Dear Friends,

Etsy has grown a great deal over the last two years, and in order to maintain site stability and speed we, like other large sites, are always tweaking the way things work. The engineering team at Etsy is constantly turning knobs and pulling levers to maximize site speed and availability, while also managing the growth in visitors, listings, images and many other variables.  In the weeks ahead, Chad Dickerson, our CTO, will be telling you more about these efforts.

One lever that we recently adjusted was the way that listings, new or renewed, are delivered to the site (see this post). This adjustment involved delivering items in very frequent batches rather than continuously in real time.  As an outcomes of this change, there is less of chance that an individual item will appear in certain ways of discovering items on Etsy, including the Recently Listed Items section of the Homepage, the Fresh Items list on the Buy Page, as part of Pounce, or in Time Machine 1 or Time Machine 2.  Each of these product discovery functions works differently and the chances of sellers actually seeing their items appear in all of these places depend on many variables including listing volumes at specific times, site speed, and each user’s speed of navigation.

As many of you are aware, there have been several forum threads discussing this very issue.  If you’ll bear with me, I would like to address some of the main concerns that have been coming up.
 
1. Etsy needs to communicate site changes more effectively.
 
Correct, and I take full responsibility here. I would like to apologize to the community at large. We did a poor job of addressing this issue in a timely or effective way. Several lengthy forum posts, a few days after the issue first arose is not acceptable. I didn't fully appreciate the need to communicate more comprehensively about this issue.

Many of you made suggestions about how Etsy can better communicate with sellers.  One of the first steps we are exploring includes an “admin” (e.g. Etsy staff) announcement section of the Forums. Though the Forums get millions of unique page views per month, I realize that they are not read by all in the Etsy community.  Nevertheless a dedicated Etsy admin forum might be helpful in making it easier to find our announcements about important changes.  I will keep you posted on this.

In the mean time, I’ve learned a valuable lesson here, and will be working much more closely with engineering to make sure that important site changes and updates are communicated more effectively and in a timely manner. 
 
2. Doesn’t my 20 cent listing guarantee me a spot on these features?
 
The 20-cent listing fee is the cost to list an item on Etsy. This fee provides a page displaying an item in your shop for four months, with up to five photos. Etsy does not guarantee that your listing will include exposure in other places on the site, like the Recently Listed Items section on the Homepage or other product discovery features. We will be making changes to relevant FAQs to make sure that this is very clear. 
 
Having said that, Etsy does have a track record of creating innovative product discovery features that showcase the new and undiscovered on Etsy. We value those features and are always exploring new ways to engage buyers on the site by showcasing sellers and their items.  We expect to continue that tradition as we grow, and are looking at ways we can improve the current features we have.
 
3. But Etsy has always told me to renew?

In various live workshops, the community moderated Etsy wiki, and in seller interviews such as "Quit Your Day Job", admin and community members alike have advocated relisting or renewing an item as a way to get it to the top of the heap, as it were.  It is true, that Search and Category pages default to the most recently listed items in the search index.

Renewing may or may not get your item at the very top, but it will place it closer to the front in features that display listings in reverse chronological order. Nothing has changed there. That said, we think something should change. Renewing was never intended to be an advertising tool, but the way it was built – along with the emphasis on reverse chronological ranking throughout the site – allowed renewing to function as a promotional strategy.

In her Storque post in November, Maria Thomas, our CEO, touched on how we are beginning to think about changing Search. You can read it here.   This work is still at a conceptual stage and nothing is changing in the short-term.

Next month Maria and Chad will be reaching out to the community again, to follow up on our thinking around Search and other matters.
 
I hope this clears things up. I know this is an important issue to many in the selling community and again, I apologize for how we communicated it initially. As always, you can reach me at matt@etsy.com. We're closing the comments here so we can follow your comments in one place in this forum thread.
 
Thanks, Matt