Originally published at: Etsy sellers on strike | Boing Boing
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They’re never satisfied are they? It was working fine but they had to go and mess it up by trying to screw more money out of the people who make the whole thing work to start with.
Sellers need to find another platform, but network effects make that almost impossible - and enable the sort of chicanery Etsy owners are now demonstrating.
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and the growing presence of resellers pitching manufacturered and sweatshop-sourced junk
This far from a new development.
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True, but the cost hike is not.
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That’s a pretty workable definition of capitalism in general.
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30% INCREASE??? What was it before? IMO, $30% sounds high!
One reason I haven’t been back to ebay in years was their higher percentage take.
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I’m wracking my brain here; but having some difficultly coming up with reasons why performing the same IT operations as previously would now command a 30% higher fee. It’s not like we recently uninvented transistors; and there has been no change in the physics of total internal reflection forcing us to move internet backbones to telegraph cables.
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Capitalism assumes limitless growth. Capitalists spend most of their efforts attempting to make this happen.
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Greed. Everyone wants more money, so they pass the price hikes around until consumers get hit with the price hike.
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Gotta pay for that shiny new office space in lower Manhattan somehow! So ironic that right as a pandemic teaches us that location isn’t what it used to be, a company whose main labor force was already distributed and home-based suddenly feels the need to swing their dick by buying up prime real estate for the management.
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Rob, forgive the dumb question, but search has failed me. pastelibaba feels like an important new coinage, and it could mean a bunch of things, but what did you mean by it? I want to use it properly! My hunch is “pasted junk from alibaba” but maybe you had something else in mind…
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Gotta appease the great bull god of make line go up.
Portmanteau of “Pastel alibaba”, where pastel refers to marketing aesthetics for crafty, vintagey stuff and alibaba refers to mass-produced junk dropshipped from the factory.
But your thought captures something important about the workflow of dropshipping and online marketing, too. The sedentary data entry work of platform arbitrage.
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sailed, long time ago.even better
now a googlewhack score of 1. congratulations, Rob.
thanks
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The off-site ads issue is what boggles my mind. As explained by Etsy, Etsy runs ads on other websites promoting specific stores & items found on Etsy. If the ad results in a sale, Etsy takes a 15% cut of the sale.
Which doesn’t sound nefarious except that the store itself has no control over these ads. They can’t control how often the ads run or where the ads run and the entire program is mandatory for any stores that earn more than $10k USD a year. Many stores have reported that after Etsy takes its 15% cut, they actually end up losing money on the sale.
It’s a mind-boggingly horrible policy to force on the people who actually create value for Etsy’s platform.
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This is the second feature of capitalism that’s been described in the comments on this article.
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Captured market. Where else are you going to go?
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Happy to do my part
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