Etsy is a site designed for individuals to sell handmade and vintage goods, as well as craft supplies. There’s some amazing stuff on there – as well as the pitfalls any online e-commerce platform suffers. As well as the usual buying and selling, they have:
Treasury
One my favourite parts of the site. It’s a little like Pinterest – you can curate themed ‘Treasuries’ of various, related items. You are not allowed to just post your own items, but it can be useful for marketing if you create treasuries that are relevant to the name of your shop – for example if your shop name is Neon Nights you could create a treasury of 80s fashions, or photographs of the Neon Boneyard in Vegas, or a rainbow range of false nails. Anything to get people clicking.
Resellers
Resellers are the bane of Etsy. While they invite you to report resellers, they are notorious for doing little about it. The forums have featured dodgy sellers, asking for feedback on mass produced items they are passing off as individually crafted. One of these scammers was very politely criticised by a fellow forum poster, ‘Runeleather’ – “Your notebooks are very pretty, but considering you buy them in bulk… and they aren’t handmade, you cannot sell them here.” Runeleather got suspended from Etsy for ‘calling out’.
Recently they even had a ‘Featured Seller’ interview with a woman who turned out to be a reseller, importing Balinese furniture, whilst marketing herself as an eco-friendly earth mother type.
April Winchell - Regretsy
Regretsy
Regretsy is a separate site that loves to showcase resellers, factory sellers and hilariously bad crafts. The founder, April Winchell, is a voice actress, philanthropist and queen of snark. Some sellers take her critiques in good humour, and have stuck ‘as featured on Regretsy’ headlines on their items – indeed shops have reported increased sales, with one even tweeting “Sold twenty items today! Thanks Regretsy!”. Being classy takes you a long way.
If you have a tantrum about it, you’ll get featured in the ‘Butthurt’ category and garner yourself even more scorn – April Winchell has been threatened with spurious legal action, whinged at, and lambasted in the Etsy forums. Once she was asked how she slept at night. “Pretty well thanks.” She posted, followed by a list of what her and her ‘fat jealous losers’ (as the regretsy crowd were nicknamed by one seller, a moniker they have gleefully adopted) have done for charity. Regretsy have raised $185,000.00 for organisations and individual sellers going through hard times, as well as putting together present boxes for low income families so that their children could have a Christmas (although Paypal tried their hardest to stop this happening).
