Is Ron Kalin ever going to address these huge, kept under wraps, changes?

If he was going to, now would be a good time to do so.

Don't think we need a "cooling off" period before it's addressed again

Etsy, you have thousands of unhappy etsians, twittering, writing blog posts about the situation, etc. Many are thinking of leaving. Very low morale around here.

If the medi gets wind, they will take off running with all this new info--an example: "Premiere handmade site, thrid in line behind Ebay and Aamazon, has now made changed in their "qualifications of handmade." Esty's allwance of Collectives to be only etsy, which if you look up in a dictiontary, have changed their defintion. It seems small factories are possibly allowed.

This means a lot to those of you who seek handmade goods. It seems it's not going to be as easy to find the real Mccoy.

Etsy touts "homemade" (plus vintage and supplies to make handmade) and customers buy into it.

Buyer beware! There are no guarantees you will be able to purchase a handmade item any longer.

This country was propelled into to the limelight by the hard work of sellers, pimping and promoting the site thru' their own ads paid out of thier own pockets, word of mouth, even passing out flyers, a promo at a very basic level.

Much of etsy' success and profits are due to the hard work of these impassioned sellers who donate an incredible amount of their time pushing etsy.

Etsy doesn't believe in main stream advertising and instead, apply grassroots word of mouth. But it's 250 sellers are the real mouthpieces that have brought etsy the success it sees today.

Today, there are a bunch of unhappy sellers who feel they were deceived since the mission statement changed midstream without them being alerted to this fact. They found info by bits and pieces and put all the pieces together.

The future oe etsy:

Can esty continue without the help of its community? I think almost all have thrown in the towel and will not help police any longer. They were deceived and disrespected.

I suppose etsy can hire a lot of new staff. Their vision hs changed, so hndmade "by you" no longer applies. There will be single shop owners who will continue to sell "handmade by them" items. But look out for the coming of factories (disguised as "collectives"( who will have no hand in the making of these "handmade goods".

Etsy has a good thing and could actually stand up against ebay and amazon because they had something no other big site has--handmade goods made by the shop owner. Now no more.

Posted at 6:55pm Jul 22, 2010 EDT