[mincer_ray]

i will say they are right about one thing, small sellers are getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress resellers. as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original work. make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress, then sold by all the boring resellers on etsy. 90% of rpg dice sellers are selling the exact same stuff they got from the exact same bulk deal.

one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks.

idk if this is just affecting the retro games / dice communities, or if others are also hit. ALSO you can kinda just sell semi-illegal "grey" goods on etsy? TONS of sellers just selling bootleg game boy games and rarely mentioning that in the product description.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Within 45 minutes of where I live lies a little town that is known for hundreds of miles around as a place to go shopping for locally-produced art and hand-crafted items of almost any kind. You know, glass items, wind chimes, paintings, etc. Why does this still work, 30 years into the internet revolution? Curation. The shop owners choose very carefully what to sell, based on extremely limited space. Etsy purports to be the same idea on the internet, but they'll let anyone who wants to sell on their platform. THEY'D BE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE IF THEY DIDN'T. But for the same reason that I buy less on Amazon and more from brick-and-mortar stores, they're finding that the CURATION is the key to VALUE. The problem of course, is that Etsy, or Amazon, or ANYONE who has a PLATFORM -- like Apple -- has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual customers. It seems that an easy "gate" to erect on the platform would be to limit how many chochkies you can sell per month. It would seem to be a fix for people who are trying to use volume and SEO to take over someone else's product idea. Someone here could probably blow a hole in that idea, though. But if it's a site for personal hobbyists to sell something on the side, then you have to come up with rules to CURATE the content to produce that outcome.

[JAlexoid]

But... That curation is a VERY expensive task.

Etsy is for artists/creators. If you add curation to the mix one side needs to take a hit - and it ain't going to be your wallet.

Basically the reason for Etsy to exist is "direct to consumer" model, with low intermediary overhead and 0 setup hurdles.

(If you ever tried to get a product on a supermarket shelf, that's how it is to get onto a successful curated store shelf)

[mschuster91]

This is why I buy music related stuff (e.g. cables) only from Thomann. Amazon more or less relies on vendors to fill out metadata like product type, cable length, plug types and communication standards, and the result is that the Amazon product filter is often just horribly fucking broken. Meanwhile, Thomann does all that curation work on their own, and it's just a breeze to use.

Our biggest electronics chain Conrad however... oh jesus they have gone really downhill some years ago with their website design - the search is broken, metadata for parts are (sometimes completely) wrong, and to make it worse even the in-store staff has to rely on the website instead of a dedicated ERP software which means if you are searching for a part with specific specs (e.g. temperature) even the store staff can't help you any more!

[rr808]

Most artist markets feel the same as Etsy, the majority of stuff is made in China too.

[taeric]

I'm tempted to say not to mistake local tourist traps for high quality goods.

This is tough, as a lot of artistic items have quality control that is purely subjective. But, often these places are not much more curated than the vendor room of a convention. There will be some nice things; but claims of curation are all too often over sold.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That reminds me of an idea that I sent in to Apple, via their bug reporter (you can submit suggestions).

I'm an Apple One subscriber. I only listen to Apple Music during my morning three-mile walk (45-50 minutes). The rest of the day, I'm working, and I don't listen to music, then.

I use their "Create A Station Based on This Song" feature, like Pandora. It generally works fairly well (I think Pandora works better, but they also limit skips -even for paid subscriptions).

I like to hear obscure, indie, music, from artists off the beaten path. I tend to immediately skip, when I get a song that is in my library, or that I've heard a lot (like the song used to create the station). I also tend to skip a lot, anyway, because a lot of undiscovered music is obscure for a reason.

One time, I was listening to relaxing, wordless, techno/trance, and a freaking Lady Gaga pop song plops in, like an airborne gift from a dyspeptic, incontinent, buzzard. The only possible relation to what I was listening to, was that one of her band members was maybe playing a sampler. She's a talented artist, and all that, but that was not what I wanted to hear. It was quite jarring.

Someone is selling eardrums. That was probably an AI hiccup.

In any case, my suggestion was to create "Undiscovered Music" stations, so you say "Play more songs like this one, but ones I've not heard before, and are definitely not in my library."

I would want to hear indie tracks, and songs from obscure artists. I listen to a lot of different types of music, and most of my tastes are heavily represented in the indie space. I often find it difficult to discover music that I'm not already familiar with.

I suspect that if Apple did it, they would sell out. They'd stuff these "Undiscovered Music" stations with commercial pablum; rendering the entire concept useless. They'd probably kill it, soon afterwards, because "Nobody uses this service."

