Photo by malissasplace

Since the launch of Search Ads last fall, we’ve been displaying Showcase spots and Search Ads and monitoring the impact of both tools on listing views and orders.

After sifting through all the data, we found Search Ads a more effective tool for most sellers. In order to focus on improving Search Ads and building additional tools, we will be discontinuing Showcase spots after Tuesday, May 29. You can purchase Showcase spots until 5 p.m. ET today and will still be able to edit any spots running between now and May 29.

We’re excited about the impact Search Ads has had, and hope you’ll come check it out. Not only do Search Ads get more exposure than Showcase spots, they are also more targeted. In fact, a buyer who clicks on a Search Ad is, on average, three times more likely to buy from that shop than a buyer who clicks on a Showcase spot. Search Ads also provide greater insights for sellers, as you can easily track orders and views resulting from each campaign and surface results by day, week, month, year, and keyword. All this information is integrated into your Shops Stats page.

At the same time that we’re improving Search Ads, we’re also building additional ways for you to promote your products and will be sharing them as they roll out. Keep creating your beautiful items, and we’ll help you get them in front of buyers.

Still have questions? Learn more about Search Ads and be sure to reach out to us with any questions.

Photo by maudvantours

I joined Etsy back in September 2008 because fundamentally I was inspired by the community of sellers and all they represented: art, beauty, collaboration, and the success of individual people around the world making and selling amazing things.

At the time, Etsy had grown beyond all expectations and was going through growing pains. I was still unpacking from my recent move as I wrote my first note to the community and was really excited to be there to move past those challenges and help Etsy move forward.

Looking back, Etsy was quite small by today’s measures — the community sold $7.93 million of goods in that September, my first month at Etsy. We had about 50 employees and we were in an office in downtown Brooklyn with a broken elevator that famously had a sign that read, “You gotta press up to go down.”

Almost four years later, many things have changed. We have different offices near the Brooklyn Bridge, a working elevator, almost 300 employees, and last month alone, the community sold about $65 million in goods. Each month, 40 million people around the world visit Etsy, with 15 million registered members and 875,000 sellers generating those sales in 150 countries.

Today, I want to tell you about some exciting news for our future but first I’d like to take a step back and look at Etsy in the big picture, how we are thinking about the company, and what’s ahead.

Etsy in the big picture 

The company is almost seven years old and we are all very happy with how far we have gotten together.  There is a lot to be proud of and the site and the community are remarkable. The past nine months since I became CEO have been full of forward progress, too. We’ve continued to improve the search experience, delivered a new Search Ads product, delivered Shop Stats, launched the Etsy iPhone app, had our best holiday season in history, started rolling out direct checkout, debuted Etsy in French, delivered new category experiences, and acquired Trunkt.

Even with the progress we have made together, we are not satisfied.

We believe, more than ever, that Etsy can help fundamentally change the way the world works by making it possible for individuals to make and sell things to other people around the globe — a people-powered economy. We have been effecting that change in small but increasingly meaningful ways. Not that long ago, in September 2011, we ran Hello Etsy in Berlin, our first conference which took on the broader focus of small business and sustainability. The description of Hello Etsy that we published last fall provides an inspiring blueprint for the better world that we envision:

Decades of an unyielding focus on economic growth and a corporate mentality has left us ever more disconnected with nature, our communities, and the people and processes behind the objects in our lives. We think this is unethical, unsustainable, and unfun. However, with the rise of small businesses around the world we feel hope and see real opportunities: Opportunities for us to measure success in new ways… to build local, living economies, and most importantly, to help create a more permanent future.

More than 500 independent business owners from 17 countries came for sessions on building “human-scale economies” and social entrepreneurship, while satellites beamed the programming to smaller gatherings in six other cities. Angela D’Alton (one of the attendees, and now an Etsy employee in Australia) called Hello Etsy, “possibly not only the best conference ever, but potentially one of the most important to the global economy.” Hello Etsy helped us fully realize that Etsy is more than just an online marketplace. Etsy is a beacon in the world for running businesses sustainably, responsibly, and profitably, with people at the center. The kind of sharing and cooperation you see on Etsy — what has been called a “sharing economy” that is part of a broader “quiet revolution” — can help businesses change the world. Etsy is helping power that revolution, and although we’ve been at it for seven years, it feels like we are just getting started.

