Etsy West Coast Tour 2009: Vancouver

 

(Matt, Maria, and Amanda from Ebbandflo)

 

Tonight I had the pleasure of meeting Matt, Anda and Maria from Etsy as they swung through Vancouver on their Etsy West Coast tour. About 75-80 people showed up, a few of them familiar to me from past Vancouver meetups, and a lot of new faces. The meeting was held at The Cambrian Hall just off Main St, a great place for shopping for Vancouver handmade, and was organized by the lovely Amanda of Ebbandflo and Pomo Mama Design.

It was a great space for a meeting and I was amused to see the chairs set up in a circular triple row, much like the "seats" in the Etsy Virtual Labs. Maria made a few opening remarks to kick things off, and then Matt talked a little about how Etsy came to be: in a nutshell, Rob Kalin made a fancy kitchen, then made a half-price website for a restaurant in order to pay rent, then won a photo contest with the first picture he ever took and argued a lot with the guys who made the animated flame on the restaurant website. It was a good story, but you really need to hear it from Matt, he tells it better than I do.

Then Maria took the floor again and spoke a bit about her past jobs in digital-based businesses like Amazon and NPR, and how she came to Etsy, attracted by its values,  "something bigger than commerce", and the stories behind how things are made. She said she wanted to talk to us about Etsy's principles and top-level ideas, which I will encapsulate here to the best of my recollection and hastily scrawled notes. (if anyone has any corrections that should be made to these notes, please let me know!)

Maria's favourite feature is speed. The most important thing Etsy can do for its sellers is to bring us qualified buyers and keep them coming back. To do this, they need to work on the back-end architecture of the site, the things you don't see but improve interaction. This includes speed, scaleability, security, and reliability.

A question was asked concerning how robust is the Etsy platform. Maria's answer: extremely robust. She said she is confident in the back-end infrastructure, but when it comes to the front-end architecture, there is much to do - it is a question of best practices. But the foundation is solid and ready for "smart growth".

Maria also commented that although Etsy may seem like a big company to the average small one-person business, in terms of the global marketplace (i.e. Amazon and eBay) Etsy is a small company.

Maria also touched on the ever-important question "what is handmade?" as it pertains to Etsy's fundamental principle. Matt also chimed in on this issue. To them, "handmade" takes on meaning that is beyond the literal interpretation of the word. It is the unique end product and the story behind it that matters. They talked a little about why vintage fits into Etsy - things that are cherished and have history can fit into the handmade ethic this way.

Maria admitted that Etsy is very U.S.-centric, but that their intent is to make the site become internationalized in the front-end architecture (i.e. currencies, languages). She gave some interesting statistics: 25% of monthly gross merchandising sales involves either a non-U.S. buyer, a non-U.S. seller, or both. As well, last year transactions took place in 159 different countries. She spoke about geography as it applies to allowing supplies on the site; supplies form a part of the continuum of handmade, and it is hard for small-town and rural sellers to get supplies as easily as their big-city counterparts.

As an example of their efforts to be more interntionally-friendly, Maria pointed out that they had retained legal counsel in order to make the current Etsy Handmade Moment Video contest enterable for sellers from several countries, including Canada.

Etsy is not yet a profitable company. This is something I have seen posted in the Etsy forums before, but it was news to a lot of people there. They are, however, at the break-even point.

Etsy's focus right now is on the buyer. Their top priority is the buyer experience. To this end they are developing the "playfulness" of the site, encouraging discovery, self-expression, and a strong focus on sharing and favourites. Someone asked for the ability to organize and group their hearts and favourites, and this is a to-do item for Etsy. Matt described a term they use at Etsy HQ to describe such organization: listology. Matt also mentioned that he'd like to see no limits on treasuries.

Someone asked how Etsy plans to bring in buyers. Maria listed off various ways: ad campaigns on blogs identified by Etsy survey participants, email marketing (i.e. Etsy Finds), social marketing (Twitter, Facebook), word-of-mouth marketing, and some limited print campaigns. They are also partnering with venues like Lucky Magazine, Martha Stewart and Good Housekeeping. They are skeptical of traditional media channels for advertising, as the return on investment is not that great. Since Etsy is not yet making a profit they have to be cautious with their advertising budget. At the present time they would prefer to focus on a campaign with more impact.

A few other questions were asked - who curates the Etsy Finds emails? Maria answered that they are curated by a small group of Etsy employees who also source items to fill the Gift Guides and the items that accompany Storque articles.

I asked what Etsy intended to do about resellers, namely in terms of the flagging system operating at a glacial pace, and the frustration of seeing resold items in the public areas of the site. Regarding the flagging system, Etsy added more manpower to clearing the queue of flags about a month ago. The goal is to have no queue at all. How to keep resellers off the site in the first place is a more complicated problem. Maria gave a bit of background to the issue by explaining that when Etsy was first created the intent was to make it as easy as possible to sign up for and open a store. This front-end ease of access is what also makes it easy for resellers to set up stores. She talked about a possible solution being to make the sign-up process a little more involved - not by jurying, but by requiring a profile to be filled out or questions answered. This would have the additional benefit of assisting Etsy in dealing with flagged items/shops as well. I mentioned the problem of lack of clarity in the emails sent to flagged sellers - frequently the flagged item is not mentioned at all and so the seller does not know which item to address - and Matt said this was a pet peeve of his as well. Maria said Etsy takes full responsibility for that problem and is going to address it.

The final question involved copyright and what to do if you find your work being sold by another seller as their own. Anda spoke up and said that Etsy's in-house lawyer, Sarah Feingold (a.k.a. SarahSays), takes copyright complaints very seriously and acts on them immediately as they are received, so if your items are being infringed upon, Sarah is the go-to admin.

