Enhancing the integrity of our marketplace
The Etsy marketplace is built on trust. We encourage sellers to earn the trust of buyers by following Etsy’s policies, maintaining a transparent shop, providing great customer service, and respecting our community.
Etsy’s Trust and Safety team is in place to help keep our marketplace safe and welcoming for buyers and sellers by helping to enforce our policies and mediating disputes between members.
Our goal is to balance the integrity and safety of the growing marketplace with the needs of our evolving community and educating and coaching sellers who need help.
We strive to provide empathetic support to buyers and sellers when transactions do not go as planned, quickly mediating disputes so that they can get back to running their businesses and shopping on Etsy. We also offer sellers education and support.
Sophisticated tools
For the past several years the Risk Engineering team, Etsy’s fraud and abuse engineering team, has created detection tools that we use to protect the marketplace. For example, we use a combination of machine learning, automated systems and community-generated flags to review items and shops that may violate our policies. We also strive to prevent and detect fraud through human review and automated tools and algorithms.
Service Level Standards
Sellers on Etsy are expected to provide a high level of customer service. This past year, we’ve made considerable efforts in scaling education of our Service Level Standards.
Etsy’s Trust & Safety team works to monitor potentially problematic behavior so that sellers are meeting these standards and that buyers on Etsy have a positive experience. These standards to help preserve the collective reputation of our seller community..
We understand and respect that running and scaling a business comes with a unique set of challenges. If a seller with a positive history suddenly begins to get negative feedback from buyers or to have non-delivery cases, we’ll reach out with recommendations to help get the seller and shop back on track. However, sellers who persistently contribute to a negative buyer experience are not allowed to continue selling through Etsy.
Case system
Almost all orders on Etsy are completed to the satisfaction (and delight) of both buyer and seller. However, with millions of transactions taking place each year, a small percentage of orders will not go as planned.
If an order is not delivered or the item is not as described in the product listing, we ask that the seller and buyer work together to reach an amicable resolution. If they’re unable to work things out through Conversations (our internal communication tool more commonly known as “convos”), then Etsy’s online case system provides another way for sellers and buyers to communicate with each other to resolve disputes. If the buyer and seller are not able to reach a resolution on their own, the case can be escalated to Etsy’s Trust & Safety Team for mediation.