Etsy, the company

We also want to make sure we are operating Etsy with sound principles that we can be proud of as we continue to grow. In other words, we want to talk the talk and walk the walk. Inspired by the experience at Hello Etsy, I spent a lot of time working with a group of people here at Etsy (led by Matt Stinchcomb and Randy J. Hunt) discussing what we needed to do to make sure that Etsy — the company — continued to operate according to a set of values. After a lot of discussion about what kind of company we are and aspired to be, the team defined these core values for the company:

• We are a mindful, transparent, and humane business.
• We plan and build for the long term.
• We value craftsmanship in all we make.
• We believe fun should be part of everything we do.
• We keep it real, always.

In stating these values, we wanted to hold ourselves to a higher standard than most companies and articulate the guiding principles for Etsy that would be an anchor as we grow and change. There is no doubt that Etsy has been a successful business, but we don’t want to be just that. We want the company to last for a very long time and clearly stand for something in the world.

Measuring oneself against a set of philosophical values is inherently challenging, so we looked for ways to evaluate how we as a company operate to see how well our values hold up. That’s part of what we mean by “keeping it real, always.” In looking for a framework, we found the B Corporation (for “benefit corporation”) movement. B Corporations are a new kind of company that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. (It’s like a LEED certification or Fair Trade certification, but for a business, not just a building or a bag of coffee.) B Lab, a non-profit, describes the B Corporation movement like this:

When you support a B Corporation, you’re supporting a better way to do business. Governments and nonprofits are necessary but insufficient to solve today’s most pressing problems. Business is the most powerful force on the planet and can be a positive instrument for change.

To read more about B Lab and the B Corporation movement, take a look at this companion post.

B Lab provides a rigorous independent third-party framework for assessing how you’re doing as a business when it comes to employee, community, and environmental interests. Etsy has gone through the assessment and we learned so much about what we are doing right and where we can improve. After successfully completing the independent B Lab assessment, we are proud to announce that Etsy is now a Certified B Corporation™. There are over 500 certified B Corps but Etsy will be among the biggest, along with mission-driven companies like Patagonia and Seventh Generation.

I think becoming a Certified B Corporation is one of the most important things Etsy has ever done. It helps us keep an eye on the “mindful, transparent, and humane” values we aspire to, and also keeps us focused on our intention to “plan and build for the long term,” not just when it comes to Etsy but for the world at large. Like other Certified B Corporations, B Lab is publishing our scores from the assessment. In being transparent, we are openly challenging ourselves to continually improve how we impact the world with our company. Like most businesses, we are imperfect, but we are publicly committing ourselves to upholding our values and grading ourselves for the long term. This is how we hope to make a better world and inspire other companies to do the same.

Changing the world

With all the talk about how far we have come, it is tempting to think of Etsy as “big” now. When I look at Etsy, though, I see a tiny seedling. Last year, over $525 million (525 with 6 more zeroes) changed hands among people on Etsy, and worldwide GDP was over $60 trillion dollars (that’s 600 with eleven more zeros). The Etsy economy represents 8.75 ten-thousandths of one percent of the global economy. We have a long way to go and grow. But we don’t think of it as Etsy becoming more like the rest of the world, rather the rest of the world becoming more like Etsy.

We want to do more for our community and we want to make sure Etsy grows and prospers. Today, we are announcing that we are adding some new resources to match our world-changing ambitions. Etsy has closed $40 million of funding from a roster of investors who have been believers in Etsy for a long time. In fact, all of Etsy’s existing investors — Burda, Union Square Ventures, Accel Partners, and Index Ventures (who led this investment round) — committed to Etsy in a big way. They’ve continued to invest all along because they fundamentally believe in Etsy and what we’re doing. I couldn’t be happier to have such a committed set of partners who “get it” along for the next stage.

What do we plan to do with the money we’ve raised? Two simple things, really: we plan to grow Etsy into an economic force all around the world and we want to provide more products and services to help sellers succeed and build their businesses on the Etsy platform. You’ve seen a start in some of these areas — our Etsy in German and French launches, the beginning of the direct checkout rollout to make transactions smoother on Etsy, and our recent acquisition of Trunkt to provide a stepping stone for new kinds of wholesale opportunities for sellers. Expect things to move at a faster pace as we add even more resources.

