[paulcole]

I don't think this has much to do with it. Amazon's attempt was really half-assed (classic Amazon, to be honest). The only mention of Handmade on the Amazon homepage is in the "Search by Category" dropdown.

The real issue in my opinion is that Etsy discovered that they couldn't keep growing without opening their doors to cheap non-handmade shit. Which they've done. And their search/discoverability is absolutely awful.

My partner lists her truly handmade products on Etsy but only as an afterthought. As the amount of garbage on Etsy has increased, her views/sales have dropped. She has put all of her effort into getting sales through her own website, where at least she's in control.

[tootie]

I think the ones who really ate their lunch were companies like Shopify.

[keepyourdayjob]

Speaking with some knowledge of the company, it boggles the mind a little that they failed to snap up Shopify (or more likely one of that company's scrappier competitors) when Etsy got like $27M in 2008. Every single time Etsy didn't help a seller set up their own e-commerce site, someone else did, and this happened hundreds of thousands of times. And is still happening.

But Etsy struggled with leadership and technical problems in those days that were really serious, and not easily solved.

[tedmiston]

But in the early days many Etsy sellers didn't have their own e-commerce sites. A lot of them didn't even have websites outside of Etsy, often just a Facebook page. I'm not sure that's changed much.

[keepyourdayjob]

You're mistaken. Etsy was for many people their first steps at e-commerce, but every seller who made sales on Etsy has asked themselves "What about all the people not on Etsy? How do I reach them?".

In 2005 Etsy's advantage was that creating your own standalone shop was hard, expensive, and ineffective. They shuffled CEO's while Shopify, BigCartel, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and many others solved those problems. And Kickstarter proved you could make a lot of money without losing your cool indie cred.

There has always been a disconnect between what Etsy wanted to be (and there have been multiple versions of that) and what it's sellers (who are its customers) wanted. That grew into a chasm so big that Amazon saw light shining through it.

[tedmiston]

It would be interesting to see data to support whether this hypothesis holds up.

I have two gut feelings:

1. Hobbyist Etsy sellers don't dedicate the time and/or lack the business savvy to be running additional sales channels outside of Etsy. Additionally, even setting up a Shopify, etc. store requires some technical ability that you or I take for granted.

2. Semi-professional Etsy sellers, for example, those coming from operating eBay or Amazon Stores, were already using their other channels before Etsy. So they were sophisticated enough that it was cheap/easy to have someone whip up an osCommerce + PayPal site for them. I did this personally for a few clients already successfully selling on forums between 2005-2008.