The current push for "Bigger, Louder, MOAR!" is something that does not favor craftsmanship, Quality, or independence.

[devoutsalsa]

It’s ok to leave money on the table. Trying to be all things to all people isn’t tenable.

[cade]

My pet rant of late is a lament that companies seem incapable of having a conversation about achieving profit versus maximizing profit. In the ideal, companies that achieving profit can treat their employees and customers well; however, companies that maximize profit shit on everyone in their blast radius for that almighty dollar. How sweetly bitter is the teat of capitalism...

[skrebbel]

Just in case you weren't aware, if you surround a word by asterisks, you can emphasize a word without YELLING

Eg

     *hello* there

Becomes

hello there

[hitpointdrew]

>has to be willing to make sacrifices to their POSSIBLE bottom line to keep the platform useful and valuable to their actual customers.

This will never happen with Etsy, Amazon, or any other publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to their share holders to make as much money as possible. If the leadership doesn't act in this manner, they will be replaced with others that will. If you want a platform like you are describing it will have to be privately owned.

[stickfigure]

> make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress

I work in this space and can provide a little correction/illumination:

The folks selling printed phone cases, gameboy cases, etc are generally not shipping these over from aliexpress. They are almost all printed on demand from printers local to the country of the buyer (there's a half dozen big phone case printers just in the US). Nothing is mass produced except the blanks.

The sellers come up with the artwork and titles/tags/descriptions/etc. Software like mine creates the Etsy listings and processes orders, routing to appropriate printers which ship directly to the customer. Etsy provides an API for this.

Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property. They jealously guard their high-resolution images, but that doesn't stop the industry from having a big ripoff problem. Low-effort ripoffs copy a public low-res image, which makes a terrible print but potential customers/victims might not be able to tell from an online mockup image. High-effort ripoffs involve hiring an artist to make a new work substantially (or identically) similar to something else. Both cheat the intellectual property of the original artist, but they're using the same print companies.

Whether this stuff is "handcrafted" is somewhat ambiguous - is a book handcrafted? Is a set of patterns for a dress or a piece of furniture handcrafted? Something 3d printed? Certainly someone came up with the artwork "by hand", but printing it on a tshirt or phone case is pretty mechanical.

[vanilla-almond]

Another grey area with POD (print-on-demand) is creating designs for POD products e.g. products like t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, wall prints, etc.

There are hundreds of online tutorials promising you how to create designs for sale on Etsy - even if you have not a shred of design talent. How? Go to Canva, find a good-looking template and slap on it on as many POD products as possible. Etsy is simply overstuffed with products like this. Many of these sellers are probably making good sales. Does this count as something being 'designed'? Does it even matter?

The perception that Etsy is a marketplace mostly of artists and "makers" is one that hasn't been true for a while.

[rswail]

> Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property.

Well they're selling properly licensed products that use their images that are protected by copyright (and potentially trademark).

The supposedly appropriate response would be to have the ability to sue those that rip them off in exactly the same way that Nike or Chanel or any other manufacturer would.

There may be some liability to the print companies (and perhaps the other companies in the pipeline) for producing product that doesn't have a properly validated copyright on the image. Especially if they are producing in bulk/for general sale to the public.

So it should be in Etsy's interest (and yours, and the print companies) to ensure that what a seller is asking you to produce is not ripped off.

[uuyi]

I know someone who was selling an electronic module on Tindie. One day sales went through the floor. Turned out someone had cloned his entire product and was shipping volume on aliexpress. He just closed up shop.

I myself have spent weeks navigating the maze of dodgy NanoVNAs out there. Even one of the official resellers decided to cut costs and ship out poorly functioning clones and try and deny it.

Can’t win so don’t play. Eventually the markets will fall due to crap saturation.

[nebula8804]

Will the markets actually fail? Or will there always be a sucker ready to try their luck? I remember seeing this happen in the Retro Video Game community with Flash carts.

Independent developer developed a flashcart for the Sega Dreamcast and was subsequently ripped off. After he complained on Twitter, most of the community sided with the cloners. They just want their cheap garbage and they have no idea/care regarding the massive effort it takes to develop a device like this.

Never mind the fact that the original developer will be inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen all the value.

He eventually walked away from the project from what I recall which pissed off his original buyers and now others have stepped up with their own devices(And will probably be cloned).

Luckily the one (temporary) respite you have in software/hardware is DRM. If you can implement a complex enough DRM system you can slow down the cloners from stealing your software for some period of time. It sucks but this is the world we live in.

