

TechCrunch Teardown: Etsy, It's Crafty - replicatorblog
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/11/tc-teardown-etsy/

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gfodor
Check out our tech blog:

<http://codeascraft.etsy.com>

We post fairly often in detail about the technical challenges we've had to
overcome while growing the marketplace.

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bmelton
In reading through the blog, there's an article on the technical challenges of
resizing the 135 million + images as you reorganized the site.

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but if you've already got a resize script
that resizes images into 6 different sizes when the seller uploads it.

What was the reason you didn't just re-point that script at the filesystem
instead of an uploaded file object? It may have taken slightly longer to
process, but my hunch is that it may have compensated for man-hours you spent
in building something new. What was the limiting factor there?

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code_duck
Excellent question. Check out the comments. A few members of the community
have questioned why they chose this elaborate process, which actually ended up
with the new images actually having noticeably lower quality. This was noticed
by the artists themselves, too, as Etsy's customers labor for a long time to
get the highest quality photos possible. Etsy's response when this was brought
up in the member forums was that they 'learned from this' and would take note
for the future... a more satisfying response would be "we acknowledge that the
images are inadequate and we'll re-do them".

Why Etsy thought they had to seek new image algorithms rather than just using
the ones they already used is the sort of question they very rarely answer. My
analysis is that it is related to the fact that they did the processing on an
Amazon server. To save bandwidth, transfer time and processing time, they sent
over the medium sized images rather than the original, full size image. Of
course, that doesn't explain why they decided to do it in 'the cloud' at all
rather than, as you say, just operate directly on the file system, in house.

They claim to have gone through an elaborate comparison process, apparently
with the visual quality comparison being done by engineers - not people
specializing in the non-technical side of photography or graphics. They seem
to have entirely missed the quality issue, though it was apparent enough to
customers that at least a hundred of them brought it up in the forums once the
switch to the new image sizes was made.

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smokey_the_bear
My fiance and I are purchasing our wedding rings from an Etsy jeweler. It's
the largest online purchase I've made, and it's a testament to how well Etsy
manages its reputation.

Also speaks to how irritating going into local jewelry shops was though.

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code_duck
There are definitely some excellent craftspeople with shops on Etsy. Etsy has
done a good job of managing their appearance, to where they clearly appear
more upscale than eBay or other marketplaces. There are some issues with that
but there's no reason to get into it here... if anyone is interested, the
juicy action is always on their forums, when it hasn't been suppressed yet.

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strebler
Great story, but I definitely dislike seeing financial projections with such
unnatural jumps - August to September 2010 has a $500K+ jump in monthly
revenue, which would appear to be the largest month-to-month increase in
revenue (as an absolute and I'd say as a percentage too).

Not saying it's impossible (maybe the September numbers so far support this),
but the jump from ~2.1 million to ~3.7 million in 4 months feels a bit
unnatural given the historical data.

