Etsy’s 2022 Transparency Report: Murky Stats and Non-Facts
Etsy claims its mission is to “Keep Commerce Human”, and unironically uses that tagline at the start of its 2022 Transparency Report - a report that details how the site’s automation is attacking legitimate Etsy shop owners with ever-increasing frequency. The deeper you dig, the more you can see that acknowledging the humanity of the seller base is not part of the corporation’s game plan.
Policy Enforcement Has Gone to the Bots
The Trust and Safety division is responsible for policing the site in areas involving fraud as well as items prohibited on Etsy, including manufactured items falsely listed as handmade. Etsy admits that automation is responsible for 95% of the listings and shops flagged for rule breaking in 2022. These reports more than doubled over 2021′s total, to around 36 million.
Despite this huge increase in flags, there was only a 16% increase in items removed year over year (a total of 1.9 million), meaning that Etsy automation is not improving in detecting real problems. Over 34 million flags were apparently unfounded; only 5% of the total flags were deactivated. That means that millions of listings were temporarily removed from the site or at least from search, when there was nothing wrong with them. It sometimes takes weeks for Etsy to restore these pages, and often that does not occur unless the shop owner opens a support ticket and complains (even though Etsy claims that every flag is reviewed “within four working days, on average”).
The 36 million flags equal roughly one-third of Etsy’s current site inventory. Clearly, these bad bots have meant a large loss of visibility and sales for shops that comply with Etsy’s rules, and often those shops aren’t even given coherent reasons for the removals. Frequently, there is no public announcement of a new “ban”, such as the removal of amber items that started in February 2022. [I had 2 items removed and then reinstated. They were wrongly removed, despite the fact I had selected the correct material attributes for both - agate and labradorite. The word amber was only used as a colour. I was not selling amber, and both focal beads were larger than the “1.25 inches” Etsy Support cited as the safety threshold.]
Unfortunately, the “Looking Ahead” portion of this report promises even more focus on machine learning to do the job Etsy truly needs real humans involved in. This problem is not going to disappear.
[Please note that I have no issue with using automation for some of these situations, but if it is only 5% accurate, it needs more human oversight.]
It Gets Worse - Meet The “Mature Content Classifier”
Here’s exactly how Etsy describes this “mature content classifier”, a new site feature:
“...in 2022, we developed a mature content classifier which identifies potentially mature listings using text and image recognition. Using this technology, we work to keep these kinds of items from being displayed to users who aren't looking for them, while still allowing those who are to find them. While no technology is perfect and we may sometimes get it wrong, we’ve seen a 17% decrease in flags of mature content from our member community since adding this classifier to our search experience.” [my emphasis]
This comes as no surprise to many sellers of both “mature” and non-mature items, as there have been many reports of items that are no longer searchable for many (if not most) words in their titles. For example, an affected listing will show up for a search that includes the shadow-banned words, but not other searches. Words and phrases that can trigger this issue include:
I am sure you can imagine many others! (but these are ones sellers have discovered and discussed publicly). For most of them, it makes no sense for Etsy to remove the item from all searches except those containing the offending word/s, since many of the words can be used innocently. “Nude” can be a colour, for example.
The most bizarre so far is the dog diaper listing, which was affected not only by the words “menstrual” and “panties” but also the lead image of a toy dog wearing the garment. Switching up the photos so the toy was not the lead made the item searchable again.
If your items are not at all mature and should not be classified as such by Etsy, contacting Support may help you get them restored, although many cannot even get a straight explanation from Etsy on this point. For some shops, removing the offending word from the title but keeping it in the tags may restore searchability, as can changing the first photo.
However, it is obvious Etsy is going to refine this “classifier” in the future, meaning that more items will be affected - both mature and not - and the current fixes may not always work. Sellers of items that are mature or even border on mature, or rely on certain search terms that may be affected, should seriously reconsider depending on Etsy for any significant amount of business income. This "solution” Etsy is touting isn’t going to end.
Resolving Order Issues Is Quicker Now Because Sellers Aren’t Involved In Most Cases - And Often Can’t Get Etsy To Help When Things Go Wrong
After a short section on intellectual property infringement, Etsy goes on to brag about the “improving” cases through its Purchase Protection Plan as of August 1 2022. “On average, cases were resolved by our team in just 14 hours in 2022. That’s down from 4.5 days in 2021.”
What they don’t mention is that Etsy’s automation of this area means many cases are closed by bots almost instantly these days, as I detail in my blog post on the topic. Sellers often have great difficulty getting errors corrected, and Etsy is automatically forcing refunds from seller money in almost all cases over $250 USD now. While it is great for buyers that they can instantly get a full refund for the package stolen from their front porch, sellers are left with no protection with these larger orders. Even if they can prove signature confirmation and have photos of the delivered package from the courier company, Etsy still takes any refund over $250 from the shop’s account.
