More Proof that Etsy is Evil

11:41 AM Posted In , Edit This 0 Comments »
Or else completely and utterly stupid.

I would think this was some sort of Horrifying Halloween Hoax if it weren't for the recent history of other, multiple horrifying "adjustments" over on Etsy.

On Wednesday, Andrew - an Etsy admin - posted here:

"Hi all,

We've made some minor adjustments to our search functionality to make it more user-friendly and to help keep our search results returning quickly.

- Due to technical limitations, we’re capping the number of items returned in a given search to 50,000. Our research indicates that clickthroughs drop to less than .001% and purchases drop to .000001% on item listings beyond 50,000 in a given search, so this change won’t negatively affect item discovery or sales. Also, many of our searches currently return less than 50,000 items. In those cases search listings will apear as they always have.

- When a visitor searches for something that our system has no match for, we won’t return any listings. Visitors have long been confused when we returned all items in this case. Now they’ll get to refine their search and find what they’re looking for more effectively."


Search at Etsy has been a huge problem from day one because the search function relies so heavily on tags that people add to their listings when they put items in their shop.   Sellers have been asking for YEARS that etsy address this issue.  So - did they fix the BLINKING blatant tag abuse problem?  No.  

Basically, what this new change means is that if you sell in a high volume category - like jewelry or supplies, the search runs out after 50,000 items and there is no longer any way to jump around and find items that were listed a long time ago.  Like yours if you didn't re-list yesterday.  Your 20 cents no longer buys you 4 months of exposure.  For some of us - jewlers, supply shops, you're lucky if your 20 cents buys you 4 days.

Artfulbeginings spells it out right here:

"So I just did some calculations for the top seller here, Yadanabeads. She has 1829 listings in Supplies. Main category "supplies" cuts off any listings made before October 27th (!). 940, or about half of Yadanabeads listings are from before October 27th - for those, she paid $188 to NOT show up in her main category, Supplies. She only needs to choose one main category, Supplies, to list and supposedly that listing should be good (i.e show up) for 4 months. The $0.20 is a LISTING fee, not a SEARCH fee."

and here:

"Going back to Jewelry, there are 1,617,214 listings. Of those, only 50,040 are showing up on the main category listing page (1251 pages, 40 listings per page). So due to the "technical" difficulties, Etsy is NOT honoring $324,234.80 in listing fees in Jewelry alone.

sadly, my math is good."


This is all very ugly.  Come visit me and a whole world full of excellent artists and crafts people on ArtFire





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