The funding also ensures that the company has the operating funds to last for many years so that the Etsy community is in a position to succeed for a very long time. We also want to be able to make decisions like the one you saw last week with “no longer pay for quantity up front,” where frankly, Etsy loses money but it’s the right thing to do for sellers. As we stated in our values, we plan and build for the long term.

The future and a backward glance o’er travel’d roads

We feel a great sense of responsibility for and duty to the community we are building with you, and with our new Certified B Corp status, we’ve made a public commitment to continuing to be a values-based company as we grow, change, and invest in the future we want to shape. We know a lot of people depend on us to run their businesses and we take that really seriously. We’re more committed than ever to running a business that you can rely on and grow with. Etsy is a marvelous force in the world, and we want to share it far and wide.

At the end of the day, Etsy — the company and the community — is about people collaborating on all kinds of wonderful creative pursuits. In my daily work, I try to stop and admire the process of creation around me. Every day when I walk to our offices in Brooklyn, I walk past the spot where in 1855 the printers Andrew and James Rome typeset and printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass by great American poet Walt Whitman. Whitman was a Brooklyn resident for most of his life and stopped by the Rome Brothers’ shop to set some of the type himself. The building itself is no longer there, but it’s remarkable to think that exactly 150 years later, barely three-quarters of a mile away, Rob, Chris, Haim, and Jared were doing the the 21st century equivalent of typesetting in coding the original version of Etsy.com. Much later in life, Whitman wrote an essay and he entitled it “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” concluding:

the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung

And so it is with Etsy.  We’re looking forward to taking you along on the journey.

Photo by FleurLux

Today we’re incredibly proud to announce that Etsy has become a Certified B Corporation™. So what exactly does that mean? B Corporations are a new kind of company that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. It’s like a LEED or Fair Trade certification, but for a business, not just a building or a bag of coffee. There are currently over 521 Certified B Corporations from sixty industries, such as consulting, solar energy, and law. Etsy will be among the biggest, keeping good company with Patagonia and Seventh Generation.

Why did we become B Corp certified? We believe that business has a higher social purpose beyond simply profit. The B Corp assessment gives us a framework to measure Etsy’s success against rigorous values and responsible practices as we scale as a company. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, a longtime Etsy investor and advisor, puts it this way: “We believe that the best long-term stewards of Internet-based networks and marketplaces will focus on value creation for all participants instead of solely on shareholders. B Corporations provide a legal foundation perfectly supporting this much more comprehensive outlook.”

The organization behind B Corporations, B Lab, was founded in 2006 by Jay Coen Gilbert, Bart Houlahan and Andrew Kassoy, old friends who had made their way through the worlds of private equity and business management before deciding that they’d rather focus on how they could make the world better with business, and redefine what a business is.

The heart of B Lab is its rigorous certification process on social and environmental performance, to which any business can apply. Companies that pass often collaborate to raise money, share sustainability strategies, and publicize job opportunities. In states where legislation has passed, B Corps are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their employees, suppliers, community, consumers, and environment as well as shareholder value. Etsy is incorporated in Delaware, a state that has not yet passed such legislation, but this certification allows us to introduce conversations in the company, community, and the board room about our social and environmental impact. Katie Kerr, B Lab’s communications director reflects: “We want to reach the point where it’s strange not to be doing business this way.”

We are inspired by this movement that overwhelmingly proves the feasible harmony of business interests with social and environmental responsibility. Etsy has already organically developed some conscientious practices, such as offering loaner bicycles to employees, hiring local small food businesses that incorporate in-season ingredients, donating office compost to a Brooklyn community farm, and regulating office energy consumption. However, there is still much more to do. Utilizing independent third-party criteria for evaluating Etsy’s success in these fields can give us a dose of pride now, but more importantly, a tangible sense of the work that needs to be done for the future.

B Lab co-founder Andrew Kassoy adds: “We’re thrilled Etsy is joining the growing community of Certified B Corporations. Their business model, which supports a community of micro-enterprises at scale, is an example of the kind of business that is redefining success and building local, living economies.”

Photo by Dear Stacey Wedding Photography

Last week, we hosted our first Etsy Weddings event in New York City. Thank you to everyone who attended, and a special thank you to all of the sellers who graciously let us borrow merchandise!

