Archive for The Future
May 5, 2008 at 6:03 pm · Filed under Chat, Etsy Communications, Events, The Future · By JB
As reported in this Storque article, Etsy is holding a chat to gather community input on the issue of Etsy sellers having employees. This issue has come up a few times recently in the Etsy forums.
The meeting is Friday May 9
6 pm Central European time zone
5 pm UK time time zone
12 noon eastern USA time zone
11 am central USA time zone
10 am mountain USA time zone
9 am pacific USA time zone
Join us for a discussion and feedback session about employees and your Etsy shop. Rob, aka Rokali, co-founder and CEO of Etsy, will be leading the workshop.
When: Friday, May 9, 12 noon (Eastern US time) times on the Virtual Labs schedule are displayed in your local time
Where: Treehouse Room, Virtual Labs
…
Agenda:
For those selling handmade goods: Are employees necessary for a seller to “make a living making things”? Are the items still “handmade”?
What sort of hired help is needed for handmade sellers? Is *what* potential employees do for the shop relevant?
Does the number of employees that a business has impact whether the shop belongs on Etsy? If so, how many is too many?
Are different rules necessary for sellers of commercial supplies and vintage goods? Are employees acceptable for these types of shops?
What sort of information do you need (for example, links to information about employment law) to grow a business that includes employees?
Should sellers who are outsourcing, involved in collectives, and employing people be approved by Etsy? What sort of approval process would you be interested in?
UPDATE Monday May 12 by JB:
The minutes to the meeting are here
April 11, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under Etsy Communications, Events, Features, Miscellaneous, The Future · By quirke
Today’s Town Hall meeting in the Treehouse of the Virtual Labs was attended by over 130 people. While a transcript will be available later in the Storque, here are a few notes in advance:
General notes:
-Etsy currently has 73,478 shops with at least one item
-There are currently 60 Etsy employees
-Engineering comprises ½ of the company
Rob said that they are developing 2 major changes for the near future and 6 other developments for further down the road.
The 6 future developments are:
-currency conversion
-shop stats for sellers
-dynamic Team sections
-“stuff with video”
-“real-time multi-user stuff” (like the virtual labs)
-an in-house payment system
The 2 upcoming changes are:
Changes to Listing Periods for Renewals – This change will mean that when you renew an item, instead of adding 4 months from the previous expiration date, the additional 4 months will start from the date of renewal.
Changes to Search/Categories – Top level categories will be clarified, and “filters” will be added, such as “who is it for?” and “what is it made of?”.
Other items of interest:
-revamping the forums is being looked at from a database perspective right now and remains under development
-the “first draft” of the separation of supplies/vintage from search is completed
-supplies/vintage will hopefully get their own place by the end of the year
-when shop stats are provided there will be different levels of stats available starting with free, and then more detailed stats costing “a few bucks”
A great many other smaller issues were discussed – we will link to the transcript once it appears in the Storque.
UPDATE April 15 by JB
The transcript of the town hall meeting is posted here
The Storque article summarizing the meeting is here
April 9, 2008 at 9:33 pm · Filed under Etsy Communications, Events, The Future · By JB
The Storque has announced the next Town Hall meeting with Etsy founder Rokali, at 4:00pm EST on Friday, April 11th in the Treehouse room of the Virtual Labs.
A couple caveats:
The room will fill up quickly. We’re working on a Balcony feature, which will increase the capacity greatly. Till then, it’s first come, first served.
Since there’s no single time that everyone in our global community can attend, so each meeting will be recorded and posted in the Storque for your re-viewing pleasure.
editorial- the article says EST (eastern standard time) but I am guessing they actually mean EDT, since New York does observe Daylight Savings time and it is in effect right now. This is important when figuring the time differential from GMT.
Time conversion:
4 PM, EDT Eastern USA
3 PM, CDT Central USA
2 PM, MDT Mountain USA
1 PM, PDT Pacific USA
8 PM GMT/UTC
9 PM United Kingdom (UK is now on Summer / Daylight Saving Time (NOT GMT))
10 PM Central Europe time zone, (+2 GMT), in countries which are currently observing Summer / Daylight Saving Time (which I think is most of them). This covers France, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, etc.
April 9, 2008 at 3:36 pm · Filed under Features, Miscellaneous, The Future · By GreenMamba
In this thread admin emilybidwell announces Etsy’s plan to add a dedicated policy page to seller shops.
emilybidwell says:
The community has suggested a Seller Policy Page for better shop organization. We think that sounds like a great idea! If we created a seller policy page, what would you want it to look like?
Here’s what we have been brainstorming so far, but it’s all on the drawing board, so anything can change:
-The link would exist on your Shop Home Page under “Profile” in blue AND at the bottom of each listing.
-The page might look similar to the profile page
-Adding a policy would be optional
-If you don’t add a policy, the page would be blank (like an empty profile page).