One tactic that a Flashcart manufacturer is using is some sort of serial coded firmware updates that only operates on a specific date code of flashcart. It requires the user to log into an account and get the specific firmware update that is tied to their flashcart. It has caused some complaints from the community regarding ease of use + resale woes(transferring ownership from one legit user to another) but overall this is an interesting solution. It hasn't fully prevented clones but has slowed them down somewhat.

I wish there was some way this could be applied to the non-software world but you can't defeat the physical layer.

[R0b0t1]

Found someone who makes NanoVNAs yet? I saw some of the newer OSS model of that, but was weirded out it was some random Chinese company on Amazon.

[DanTheManPR]

I've started open-sourcing all the design files for the stuff I sell online, because IP protection is very weak (and frankly, I've come to think it's basically impossible). It's been a more healthy way for me to approach my products: I am a manufacturer of this product, and my competitive advantage is my own familiarity with the product and my own reputation. Whether that's fair or not is besides the point, since it's the nature of online sales these days.

[tyingq]

The volume folks also aren't shy about outright lies in the product descriptions. Like pictures of stained glass that clearly show real, leaded-joint stained glass, that turns out to be a painted plastic copy. Where the pictures are probably stolen from a genuine seller.

[duxup]

I largely quit going to Etsy for this reason.

Had a couple run ins with what looked like good quality product only to get what was clearly just bulk garbage.

Etsy was a neat bonus where I could access handmade small makers, but now that it is a hassle/ I don’t know what I’m getting… I just don’t go there.

[WalterBright]

Back in the early 90's, I visited Santa Fe as a tourist. I enjoyed browsing the local shops looking at the American Indian art for sale. After a while, I noticed the same things over and over in different shops - most (all?) the stuff was imported from other countries.

A few years ago I also toured souvenir shops in Malmo, Sweden. I asked the proprietor of when where the merchandise came from, she said it all came from China.

With a global economy, that's just the way things are.

[kxyvr]

As a note about the markets in Santa Fe, there are some volume producers of all sorts of goods, but it illegal to market something as made by Native Americans and have it be made overseas. It's the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990:

https://www.doi.gov/iacb/act

and they actually do prosecute it:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/owner-old-town-albuquerqu...

To be clear, not all art in Santa Fe is Native American, but a large amount of it is. And, yes, there's a large amount of junk being peddled as well that is absolutely imported. As a side note, there's a yearly Santa Fe Indian Market that's pretty fantastic and brings artists in from all over the place. None of that will be mass produced or imported and it is worth a visit.

[honkdaddy]

Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese don’t have to respect the system of copyright or patent in any capacity at all? It seems like we’re converging on a point where nearly any novel invention or concept will be quickly stolen by the Chinese, repackaged, and sold in the global marketplace for a fraction of the price.

[AlexandrB]

It's hard to have respect for the copyright/patent system we've constructed in the west when it's frequently abused and often favours large industry players over "little guys". There are some advantages to the wild-west remix culture you see happening with Chinese goods. There are also plenty of inventions that are so trivial/obvious that they should not have had patent protection in the first place[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click

[com2kid]

Working at Microsoft, I was not allowed to even read patents incase I accidently infringed on one, which would become willful infringement since I had read the patent.

So, that means no learning from what others had done, which is the entire idea of publicly posted patents vs trade secrets.

The patent system is literally causing the opposite of innovation to happen in certain technology spaces.

[bsder]

> Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese don’t have to respect the system of copyright or patent in any capacity at all?

Even if these were prosecuted, would it really help in electronics, for example?

Since everybody has access to the same chips and creating a PCB is cheap and relatively quick, what would you even prosecute? Sure, you could prosecute the exact clones, but, most people are just following the manufacturer reference designs from the datasheet so there's nothing stopping someone else from doing that.

The problem is that once you prove there is a market for a piece of electronics, somebody in China will now pick off that market for cheaper. Is this not capitalism at its most raw?

The problem that this causes in electronics is that this trashes scaling as well as customer support. You can sell a $100 thingit, create a reddit community, and mostly tell people they're on their own with the occasional answer from somebody semi-official. Or you can sell a $10K+ thingit and actually provide excellent customer support.

In both cases, you will get cloned and ripped off--which limits the amount of money you can get from the market.

The current "solution" is to always have a cloud component which can't be cloned. This is, of course, anathema to open source, but I haven't seen anybody in open source have a good answer for this, either.

[impostervt]

The "easy" solution seems to be - if it's sold on Amazon, you can't sell it on Etsy.

