
Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff - tiger3
https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/21/etsy-layoffs-focus-on-core-marketplace/
======
20years
I tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not
being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D
printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar
endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I
pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the
sales I made.

I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I
know that makes custom things to stay away.

~~~
kbenson
> They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made.

That seems illegal. Then again, Etsy does its own payment processing now, and
Paypal's been using that same tactic for years. I wonder if Etsy could get in
trouble for doing both, since they have more info and can generally confirm
shipment, given you print labels from them, and the problem is not that your
items were misleading or fraud, but that they prefer you not sell those types
of items on their platform?

~~~
throwawaylalala
Most likely, it was held for the period in which customers could get returns.
This is sane.

~~~
20years
Held for 180-day period. Far longer than needed for customers to get returns
and far from sane imo.

~~~
ves
180-day holds are generally standard if you're worried about chargebacks.

------
strict9
Will echo others regarding China imports, but one last hope to bring me back
to their marketplace is a revamp of the review system.

After spending thousands of dollars on furniture, waiting a month for the guy
to make it, and another two weeks to ship, I had maybe a few days to leave a
review for something I spent a lot of money on. With this policy, reviews are
for first impressions only. And I won't be coming back.

Maybe it's in place to prevent review extortion, but a time limit (especially
for goods made on demand) isn't the way to do it.

~~~
timdeneau
They used to email prompt you for reviews, or prompt you for reviews whenever
you signed in. Now they don’t do either, and even if I manually check the
backlog of orders, the review time windows have all expired. So I never review
anything anymore.

Seems like a strange decision. I don’t understand how that is helping buyers
or sellers.

~~~
strict9
Forgot they used to do that. The receipt emails also fail to mention the time
limit policy, causing many more people to miss their chance. For one-off
handmade products, reviews are more important than most other marketplaces.

The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers
when you later discover the fraud.

~~~
the-dude
> The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import
> resellers when you later discover the fraud.

Which may be the actual intended consequence.

------
k3oni
Etsy should go back at what they did initially and support the craftsmen
instead of the china imports, maybe that would help bring them back on track.

~~~
perseusprime11
Here's a contrarian point of view: What if they do embrace China imports, get
acquired by Alibaba and become from a front of artistic goods made in China.

~~~
rhizome
Doesn't Amazon already have a lock on all that?

~~~
wmeredith
Amazon's "lock on all of that" has pretty much ruined their brand from a
retail seller standpoint. They're catalogue is overrun with garbage and
counterfeits. It's quickly becoming eBay. I used to look at stuff in brick and
mortar stores and then buy from Amazon. Now I look on Amazon for research and
buy from brick and mortar stores so I know I'm not buying Chinese counterfeit
garbage.

~~~
rhizome
No arguments there, but to be clear I was speaking primarily to the Alibaba ->
FBA pipeline.

------
_Codemonkeyism
I know this will cost me mucho karma, but

what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog
posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after
years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked
out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds.

To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO
discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to
replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks.

[1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX

Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says
his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.

~~~
allover
You think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams
should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or
should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the
article mentions?

I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a
huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought
they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
"You think the tech leads ..."

Yes.

"schadenfreude"

No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some
companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap.
And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are
excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue.

Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they
focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen
have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the
questions I'm interested in.

~~~
allover
Who are 'they'? What member of the company do you imagine is deciding to do
'good ops' over 'revenue'?

You are acting like the whole company is just an amorphous blob that chooses
to siphon 'focus' into buckets. That is just not how companies work.

It simply makes no sense to infer anything negative about the company due to
them having a good ops image.

------
socrates1998
I have just heard a gradual declining of Etsy's quality and creator service of
the last year or two.

Their reluctance to crack down on Chinese crap along with being very unhelpful
to it's creators are the two biggest issues.

I mean, I get that a tech company would struggle with service to it's sellors,
that's pretty normal, but if your brand is "handmade quality", then why the
hell would you allow Chinese trash?

~~~
creepydata
Chinese trash is $$$$$.

It's hard to resist a stream of very easy money (in the short term at least).

------
jroseattle
I remember when this article about the Etsy engineering department came out on
Techcrunch 3 years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377)

The items that jumped out at me:

> The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own
> datacenter.

> The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers.

> It wanted to know how Hadoop worked, and the only way to do that was to
> bring it in-house and figure it out.

