The New York Times has a monster, seven page article on Etsy this weekend.
Sellers mentioned include RareBeasts, loranscruggs, Clayflower22, Simply Soaps, Circa Ceramics, and Black Apple.
The article also contains sales figures and more details about Etsy’s founders and first days.
Some very important changes to the Etsy billing process are outlined in this Storque article:
Attention sellers! This is an important message about your bills!
In order to keep Etsy growing, we rely on the fees we collect from sellers. This is vital to the success and future of Etsy. As of January 1, 2008, a new Billing Policy will be put in place to motivate sellers to settle overdue accounts. The following is a description of how this will affect sellers who have not been paying bills.
If you did not pay your September bill when it was due on October 1st, that bill became overdue on October 15th. On November 15th, it became one month overdue. On December 15th, it became 2 months overdue. On January 15th, three months over due.
If you do not pay the overdue funds accrued in September or before, your account will be suspended on January 15th.
If you just do not pay the money from your bill that was accrued in October (overdue on November 15th, one month overdue on December 15th, two months overdue on January 15th), then you will not be able to relist items until you pay that amount incurred during October.
So, the policy goes into effect on January 1st and you should pay before January 15th, or you will have to deal with these penalties.
Please, please pay your bills. If you do it now, you will save yourself a big hassle. And you will save Customer Support many, many headaches (and time not spent helping newbie shoppers!).
You can find our previous coverage of Etsy bill issues here.
update, December 18. Edit by JB
This new Storque article attempts to clear up the confusion about bills.
Dear Sellers!
Your Etsy bill is due on the 1st of each month and you can pay it at any time. It becomes overdue on the 15th of the month, at which point you may start to notice some nagging reminders popping up in Your Etsy.
In order to clear up some confusion about billing, we’ve extended the payment grace period until 12:00 am on the 16th of each month, meaning you will not see any nagging overdue notices until then. Our billing time is in UTC (UTC is Coordinated Universal Time), so that’s midnight for folks in London and 7:00 pm on the 15th for the East coast of the USA.
And don’t forget, starting on January 1, 2008 we’ll be taking action on overdue accounts, so make sure you’re current!
The article is closed to comments.
edit Dec 24 by JB
Dec 21 Storque update:
As of January 1, 2008, a new Billing Policy will be put in place to motivate sellers to settle overdue accounts.
This is how billing works:
* Your balance from the previous month is due on the first of the following month.
* Your balance must be paid in full by 23:59 UTC on the 15th of the month.
* Accounts not paid up by that time are considered overdue.
* Accounts 2 months overdue will automatically be suspended from listing, relisting, and renewing items.
* Accounts 3 months overdue will be suspended.
The article is closed to comments.
Etsy and Matt Stinchcomb are mentioned in a USA Today article, along with more sales figures.
USA Today: “To give a gift from the heart, why not make it yourself?”
In this thread:
jared says:
We’re increasing the number of Treasury lists available to 333. This means more lists for more people.This change is effective immediately. Enjoy!
In this thread, Jared previewed a new site feature called “Pounce”:
Here is a simple, lightweight tool to help shop:
http://www.etsy.com/pounce.php
Pounce provides a way to browse listings by recently purchased items. Each time Pounce loads, it randomly shows you a listing that has recently sold. To the right are more listings from the same shop. Reload quickly by pressing the ‘Show more…’ button.
I’ve been having a blast finding gifts this afternoon while I was building this thing.
I am posting the link here to gather suggestions, comments, and criticism before a site wide rollout later this week. Thanks for your time!
Update December 11:
The missing gift guides are back, along with a few new ones! The only one still missing is “under $15.”
Luxury (I think this used to be the “over $100″ category)
Environmentally Friendly
Pets and Pet Lovers
Art collectors
Jewelry Addicts
Book Worms and Writers
Bag Lady
(new) Crafters
(new) Gourmets
(new) Gag Gifts (Warning: Mature)
December 10:gift guide changes
These categories have been removed:
environmentally friendly
Pets and Pet Lovers
art collectors
Jewelry Addicts
Book Worms and Writers
bag lady
under $15
$100.00 and up
new category under occasions:
everyday
Edit: (by quirke)
These categories are not gone for good, just being moved around, according to this thread.
kfarrell says:
The missing guides will return, no worries! We’re just moving them around a bit :)
In this thread, RevolvingDork describes some new improvements to Etsy’s search functions.
