Guided by our values
Our policy decisions are guided by our company values with the understanding that business can be a force for positive change. Etsy’s Policy team furthers that vision by creating rules that:
-
Preserve our commitment to independent businesses that sell handmade and vintage items and craft supplies.
-
Protect our marketplace and community from content that is harmful or presents legal risks for our members, is inconsistent with our values, or is simply not in the spirit of Etsy.
-
Help members navigate the legal and policy challenges of running an independent business.
Item by jimbobart
Protecting endangered species
Among Etsy’s core values is our commitment to acting as a mindful, transparent, and humane business, and planning and building for the long term. For this reason, it is important for our company and our community to minimize our impact on the depletion of scarce natural resources. Those resources include threatened and endangered animals. As part of our commitment to minimizing our impact on these resources, we have banned certain animal products from our marketplace, including items derived from or created using any animal species designated as threatened or endangered by the US Endangered Species Act.
Keeping our community safe
Etsy’s marketplace is built on trust. Part of the Policy team’s mission is to create policies that promote safe transactions and positive member experiences. In an effort to further this mission, we created a new landing page with tools and policies to help buyers and sellers from around the world feel comfortable entering into transactions together on Etsy. By visiting the new landing page, buyers can learn more about how to find reputable sellers, how to communicate directly with sellers to find the products they want, and how to protect themselves against fraud. Sellers can learn how to develop and protect their good reputations on Etsy, how to amicably resolve disputes should anything go wrong, and how to handle fraudulent buyers. Both buyers and sellers can learn how to take the appropriate security measures to protect their online information. Read more about Buyer & Seller Safety here.
Ensuring marketplace integrity
Every day, Etsy’s Trust and Safety teams focus on making Etsy a high-quality marketplace that upholds our values and is safe for both sellers and buyers.
Minimizing fraud and risk
The Etsy marketplace is built on trust. We encourage sellers to earn the trust of buyers by following Etsy’s guidelines, maintaining a transparent shop, providing great customer service, and respecting our community. Combining member education and policy enforcement, the Marketplace Integrity Trust and Safety team works to uphold the integrity of Etsy while maintaining the freedom needed to be a vibrant handmade marketplace.
-
The Marketplace Integrity team monitors the marketplace and proactively selects shops for review to make sure they are following Etsy’s guidelines.
-
The Trust team works to make the marketplace safer for our community of buyers and sellers, aiming to resolve member disputes quickly and kindly.
-
The Risk team monitors Etsy Payments transactions and account behavior looking to protect Sellers from fraud.
Connecting through customer support
What makes Etsy’s global community so special? It’s based on creativity, passion, entrepreneurship, and helping one another. In 2014 our customer service approach was revamped to greater emphasize a personalized, nuanced assistance relevant to each seller’s needs.
Item by annmoore
Supporting our community
-
Support representatives communicated with 342,000 Etsy members around the world via email, handling an average of 2,400 incoming emails every day.
-
We continued to expand phone support for shop management issues that may not be easy to resolve over email.
-
There were 5.6 million posts from 98,000 Etsy members in our moderated Forums (a unique venue for sellers to share their thoughts with one another and Etsy staff).
Buyers account for about 55% of our incoming Support volume and often need help finding or contacting a seller about a specific order or item. Sellers, who make up the other 45% of our Support volume, have a much wider variety of questions, ranging from clarification on a bill to troubleshooting site features and optimizing shop performance. In November and December alone, the Support team conducted more than 1,000 personalized shop critiques for sellers, focusing on best practices for listing and promoting items and analyzing Shop Stats.