As a means to an end, this is a _really_ expensive way of operating nowadays.
And when the business isn't rolling, these costs become magnified (and the
associated operation vulnerable.)

~~~
njyx
I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. It depends on scale and the skills
available to you. Yes, amazon and co do a good job of pushing down cloud
costs, but you still need people to manage these services.

Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty
viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago
that very likely wasn't the case.

I'm not saying Etsy doesn't have somewhat higher system costs than others but
I doubt it's the cause of their issues.

~~~
jroseattle
> It depends on scale and the skills available to you.

Skills -- yes. Scale? That's kind of the point, nowadays. You don't need a
large staff to accomplish scale.

> I doubt it's the cause of their issues.

Their eng/ops approach wasn't the cause of any business issues, AFAIK. That's
why my comment is directed around what happens when business performance
suffers -- you start looking for cost reductions.

------
Justin_K
I lost interest in Etsy when I saw a bunch of manufactured crap I could by
anywhere else. There was a turning point where Etsy became more of this than
original, personally crafted items.

------
dmode
Etsy is a company that needed to stay private

~~~
CodeWriter23
We have a winner!

------
lkrubner
There was a stretch, I think 3 to 5 years ago, when it seemed that Etsy was on
a hiring spree -- lots and lots of recruiters were reaching out to me and
asking "Would you like to work for Etsy?" I was intrigued because I used to
live in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from Etsy is. So if I worked there, I
could have biked to work in about 10 minutes. That would have been cool.

But every time I asked about the tech, I was disappointed. They wanted me to
come in and work on a bunch of PHP code. When I asked about the details, from
the hiring manager, I was told that it was, basically, a big monolithic PHP
thing. I've no idea if they later moved to microservices, but I have been
traumatized by a few too many encounters with horrendous blobs of PHP. For me,
its become a bit of a heuristic. If a company is apparently working with a big
blob of PHP, I am wary. I need to hear very good things about that company, to
offset that wariness.

More recently I've read criticisms of their search system. At the risk of
indulging in "confirmation bias", I'll say this (bad search) is exactly what I
would have predicted, based on what I'd heard 3 to 5 years ago.

~~~
nikanj
For me, it's the opposite actually. "We have a monolithic php thing" seems to
signal "We made an MVP, found traction, and have been too busy to start from
scratch". In contrast, "We have ultramodern microservices" is depressingly
often code for "there's no real business here, so we have all the time in the
world to polish the tech".

With the former using "old, boring" tools, as they have been battle-proven
time and again, and the latter using $dailyhype, as that's the thing that
looks best on your CV right now.

I guess this comes down to personal preferences, and whether you value the
tech environment, or the business environment. I'd rather do unexciting work
in a profitable company, than exciting work in a company with a writing on the
wall.

~~~
rixrix
> I'd rather do unexciting work in a profitable company, than exciting work in
> a company with a writing on the wall.

this is a very good point

~~~
ryanmarsh
LOL, some of us like the thrill of a plane with one engine on fire, it appears
some of us are happy safe on the ground.

~~~
fred_is_fred
I'll take the plane on fire but only if the airline is profitable. A plane on
fire where the airline is bankrupt sucks. That was the second part of his
comment. Working for a company that's growing with revenue is always better.

------
JustAnotherPat
Seems like a sinking ship for anyone there involved in software especially
since they like to blame their tech and poor search for a lot of their
problems.

~~~
perseusprime11
Morale is very low currently. Not much confidence in the business.

------
amazon
I have only had positive experiences working with Etsy but a lot of other
people I've met have had their businesses shut down and their funds locked on
the site. Incredibly shady especially since most of their products were
legitimate crafts they made. Hopefully they get their act together because
there really is no replacement.

------
upbeatlinux
Why not initiate a share buy back, continue to trim the fat and go private? A
return to their roots is necessary rather than trying to balance the share
holder value of their B Corp status.

------
mi100hael
I wonder if that includes the bike-pedaling office composter.

~~~
bogomipz
In case anyone is wondering:

[https://blog.etsy.com/news/2012/office-ecology-composting-
at...](https://blog.etsy.com/news/2012/office-ecology-composting-at-etsy/)

------
rockmeamedee
A lot of negative nancies in this thread. I'm not here for kicking people
while they're down.

But didn't they have a layoff a month ago? Isn't there a management saying
that goes something like "If you're going to eat shit, eat enough so you only
have to do it once", specifically about layoffs?

Etsy engineers (and other workers) reading this, I wish you good luck! May you
survive and thrive through tough times.

------
jbob2000
Etsy is looking for a buyer.

