And I doubt they will till they start going down the same hole ebay is on.
I’m looking at artfire.com as a substitute. They look promising.

There are 422 forum threads that come up when you search on “stats.”

Here’s a gem of a post, Admin stellaloella responding to a stats request from 2006:

stellaloella says:
There has been some talk (by Admin) of adding stats. In fact, rokali started a thread asking which stats sellers might find most useful. Here’s that thread: http://www.etsy.com/forums_topic.php?thread_id=13096

I’m hoping this means we’ll have access to some of that information when Etsy v2 comes out.
Posted at 5:22 pm, August 15 2006 EST

Needless to say, v2 had no stats, and sellers continue to ask for them. When one astute seller resurrected rokali’s thread in the summer of 2008, Admin closed it for good. They didn’t appreciate the call-out.

Admin uses Google Analytics. So clearly, they know there is something there that would not make for good PR and/or customer relations. We can only guess.

Here’s a link to an EtsyBitch article which documents four years of requests for stats and the various ways Etsy Admin have jerked us around.

http://etsybitch.blogspot.com/2008/08/question-for-etsy.html

I just came by and was surprised to see myself quoted here:

phippsart says:
“Having stats on Etsy is more important to me than ANY other feature they could possibly implement. The fact it’s on the back-burner causes me physical pain.”

I’m glad my post was found helpful and relevant.

Still feeling the pain,

MIchael

It is likely the reason Etsy offers no stats is becuase of the very model of their business/website. Etsy cannot come close to having your OWN e-commerce store. Which, is always better AND NO FEES!!!

It’s simple people, no stats = more Etsy users. Having stats would likely reveal how little visitors their are to ones products AND how much better off Etsy users would be by having their own online custom made store.

Hire a web designer/developer = more sales