Over three days, Etsy wedding sellers wowed the socks (and stockings) off of more than 1,000 brides-and-grooms-to-be, wedding planners, friends, family and industry press. As one attendee put it, “A wedding program finally designed for ME!”

Dear Stacey Wedding Photography

One of our goals with this event was to bring new shoppers to Etsy’s already thriving weddings category, and To Have & To Hold was the perfect place to check out the breadth of weddings items available from sellers around the world.

Dear Stacey Wedding Photography

Dear Stacey Wedding Photography

Of course, we were also there to promote and publicize the launch of the new Etsy Weddings and Registry, so the event wouldn’t have been complete without a section focused on your new life together as a couple. We even had a station where you could register on the spot!

Dear Stacey Wedding Photography

Dear Stacey Wedding Photography

It was a dream come true to see the wonderland that is Etsy Weddings come to life in person. On all counts, it turned out great, and we couldn’t have done it without you (and you, and you, and you). Thanks again for being a part of it. View more photos on Flickr and keep browsing Etsy Weddings for your special day. Mazel tov!

Photo by MaisonMaudie

Today we’re excited to announce a highly-requested change to fees for listings with a quantity greater than one. This change will roll out the week of May 21, 2012. Sellers will only be charged $0.20 USD to list or renew an item, regardless of quantity. Fees for additional quantities will only apply when an item sells. It works like an auto-renew feature — when your item sells and you still have quantity left, your listing automatically renews for $0.20 USD. If your listing sells out, the total fees are effectively the same. If your listing doesn’t sell out within four months, your fees will be lower because you won’t pay for unsold quantities.

Currently when sellers list their items on Etsy, they pay $0.20 USD per quantity up front when the listing is published. (For example: I have six handmade mugs. If I list with a quantity of six, then my listing costs $1.20 USD right away.) Many sellers instead choose to list a quantity of one to avoid fees for unsold items, and to reduce the cost of renewing. This can confuse shoppers (maybe they want to buy six as part of a wedding registry but only one is listed!), and sellers are stuck manually watching and renewing sold-out listings. With the new system, sellers can add as many items as they have in stock or are able to make, and shoppers can check out easily and add their desired quantity to the order. We hope this will be a time-saver for sellers: you’ll have to renew your items less often!

Our Fees Policy is being updated to reflect these changes, which go into effect the week of May 21, 2012. When the new fee structure is live for your shop, we’ll notify you in the shop management area of the site. Be sure to check out our lovingly-illustrated FAQs for details about how the new structure works!

Photo by cynthiavardhan

Today we’re excited to introduce you to Dev Tandon, the latest addition to the Etsy team, and a bona fide wholesale guru. You might already be familiar with Dev, as he is the founder of Trunkt, the popular Etsy API app that has been facilitating wholesale transactions for 7 years. Dev came up with the idea for Trunkt after running a retail boutique with his wife in New York City, and yearning to source even more items from Etsy sellers.

We know many of you are already wholesaling or are actively working towards it. Advice about wholesaling has circulated through the Forums, blog posts, email newsletters, online workshops, and Teams, since the very beginning of the site. In interviews for the Featured Seller and Quit Your Day Job series, sentiments like Christine’s from failjewelry abound: “I am really excited every time a store owner finds me through Etsy and enjoys my pieces enough to contact me about working on a wholesale basis.”

We hear you, and we’re thrilled to begin charting this path together. Our ambition with bringing Dev and Trunkt on board is to make it even easier for Etsy sellers to connect with buyers such as decorators and boutiques. The world cannot get enough of the unique creations and collections on Etsy, and we intend to give sellers the tools they need to bring their business to the next level.

So what happens next? We are not planning any immediate changes to either Trunkt.com or Etsy. Dev’s first task is determining how we can best serve the wholesaling needs of our community. In doing so, we hope to give sellers even more opportunities to succeed.

Are you a seller who wholesales or aspires to? Join the conversation with Dev in this forum thread.

Photo by The Inviting Pear

For shoppers on Etsy who may not have a specific item in mind, we want to offer the best inspiration and guidance we can. This was our motivation last September when we introduced new ways to shop and explore Fashion, Home and Garden, Kids, and Holidays. Today, we’re going one step further by introducing a brand new browsing experience for a category we love: Etsy Weddings.

