Etsy Strike a NothingBurger, Sellers Care About Buyers
Etsy Strike a NothingBurger, Sellers Care About Buyers
The job of a marketplace is to bring new customers, and most sellers will tolerate almost anything as long as that's still happening.
Even before I saw the metrics, I knew it wouldn't amount to anything. Nothing has fundamentally changed about Etsy's value proposition over time. Social media amplifies everything, investors are sometimes listening "too hard" in an attempt to generate alpha, be first, or some other reason.
It's still a great business.
It's still a business that's tough to scale, because unique items are tough to scale.
It's likely a business that still needs to keep acquiring vertical-specific marketplaces to continue to drive growth.
Watching eBay's marketplace grow up in the 2000s, to say they had a vocal community would be an understatement. As one of the first online marketplaces, eBay was having to invent new rules as it went along.
Each new policy or fee hike would bring a mini-revolution.
The only one that even potentially threatened the business was when eBay went down continuously over and over for months, prior to their CTO stabilizing and helping rebuild the platform.
The fact that even the platform going down didn't kill the business tells you a lot.
This isn't to say I don't care about the little guy or that it doesn't affect entrepreneurs who are selling on Etsy at all. It's just it has been entirely overblown in this activist/unionization environment right now. A strike sounds newsworthy.
It's not. There are any number of things sellers can do to respond.
The only metrics you need to pay attention to are active buyers, repeat buyers, transaction velocity, GMV, multi-category buying, AOV, etc.
When the buyers leave, the sellers are gone. Until then, marketplaces serve a purpose in the market that is not declining despite fee hikes -- especially in this environment.