-There would be sections for different aspects of policy: payment, shipping, refund/exchange, general
-If you don’t fill out a suggested section, the section will not appear in public in any way
-There will not be a text limit
Posted at 2:16 pm, April 9 2008 EST
Be sure to add your own ideas and suggestions to the Policy Page Wish List.
(At this time, there is no firm ETA.)
March 6, 2008 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Etsy Communications, The Future, The Storque · By JB
The Etsy survey results have been published, please see this Storque article for a summary.
Etsy has compiled the detailed results into a pdf file you can download here
March 6, 2008 at 12:04 am · Filed under Customer Service, Etsy Communications, Site Terms, Site Use, The Future, Uncategorized, policy change · By quirke
In this Storque article, Matt provides a summary of Monday’s discussion on Etsy’s policies and practices.
There is a direct link to the meeting minutes here.
edit by JB:
The posted minutes only contains the written portion of the chat and not Matt’s voice comments.
This past Monday I invited members of the Etsy community to join me in the Virtual Labs to share their comments and concerns. My intention was to give the community an opportunity to speak directly and candidly to us here at Etsy.
We were there to listen, and listen we did.
Over the past couple of weeks, we clearly made some missteps in the forums and customer support. We are sorry for anyone who was affected by our mistakes, and we’ve been reaching out directly to the people involved.
Our aim now is to take action by formulating clear and consistent policies and practices to make sure our community, and our company, will continue to be healthy, helpful, and supportive as we grow.
Here are the key issues raised during Monday’s meetings:
Issue 1: Buyer /Seller Disputes- What Role should Etsy play? What is a venue?
Issue 2: Shop Closures:- What are Etsy’s policies? What due diligence measures are being taken to make sure that mistakes are not made?
Issue 3: Relationship between Etsy’s Policies and a seller’s.
Issue 4: Feedback System - improvements and limitations.
Issue 5: Improving policy documentation: TOU, Dos and Don’ts.
Issue 6: Forum: Policies and environment. Muted sellers.
Issue 7: Admin tone, behavior, and accountability.
The entire Community & Support team is in NYC this week and we’re discussing the these issues. I invite you to email me directly at matt@etsy.com if there are other issues regarding customer support and forum policies that are important to you that weren’t discussed.
One quick note:
Monday’s discussion was rather spur of the moment. I realize how important it is to make sure everyone’s voice is heard, and I apologize to all who did not learn of Monday’s talk in time. I do assure you, however, that they were just the start of what will be regularly occurring conversations.
FYI: The comments as currently posted accidentally repeat the minutes from the morning meeting twice. The minutes for the second session start approximately three-quarters of the way down the page.
March 2, 2008 at 5:43 pm · Filed under Customer Service, Etsy Communications, Site Use, The Future, policy change · By quirke
In this thread, Matt invites Etsy members to join him in the virtual Labs for a chat about Etsy’s policies and practices.
matt says:
I just posted this in another thread, and will share it here too.
The entire support/community team will be in New York this week and we will be reevaluating policies and practices, and shifting roles and priorities.
I would love to hear your ideas and encourage you and any one else to join me in the treehouse in the virtual labs tomorrow (monday) morning at 10:30 am est to chat about this and more.
http://www.etsy.com/virtual_labs.php
Put on your thinking caps, gather your questions and concerns, and be there!
January 31, 2008 at 10:49 am · Filed under Etsy Staff, The Future, The Storque · By GreenMamba
In this Storque article, Etsy’s First Five Years, co-founder Rob Kalin discusses Etsy, from it’s early beginnings, to a point in its not-too-distant future. Kicking off with a reading of a children’s book, Swimmy, to help illustrate his ideal company model, he goes on to give a quick introduction of Etsy investors, then outlines why a nearly-solvent Etsy needed another financial boost:
- Given our current rate of growth — with how many images we store and how much traffic we serve — we estimate that we’ll need to spend $5 million on hardware and hosting in the next two years. This is not only to keep up with what we have now, but to support new features and expansion.
- Right now, Etsy only supports the US Dollar and the English language. We want to support many other currencies and languages, but to do so requires significant resources: from people to translate the site as it exists now, to providing customer support in new languages.
- The checkout experience on Etsy is not ideal. Every buyer has to pay every seller individually when checking out. Based on our own tests, and based on a lot of unsolicited feedback, this is a major hurdle to increasing sales. People shopping on Etsy expect an experience comparable to other leading ecommerce sites like Amazon.com. We aim to build an in-house payment system, and to do this properly requires a significant amount of capital investment.
- In the same vein as the previous point, people searching for items on Etsy expect search to be comparable to Google. This is quite a lofty goal, but we’re up for the challenge. Our new investment will help us achieve this.