As explained on my blog, there have been many ridiculous refunds issued from seller funds, including the following situations:
- the buyer didn’t pick the item up at the post office
- Etsy’s automation said the order was shipped late, but the message from Etsy listed the correct date as being “late”
- a not-as-described case where the customer used a screenshot from another shop to prove the item wasn’t as described
- a buyer returning an order without notifying the seller (which Etsy policy does not allow)
- the purchaser promised to return a damaged item, but recalled the package through USPS once Etsy issued the refund (thereby getting both the package and their money back)
In many of these types of examples, it was difficult or actually impossible for the shop owner to get their money back from Etsy, often because they could not reach Etsy or could not get an Etsy employee to understand the problem. Despite this, Etsy is claiming that “Sellers are also getting more access to support”. The corporation then flat-out lies by stating “we expanded our popular Help Center live chat support to be available to all sellers, 24 hours a day, every day.” I know this statement is as false as the day they announced it, as I was one of the sellers who filed [unresolved] Support tickets complaining that we did not have access to Live Chat. Today, I still frequently cannot get more than email options when trying to access chat through the Help Centre, and often have to use a help link generated by another seller to see the chat option.
Furthermore, even if an Etsy shop owner can contact Etsy through live chat, any serious issue must be escalated beyond that first tier of support, and some of those other tiers can now take weeks and even months to get back to sellers. In another example of Etsy’s shoddy automation, I filed a ticket 10 days ago regarding a listing in my shop that displays the “Sorry, this item is unavailable in your region” message when clicked on from the United States, and only received a cut and paste reply that explained some plants and seeds can’t be sold in the US. (It’s not a plant or seed, nor does it contain those substances. I can’t even figure out why they think it does. Plus, I have 4 other listings of the same material that haven’t been affected!) It’s obvious from my stats that this item was removed from US search and was made unpurchaseable there back in August 2022, yet not only did an Etsy employee not review this removal in any way, but 10 days later I still cannot get a real answer from Support.
It’s not just me. I advised 2 different sellers on appealing their shop suspensions back in March, but neither appeal has been decided yet (as of May 9). The Etsy forum is flooded with posts from new merchants who have correctly updated their tax ID numbers but still have suspended shops. Owners of hacked accounts can wait over 10 weeks to get Etsy to act. Most of Etsy’s social media posts get a large number of replies from disgruntled sellers who cannot get help with serious issues (or even sufficient explanations of what is happening). So even when live chat works, some of us may end up with worse “Support” than they did in the past, as the people staffing chat aren’t allowed to do many things on their own.
The Future Isn’t Any Brighter
So why is Etsy harming sellers in these ways? Why can’t the “Keep Commerce Human” company use actual humans to make sure its sellers are treated humanely?
The answer comes in 2 parts:
- Staff cost money. Etsy can’t spend cash hiring adequate Support or Trust and Safety staff if it is going to stay profitable. It is becoming evident they are running out of ways to make more money, so they aren’t going to spend any more dollars on helping the human collateral of faulty automation, regardless of how unfair the non-human bots are. Their business model isn’t profitable if they “Keep Commerce Human” by hiring humans to deal with human problems.
- In the recent quarterly report, Josh Silverman admits that shoppers have trouble finding the best things on Etsy - with over 100 million listings, there’s just too much stuff to wade through. It’s one of the 3 main points Etsy feels is holding the site back from having broader appeal. So when Etsy removes my keychain and pendants for spurious reasons, and puts the full onus on me to get the items relisted, it not only saves them money on staff, but also reduces the number of items in some searches, giving them an instant improvement in the oversaturation area. Or, put another way, Etsy will still get the same sales if my listings and your listings and some dog diapers modelled on a stuffed toy don’t show up now and again. They’ve learned they can lose a certain number of listings - even best-selling ones - without really losing money overall. They’ve made this clear in the past when discussing “churn” when they do something that forces shops to leave the site permanently. While Etsy’s primary goal isn’t to remove legitimate listings, doing that doesn’t hurt the bottom line, and does help with the “too much stuff” problem. What’s not to like, from an executive's point of view?
The corporation sees nothing to fix here. Sure, we can argue they shouldn’t release bad bots before they work better, but that would also cost money. Building faulty automated “solutions” is really Etsy’s thing, and they aren’t going to stop just because individual human shop owners lose thousands of dollars when their best sellers get deindexed or Etsy refunds an item that the buyer signed for.
You’ve been warned.