But I guess that would still harm the original developers of the IP :\

[light_hue_1]

Any time I find anything on Etsy, I double check Amazon. A lot of the time, I find the exact item for sale for less.

Now, I just skip Etsy most of the time, wading through so much junk to find something original is too much work.

[throwmeariver1]

And If you go on aliexpress you can trade 50% of the price for 2 weeks of shipping.

[heavyset_go]

> i will say they are right about one thing, small sellers are getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress resellers. as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original work.

At the end of the day, any increase in sales means more revenue for Etsy. The company is following the same digital flea market model that Amazon does, and it has all of the same perverse incentives.

[freedomben]

This is a major problem that put my wife and a couple of her friends out of business. Another major problem right now is that small blogs/instagram accounts/etc are nearly impossible to establish because the "influencers" (the big blogs now) will rip off ideas and shameless repost them within hours! Not only does this mean all google traffic takes people to the "influencers" page instead of the young blog that created it, but it makes the young blog look they are ripping off a big blog. It's quite despicable. My wife has shut down because she got tired of inventing great recipes that are damn hard to come up with (ever tried to make Keto desserts, or vegan scrambled eggs?) that get stolen right away.

I've been trying to think of a way to use blockchain to prove "who posted it first" but it's got a major network problem (nobody uses it because nobody will use it because nobody uses it).

[CommanderData]

I avoid etsy for this reason. I want original work. Its in etsys interest to stamp this out.

They are not another ebay and shouldn't want to be.

[baristavibes]

I hear that designers are being steamrolled by Aliexpress or Shein all the time. The landscape has obviously changed. I wonder if a pioneering designer somewhere used this to their advantage to mass manufacture their products while integrating a staple design element by which they end up promoting themselves?

[bduerst]

>small sellers are getting totally run over by design theft and aliexpress resellers

Some friends and I were discussing this point recently: Etsy has become Ebay, sans the auction veneer.

Truly frustrating that they can't implement some sort of quality control, but that's a hard problem to crack at scale.

[Melatonic]

Yea this is hugely annoying now on Etsy - I used to love going there for random gifts for people of handmade stuff. Usually you can tell the real from the aliexprses BS by asking the seller how much they can customize the item. But the marketplace is legit flooded with crap

[have_faith]

I used to visit Etsy to buy gifts and that sort if thing but I hardly go there any more because of all of the spam products. I can usually tell what is and isn't an independent seller but I can't be bothered with sifting through them all anymore.

[blacklion]

Everything and everybody are hit. Etsy becomes yet-another-aliexpress-but-more-expensive (especially if you are not in USA and shipping from China is cheaper than shipping from USA, as many aliexpress resellers ship from USA).

It is very hard to find real hand craft on Etsy, if you don't have direct link for exact creator.

[xwdv]

I’ve decided to protest the issue of counterfeits by simply not buying anything at all. Can’t trust the source, can’t buy.

[circa]

you're 100% correct. Very similar to Amazon and their 3rd party market. There is very little policing of the products being sold I feel like. Lots of knock offs and even things available for free being sold at a cost. (ie. ETSY USB sticks pre-loaded with freeware like Coin OPS X)

[agentdrtran]

I've come across very niche products that get ripped off, it's affecting everything. if your tiny custom tshirt shop gets enough sales you'll be copied soon enough with apparently no recourse.

[naoqj]

> as a buyer, its a huge pain to have to sift through pages of aliexpress merchandise to uncover interesting and original work. make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress, then sold by all the boring resellers on etsy

As a buyer it is a massive joy to see the price of some item go down when there’s diversity of sellers instead of a monopoly.

[bovermyer]

Just to make sure I understand your position... are you saying that it's OK for someone to copy someone else's original design, mass produce it at lower cost, and give no credit or royalties to the original designer?

[nerdawson]

That arguably goes against the purpose of a craft marketplace. If you want competition over cheap imported products, there’s already Amazon and eBay.

[samstave]

I have a few designed items that I have oft been told to sell n etsy - I have literally no interest in setting up an etsy shop -- however, I DO have interest in finding out how to get things I design made via AliExpress for my own desires - and dont care if other items crop up so much...

How does one go about getting a product made through aliexpress?

[ss108]

"one of the biggest problems for me is im never even sure if im buying the original design or a knockoff, which totally sucks."

Potential use-case for NFTs? :thinking:

[nerdawson]

How would an NFT help? I’m not opposed to the concept of NFTs, I’m just baffled as to how they in any way provide benefit in this situation.