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,As a step towards making the search feature easier to use, we’ve fixed a few bugs and have added some more search options.
:: Please note that these changes affect only the default “tags, titles” searches ::
You can now use quote marks to search for exact words or phrases in listing titles and tags. For example, if you wanted to find items that used the exact phrase “far out”, you can now enter “far out” in the search bar to get exact results. Without quotes, you’ll get every item that uses both the word “far” and the word “out”. Quoted and non-quoted search terms can be combined, such as in “far out” pillow.
You can now also reliably use the option “NOT” or the minus sign “-“ to exclude terms from your search. For example, if you wanted to find jewelry that was not silver, you could enter jewelry -silver . If you wanted to find jewelry that was not silver and not a ring, you could enter jewelry -silver -ring .
There are a handful of other tweaks, such as no longer breaking on certain non-alphanumeric characters ( like apostrophes ). Be sure to send thanks to Jorge, Haim, and Kelly, as they’re the ones that made this update happen!
We hope these modifications make searching easier and more accurate. We’re working on further enhancements to make it even better, so stay tuned!
The chatroom will be down at 9pm EST for about 30 min.
Here are the issues being addressed:
* fix broken whispers for some
* fix broken auto-complete
* faster server
* cleaner server-side room instantiation
Read the official announcement here.
Etsy admins and engineers have known, for at least a month, that there is a bug, or programming oversight, which allows Etsy to take a .20 listing fee without delivering the 4 months of contracted listing time.
This bug affects those listings which are in inactive or edit mode and are beyond their expected expiration date. Unlike active listings, these items are bypassed by the ‘expiry bot’ and when reactivated and renewed/relisted, it causes the listing time to be calculated from the original expiration date, not the current relisting date - which in turn actually subtracts listing time, rather than adding it. In some cases, the entire 4 month listing time has vanished, requiring an additional .20 renewal/relisting.
There have been several threads (here, here, and here) detailing this bug, each of which has been closed to further comment and discussion. The latest thread to get the invisible lock was shut down with this comment by admin stellaloella:
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Mary Kathleen Flynn, Senior Editor of Tech Confidential, the publication that recently ran an article on Etsy founder Rob Kalin, posted on the forums in a thread on the topic:
Thanks for checking out our recent coverage of Etsy.com and founder Rob Kalin:
http://www.techconfidential.com/features/startup-stories/the-homemade- ceo-etsy-founder-1.php
You ask why we would bring personality into reporting on a company?
The head of a company and his or her personality — credibility, reliability, professionalism as well as creativity, talent, intelligence, skill, background — are crucial to the success of a company, especially the founder when you’re talking about a startup.
For example, when we asked investors in Etsy.com — such as Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson and Flickr founder Caterina Fake — why they put their money into Etsy, their faith in Rob Kalin was a huge part of their answer.
As journalists, our mission is to give readers a full picture of the tech dealmakers we cover. (I’d say fair and balanced, but I’m afraid I’d sound like a rep from a certain conservative news network.)
As Fred Wilson told me, Rob is a maverick who’s out to change the world. But Rob is also struggling a bit with the responsibilities of running a successful Internet company — as even his closest compatriots will acknowledge, and as we discovered when he skipped town without canceling an interview with us. :)
Does that mean sometimes he comes across as a bit of a flake? Well yeah it does.
But, heck, as you say, many of us are flakey, aren’t we?
:)
Hope you’ll keep reading Tech Confidential.
I know we’ll keep following Etsy and Rob.
Edit by Serena on Dec 8, 10 a.m.:
On Dec 7th at 10:22am, the author of the article, Stacey Higginbotham, responded to questions raised in the thread:
Hey guys, I’m the person who wrote the article on Etsy and wanted to address the questions on the 11,000 items. That number came from an interview with Rob done in October. I’m not sure if the site has jumped in popularity or if he was giving out an old number, but I’m glad to see that even more items are listed. And you’re right, it’s not an eBay-style auction site. It’s an e-commerce site.
Thanks for reading and responding to the story.