~~~
CodeWriter23
As they do all day every day
[http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/etsy](http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/etsy)

------
learc83
I remember hearing that Etsy had an unusually large number of women working on
the development team. I wonder how this layoff is going to affect that? Will
they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a
luxury?

I also read that they were also hiring a lot of bootcamp grads. It would be
interesting to see the percentage of layoffs coming from bootcamps.

~~~
LoSboccacc
> Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more
> of a luxury?

if they need to cut cost, they should start firing males, if anything, right?

~~~
geofft
Yes. This is economically rational, as Alan Greenspan pointed out in 1983:

> ... _the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille
> Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-
> market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and
> women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women
> economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us
> better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of
> women."_

~~~
086421357909764
By that statement though, you're implying that men and women aren't paid
equally within Etsy. Which is against the whole of diversity and equal pay for
equal work campaign isn't it?

~~~
geofft
Yes, in the absence of strong evidence I would assume both Etsy and every
other salaried company that permits offers to be negotiated is paying men and
women non-equally for equal work, primarily because (as Greenspan points out)
the _market value_ of men is higher: they are receiving competing offers from
places that are more blatant about paying men more (or extending fewer offers
to women, or whatever). Hopefully this difference is pretty small at Etsy, but
it almost certainly exists, and even a small arbitrage opportunity is
economically rational to capitalize on.

I'm using "equal work" in an informal sense. (In the legal sense, yes, equal
pay for equal work is the law, but also in the legal sense, you can't give an
immigrant worker a green-card-path visa unless you can't find _anyone_ in the
States to do the same job, and we all know how creatively "the same job" gets
defined.)

~~~
alexashka
In the absence of strong evidence, you're making a bunch of assumptions you
mean?

In the absence of strong evidence, I personally err on the side of caution.

I don't know what these mythical places are that vastly prefer men over women
- every place I've ever worked at, everyone preferred people who are good at
their job and are easy to get along with - mostly the easy to get along with
part by the way.

~~~
lazyasciiart
Yes, culture fit, or 'getting along with each other' is important. When
looking for people they will get along with, most people tend to prefer to be
around others who seem like themselves. Given a team of all male engineers and
two candidates of equal ability and with similar personalities, one male and
one female, the male candidate is more 'like' the hiring engineers which makes
him seem easier to get along with. And so a company which is just hiring
people who 'are good at their job and are easy to get along with' can end up
with a team of men.

------
johnbellone
I didn't see any numbers on what departments were the most affected, but to my
friends at Etsy looking for roles in automation/infrastructure engineering
please reach out!

------
ComputerGuru
Maybe twitter will watch and learn. They have some similar problems.

~~~
Asparagirl
Yes, but their crap products overwhelming their ecosystem tend to be Russian,
not Chinese.

------
madamelic
This seems like the 'bubble' deflating.

Not so much a _bang_ , more of a fizzle as "the big kids" come in and cut
deeply.

That and investors keeping out of seed-stage funding because it has gotten so
bloated by everyone wanting their own startup.

I've seen Genius, Etsy, Uber... etc. It seems like a lot more startups are
getting shook up and cut down.

~~~
adventured
Etsy looks to be just fine. Sales grew 33% for 2016 vs 2015. Their operating
loss is down to a very small trickle at $2m for the latest quarter. To go with
$275m in cash.

They appear to have a very nice business that's trading for a reasonable four
times sales and likely heading toward profitability. What's the problem?
Cutting bloat is exactly what they should be doing, it'll drive them to
profitability faster.

~~~
LoSboccacc
it's still in a very precarious position - if they open too much to resellers
and large manufacturers people will go back to the more convenient alternative
- amazon.

~~~
treehau5
More convenient, better experience, better search, better customer support,
better shipping, more reviews, etc. etc.

I know this is a dead horse here but Etsy needs to go back to it's roots or
die. I would use eBay or alibaba before Etsy if they want to sell cheaply
manufactured goods.

~~~
huebnerob
There's no reason why the cheaply made goods couldn't be their "day job",
funding the true passion of supporting the creative entrepreneur.

What would be concerning is if they see it as anything more than a way to pay
the bills.

