This story has been updated.
It’s the last day of the Etsy strike. Here’s what comes next.
More than 82,000 people — 29,000 of whom claim to be Etsy sellers, according to two strike organizers — have signed a petition supporting sellers’ demands that the company cut recently increased seller fees, among other vendor-proposed changes. Many sellers shut down their virtual shops for the past week, uploading banners on their pages noting that they were on strike.
A group of two women and four nonbinary people organized the strike — mostly over Reddit and the messaging app Discord, where more than 600 sellers have been in constant contact, fielding media requests and strategizing next steps.
Two of the lead organizers and three sellers who took part in the strike told The Washington Post that recent policy changes on the platform have transformed it from a refuge for marginalized people seeking to start their own businesses — including many women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities — into a place that replicates some of the real-world economic barriers those people face in trying to earn a living wage.
“People see us as hobbyists, or crafters, or just people doing something on the side. … They don’t see what’s happening here is exploitation,” said Mattie Boyd, 32, one of the lead organizers of the strike and a nonbinary Etsy vendor who said they earn a full-time income on the site from selling punk-inspired T-shirts and accessories geared toward queer and trans communities.
“People are willing to write off the plight of Etsy sellers because people don’t take us seriously, but the reality is we depend on the platform, a lot of us, to make a living,” they added.
Etsy has flaunted the fact that it attracts sellers who have been historically underrepresented as entrepreneurs. Last year, Etsy chief executive Josh Silverman appeared on CNN to discuss the high number of women who are Etsy sellers, characterizing the platform as an “on-ramp for women all around the world.”
A 2021 Etsy report notes that the site has more than 5.3 million active sellers around the world, 32 percent of whom rely on Etsy for their sole income. According to that report, 79 percent of the site’s U.S. sellers are women. And 14 percent of Etsy sellers identify as LGBTQIA+ — double the proportion of LGBTQIA+ people in the U.S. population.
The Etsy report does not measure the number of sellers with disabilities, nor the intersections of sellers’ genders and races — though it notes that 76 percent of Etsy sellers are White.
Etsy chief operating officer Raina Moskowitz said in an email statement that “sellers’ success is a top priority for Etsy,” and that the companies’ new fee structure “will enable us to increase our investments in areas outlined in the petition, including marketing, customer support, and removing listings that don’t meet our priorities.”
Here’s a rundown of what led to the strike, what sellers want to see change on the platform and what organizers are planning next.
Why did sellers strike?
The sellers’ petition outlines five demands, two of which concern sellers’ fees.
Sellers are demanding that Etsy cancel the recent increase in the transaction fees sellers pay on each purchase, which the platform announced in February would go from 5 percent to 6.5 percent. That increase took effect last Monday, the first day of the strike.
For Boyd, getting notified of the fee hike was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” they said, adding that “it came at a time when there were a lot of us [who] were really having issues with some other problems that have kind of been developing over the past few years.”
One of those boiling frustrations concerned off-site ads, which the platform introduced in 2020 and which advertise items sold on Etsy on search engines and social media sites. If a customer clicks on one of the ads and makes a purchase at the Etsy shop within 30 days, Etsy charges the seller a minimum 12 percent fee on the order. Vendors who earn less than $10,000 annually on the site pay a higher fee — 15 percent — but they can also opt out of the off-site ads. In their petition, the sellers call for all vendors to be able to opt out of such ads.
On top of the transaction and off-site ad fees, Etsy sellers also pay various other expenses, including shipping costs and a listing fee of 20 cents per item. Other sites’ fee structures tend to be more variable than Etsy’s: eBay allows sellers to list up to 250 items for free, and charges a final sale fee that varies based on the specific product, while Amazon charges 99 cents per listing for individual sellers, or a $39.99 monthly subscription fee for “professional” sellers with higher volumes, plus a referral fee for each item sold, which differs based on the product, and a closing fee of $1.80 on some products.
For 39-year-old Rhode Island resident Kristi Cassidy, one of the strike organizers and an Etsy seller since 2006 who earns a supplemental income on the site, Etsy’s fee increases have resulted in about a two-thirds loss of income since 2019.
“It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even make minimum wage anymore,” Cassidy said.
Cassidy’s products — custom-made costumes and wedding dresses — take her at least two weeks to make, she said. That’s why she plans to pivot to doing most of her business on her own website, because she can’t afford “a solid two weeks of making something for less pay” on Etsy, she said.
Sellers’ other frustrations featured in the petition include an allegedly slow support system for sellers who reach out to the platform with customer service concerns; a “star seller” program that incentivizes fast customer response and shipping times, which sellers say aren’t always feasible; and a proliferation of resellers, or “people buying stuff made in factories and tricking buyers into thinking they made it themselves,” Cassidy said.
The strike’s lead organizers also sent an email outlining their demands last Monday to Silverman, the platform’s executive staff and some members of its board of directors, but they’ve yet to receive a reply, according to Boyd.
Why is Etsy so popular among women and LGBTQ sellers?
Boyd attributes the higher-than-average rates of Etsy sellers who are women and/or identify as LGBTQ to the fact that “Etsy really has historically been effective at lowering the bar” for aspiring entrepreneurs.
“I think it’s appealing — because some people face real barriers to accessing capital, or to whenever you need to open up a brick-and-mortar store — to build one’s own website. … I think for people who don’t have that as an option, [Etsy] becomes even more appealing, but also important,” Boyd said.
Many women in particular said they were attracted to the flexibility and autonomy Etsy offered, allowing them to balance paid work with child care.
That was the case for Cassidy: She has two autistic sons, ages 14 and 9, and Etsy has allowed her to “be the flexible [parent] that can make her own schedule” and take care of her boys as needed, she said.
For Aida Almeraz, a 37-year-old seller who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss., her Etsy shop — where she has sold custom-made dog collars since 2011 — has allowed her to provide for her 8-year-old son as a single mother, she said.
Almeraz’s Etsy sales blew up between 2014 and 2016, and she continues to earn a full-time income from the site, she said. But her sales have been steadily declining since 2019. Last year, she earned $26,000 less on the site than she did in 2018, her tax documents show.
Almeraz added that the platform’s constant changes over the past few years — including the introduction of the star-seller program — have led to unrealistic expectations from customers: “When a customer expects to receive an item in three days and they don’t, they don’t attack Etsy, they attack me and my business,” she said.
What’s next?
The Etsy sellers who were on strike are still hammering out the details of exactly what comes next, according to Boyd and Cassidy. But for now, one thing’s certain: They don’t intend to stop organizing even though the strike is ending.
They instead plan to form a “solidarity organization … basically the equivalent of a union for Etsy sellers,” Cassidy said.
“We will be, at the very least, a force for Etsy to reckon with before they try to do things to hurt us in the future. … The stronger we get, eventually they can’t keep ignoring us,” she added.
Sellers also plan to take individual actions to protest the fee hikes and changes to the platform if Etsy executives don’t respond to their demands. For many, protest will come in the form of either migrating off the site — as Cassidy and Almeraz said they plan to do — or begrudgingly increasing the price of products they keep on Etsy. Some sellers say they will encourage other aspiring entrepreneurs to stay off the site.
Hannah Forkel-Matte, 30, an Etsy seller since 2015 who earns a supplemental income on the site selling My Little Pony-themed stickers and accessories, said moms regularly come to her for advice on starting businesses on Etsy.
Last year, Forkel-Matte — who is based in Evansville, Ind., and has a 4-year-old daughter — started giving those moms new advice, she said: “If you want to build your business, I would consider doing it off of Etsy, just because I don’t know what the future holds.”
Source: WP
