The tagline on our homepage reads Your place to buy & sell all things handmade. This was our focus when we launched Etsy two-and-a-half years ago, and it will remain our focus. However, a bit of housekeeping is needed to maintain this.
Etsy currently has over 1.1 million active listings, and more than twice this number of items have been sold. Way back when, in April or May of 2005, when we were laying out the top-level categories, we included two categories that we thought would be of great use to the community: Supplies and Vintage. We’re glad we did this, and we have been happy to see these categories thrive.
As Etsy continues to grow and the circles of people who know about the site spreads beyond crafters, we see the ratio of buyers to sellers increase. What began as a one-to-one ratio is now five-to-one, and we hope to see it around ten-to-one by the end of this year. This means means more buyers for every seller. It also means the vast majority of people coming to the site are coming here to find "all things handmade."
We’re super sensitive to how the small businesses get pushed to the perimeter of marketplaces. Indeed, we created Etsy for the specific reason of making sure that handmade goods were kept in the center. We’re going to make some changes to the current site to make sure the center can hold.
What’s going to change?
We’re tweaking how both browsing and searching work.
The main search bar will default to searching only handmade goods. This means that vintage items and commercial supplies will, by default, be excluded from search results. Of course, the searcher can opt to include them by selecting the correct option from the drop-down menu to the right of the search bar.
Right now we have what we call "subcategory bleed." When you click into, say, Art, you only see items whose first tag is Art. But as soon as you hit a subcategory in Art, like Drawings, you see all items who have both those tags, no matter what the first tag is. This will be remedied to work in the way that most people expect it to work (from other ecommerce taxonomies): Art > Drawings will only show items with the first tag Art; in other words, items inside that top-level category.
Three Special Considerations
One: Patterns will be moved to their appropriate places: handmade patterns with the handmade crafting supplies, and commercial patterns with the commercial supplies. The Patterns for sale on Etsy are both handmade and commercial, and should be tagged appropriately. This moving will be done automagically, and we’ll give specific advance notice for it.
Two: Handmade supplies are handmade, so they’ll still be included in the default results.
Three: We know that changes like these will require some getting used to. We’re going to give all commercial supplies and vintage items an extra 4 months of listing time in light of this.
What’s the timeframe for these changes? Our goal is to put them in place by the end of this month. Like all tasks that require engineering work, things could take longer than expected, so please keep this in mind.
Please use this forum post to carry on the discussion.