That wrapped up the Q&A part of the evening, but a lot of people stayed on and mingled for a couple of hours. I had an interesting chat with Matt about what he likes to make (lamps out of guitars!) and read (books about online payment systems), and talked with Anda about the excellent shopping along Main Street, and the upcoming move to their new digs. Altogether it was a very enjoyable evening, and, as Matt said more than once, it's always great to put a face to a name.

Much thanks to Etsy admin for coming all the way to Vancouver, Canada!

Comments

[eclipse]

"I mentioned the problem of lack of clarity in the emails sent to flagged sellers - frequently the flagged item is not mentioned at all and so the seller does not know which item to address - and Matt said this was a pet peeve of his as well. Maria said Etsy takes full responsibility for that problem and is going to address it."
--------------------------
I am so glad you asked that question, it is really one of my pet peeves and it just creates so much extra work for the staff as well as frustration for the seller. (often leading to forum threads which then get locked and told to email the content team with questions, which of course the seller has been doing before turning to the forums in desperation). Even when the outcomes are eventually OK, by the time it's all resolved, Etsy often leaves a formerly happy, law-abiding seller with a bad taste in their mouth about the whole Kafkaesque process.

When you do any type of customer service by email, the goal is "done in one". This means solve the problem or give all necessary info inn the first communication, reducing the need for drawn-out, back-and-forth exchanges. For the seller this is preferable because their time is money and they usually just want to fix their mistake ASAP and get back to running their business, they do not have time to play guessing games.
But "done-in-one" is also in Etsy's best interest. The time of their CS staff is money too, and when you have one admin spending a cumulative hour dealing with one customer, it's just a diminishing rate of return. It leads to low productivity and backlog. I think if they had a more efficient procedure, they could get more done with FEWER staff on the content team, rather than needing to keep adding more people.

[fernfiddlehead]

Thanks for sharing this.

[wallwork]

Very interesting! Sounds like you and others asked good questions. Thanks for sharing.

[Stephanie]

Thanks for the recap! It was nice to be able to hear second hand what the admins said. Reading the forums sometimes can be so negative and it's nice to know that they still are still small and focused on improvements.

[Lisa]

Thanks for the write up! My San Francisco Etsy meetup is here:

http://savorsoap.com/cookbook/?p=189

I really liked how you guys addressed the flag emails that sellers receive. I've never received one, but I frequently see posters in the forums totally bewildered because they cannot figure out what was flagged, and some have hundreds of items! And of course their thread gets shut down if they try to ask us to find violations in public, a catch 22 really. Would be great to have this addressed.

[Keith]

Thank you for the write-up! Nicely done!

[Noah]

Am I the only one concerned that, and let's quote this so I don't mess it up:

"Etsy is not yet a profitable company. This is something I have seen posted in the Etsy forums before, but it was news to a lot of people there. They are, however, at the break-even point."

This sets off several alarms in my mind. Why is the largest handmade marketplace online unable to turn a profit. Rough calculations and past mentions put their revenues at almost one million dollars a month.

The big money investors aren't going to let Etsy hemorrhage their money for long. "Break-even" doesn't generate the 300% return on 35 million that venture cap firms look for.

I'm crossing my fingers that it all works out in the end.

[Abitabite]

Thanks for the detailed report.
When i went through the whole flagging thing when they altered the mature rules, it was, to put it nicely, agonizing to get a straight answer from community. Sarah (lawyer-sarah) was my savior on that. She is a really great person to deal with, and will tell you things on face value, for what they are. Maybe Sarah could take some time with the community team helping them figure out how they *should* be replying to flag complaints. This has been an ongoing problem for years now, and like Eclipse commented "done-in-one" is optimal for all parties!

[Ian Malpass]

Noah,

It's very common for start-up companies to take a while to reach profitability. That Etsy have reached break-even in four years is actually, to my mind, very good.

It costs a lot of money to keep a big site up and running, and you have to balance having enough staff to expand the company with having a low enough payroll cost to keep afloat.

Etsy's venture capital partners are seasoned veterans. They're looking for a return on their investment down the line, not tomorrow. And their profit is tied to the value of the company, rather than the company's profits per se.

So no, I'm not concerned myself.

[ange]

Great blog ty for sharing with us

[Connie]

sounds like i missed a great meeting! thanks for summarizing!

[ebbandflo aka pomomama]

thanks for taking and summarising. it was an amazing event, notably for getting so many vancouver etsians together in one room (and those on the team certainly rallied to making suggestions for meeting venues, etc. - thank you all!). i left feeling quietly a little more optimistic about all things etsy but i still hold some reservations. there was a lot of talk about branding, which no one challenged or pointed out that this involved a lot of etsy picks/faves, an issue which is dividing the 'community'. Likewise, Tanis's plea for searchability within her faves and the developing discussion about member-curation of their own faves wasn't seized on by etsy as a way of salving the aforementioned dissent.
admittedly it did occur to me that bringing such hard questions to such an event would be impolite ..... but i still would like to know

[Anda Corrie]

Thanks for such a thorough write-up. I'm enjoying the comments (especially Amanda's above me)--will be continuing to follow the discussion over the meet-up, even though the meet-up itself is over.

Melanie mentioned that we had placed 82 seats in the room! Amazing turn out! Double thanks again to everyone for joining us. I met a few people I've known online for years now for the first time.

You can always email me with questions or further comments and I'll do my best to help.

[louise (art and ghosts)]

Interesting stuff, and nice to have this perspective, thanks for sharing it!

lou x

[Soma Online]

Shoot, so that’s that one sppuoses..

[Global Bookmark Today]

Nice article. Unique thinking. Thanks.

[Ayman It]

Unique idea. Make it persistent. Thanks.