- Etsy is a platform on top of which tens of thousands of other people run their own businesses. We have a huge responsibility to keep our service humming and improve it based on community feedback. In order to do this, first of all we need to stick around. While it’s nice to know that we can cover our own operational costs, I never want to make the excuse that we can’t succeed because we lack funds to buy servers, cover a bandwidth bill, provide a warm office for our employees and so on. In other words, we need a bit of a cushion in order to provide the best service we can, confident that we can spend a bit more when need be.
- We need to be able to make it through any hard times that hit the economy. We believe that the current economy, favoring megacorporations and supersizes, is unstable. People who make a living making things, especially those we have on Etsy, will play a key role in revitalizing and stabilizing the world.
- The services Etsy provides, from customer support to shopping tools, need to grow and improve. We want to offer superb customer service, including live phone support; we want to provide our sellers with detailed stats on their shop. We can do these, but they require more resources than we currently have.
- It is immensely important to me that all Etsy workers are paid a good salary, provided with full benefits (medical, dental, vision) by the company. Many companies, far too many companies, underpay their employees, don’t make workers employees at all (”permalancers” and “permatemp” are the new words for this), and provide few if any benefits. (We also know that many of the sellers on Etsy lack access to such benefits as health insurance, and we want to work to change this.)
He wraps up the article with a double postscript:
P.P.S. I’m planning another Town Hall, so please think up any questions and post them in the comments. I’ll gladly answer them during the online meetup.
December 27, 2007 at 12:46 pm · Filed under Checkout System, Customer Service, The Future · By GreenMamba
In response to a thread proposing on-site payment processing for all Etsy purchases, Rokali gave this response:
Yes, this is something we’re working on. It’s a large project and requires a hefty amount of legal, technical and operational planning, with almost no margin for making any mistakes.
The most common complaint we hear from buyers concerning the checkout process is having to pay every seller separately, off-site.
This also creates the problem of the “non-paying buyer,” i.e. someone who purchases an item on Etsy but never pays for the item. This is a big drain on both sellers and our own customer support.
Any online transaction is going to involve a “middleman” between the buyer & a seller’s bank account. We’d still allow for a buyer to specify PayPal at checkout if that’s what they preferred. Many other online ecommerce sites do this.
Having our own in-house payment system would also facilitate site-wide gift-certificates, coupons, an affiliate program and more. It’d also entirely eliminate non-paying buyers.
We’ll keep everyone updated as to our planning here. This is something we’d announce several months ahead of time, if we get the go-ahead in the first round (legal) of implementation.
Posted at 6:37 pm, December 26 2007 EST
You can follow the entire thread here.
November 29, 2007 at 11:47 pm · Filed under Alchemy, Categories, Currency, Features, Feedback, Listings, Search, Tags, The Future · By quirke
In this thread, admin kfarrell gives a general progress/status report on many of the top issues currently concerning Etsy members.
kfarrell says:
So without making any promises or specifying any timelines, I’ll address some of the features mentioned at the beginning of the thread. A couple of them aren’t really my area so I’m afraid I’ll have to skip those.
* Checkout process needs reworking
Yes, we are working on layout changes to make this process easier for new buyers on the site who may not already be familiar with Etsy and Paypal.
* Bring alchemy back
OK!
Seriously, it will be back. And better than ever!
* Deal with categories, tags, and search
Well now that’s three features, isn’t it ;) All three of these are being actively evaluated, tweaked, and redeveloped. They are all very complicated systems that work with each other, so nothin’s gonna happen overnight.
* Clarify the place of both supplies and vintage on the site
Vintage items belong in the Vintage category, handmade and commercially produced supplies belong in the Supplies category.
* More frequent and clearer feedback to the forums from the Etsy admin team (FAQs, stickies, etc)
We have recently release a new help guides section ( http://www.etsy.com/help_guide_main.php ) which we will be adding guides to on a continual basis. We are also going through and updating the FAQs.
* More warning and user testing before introduction of new features
We do collect a lot of user input before a feature is launched, and the lead time between announcing and releasing a new feature varies from project to project.
* Bulk/multi-update for items (Shipping profiles, prices, tags)
This is a great idea, although not something we’re actively developing at this very second because we have a few bigger fish to fry, and only so many cooks can be in the kitchen at a time! Also apparently the engineers like to sleep occasionally. Yeah, I don’t get it either ;)
* Multiple currency support for sellers and buyers
This is something we are working on.
* revise flagging system
We are indeed working on a far more graceful way to handle flags
We’re also working on about 50 other BigSecrets I sadly can’t tell you about, although none of them happens to be a Dodgeball game (bummer for dodgeball fans).
We do read *all* the feedback on Etsy posted here in the forums, including the stuff that’s sometimes hard to read. So please, continue posting your ideas (both positive AND negative), I just ask that you keep things constructive and refrain from personal attacks on admins or each other. There is a human being behind every avatar on Etsy.
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