Etsy Weddings is a combination of wedding items, trends, how-to’s, expert advice and the stories of real couples — all in one place. Featured items will change frequently to represent trends in the Etsy marketplace and beyond, and this week you’ll see some of our favorite wedding bloggers and influencers curate a variety of wedding styles, all with items from Etsy.

To round out the wedding shopping experience, we’re also introducing the much-requested Wedding Registry. From personalized decor to vintage kitchen items, the registry makes it easy for couples to choose gifts that match their distinct taste and lifestyle. As brides and grooms share their registry with their guests, we’re hoping new shoppers can discover Etsy along the way too.

For sellers wishing to learn more, check out our post in the Seller Handbook.

Photo by Elise Mahan Fine Art

I wanted to comment on the recent controversy over one of our featured sellers and the questions it has raised about Etsy policies. First, I want to let everyone know that I hear you. Thank you for asking good and fair questions. I’ll admit that it’s been difficult for us to find the right balance between upholding our value of transparency for the community, on the one hand, and protecting our promise of privacy to each individual member of Etsy, on the other. We’ve spent a lot of time internally trying to figure out the best approach that honors each commitment. As we wrote earlier in the week, Ecologica Malibu’s operation meets our standard for the marketplace, based on a full internal investigation and policies that have been in place since 2009. Frankly, the easiest path for us would have been to have a knee-jerk reaction to the outcry and shut the shop down, but we took a deeper look and ultimately concluded that the shop does not violate our policies. The community has understandably demanded clarification on our policies, so on Wednesday, we posted details about the rules on collectives and production assistance. We know we have more work to do to clarify our policies.

Having looked at a number of these cases in my time at Etsy, there are times when available public evidence suggests that a violation of our policy is clear, and our investigations find that it’s actually not the case. In other scenarios, a seller who by all appearances is operating within our policies is aggressively violating them and leveraging the overall goodwill of the Etsy community to manipulate the system. In both situations, making what we think is the right decision can cause our process to look unfair or unjust to the community. Juries make decisions after hearing all of the evidence, and that’s how we approach our work. If we made decisions based purely on public outcry — ignoring evidence before us — then we would be operating based on a mob mentality, and this would be destructive to the long-term health of the community.

I realize that not knowing precisely how we conduct these investigations and what we consider proof might feel agonizing or frustrating for some members of our community. We believe this creative community’s interest is best served by keeping the details of our investigations private. Sellers have proprietary information such as suppliers, process, and private business arrangements that they may not want revealed to potential competitors. In addition, we don’t disclose specific details about what we review because we don’t want to give those who are intentionally breaking Etsy’s rules an easier way to get around them. But I can tell you more generally about our thorough process for evaluating shops.

When the internal team at Etsy begins to look at a particular shop or listing, we request a lot of very specific information. This may include who is involved in their shop, how their items are produced, or how orders are fulfilled. Sellers then provide extensive responses to us based on a standard process, and we review the documentation carefully. In some cases, a dozen or more pages of detailed written, photo or video documentation come back from our inquiry. We then compare that information with signals from our own data and the independent research we do to make a decision based on what we’ve learned. We do make some judgment calls and depend on people telling us the truth. But like all Internet platforms, we have reliable technical tools for verifying answers to the kinds of questions we ask, such as where are your items shipped from, where are you located and who do you work with.

Much of the information we learn from investigations can’t be shared with the larger community out of respect for the privacy of the seller being investigated, so there is a natural divergence between what the community sees when they report a seller and what we see as we go deeper on the case. Etsy is lucky to have a dedicated community that helps us by reporting suspicious listings and shops based on what they see and their experience making things themselves. In our DOs and DON’Ts, we say “flagging is akin to neighborhood watch.” But depending on how you participate in the investigative process — as a community member, an Etsy employee, or a seller we are investigating — you will have differing levels of visibility at different stages of the process.

The larger issue here is transparency, and it can be difficult in a marketplace where we have obligations both to the community at large, and to individuals. We’ve been actively working on product changes — starting even before this particular incident — to promote more transparency into the production processes of all Etsy sellers, and to shop businesses as a whole. I’m committed to continuing that work and providing greater transparency, even within the constraints of privacy. I know how much our community cares about preserving what makes Etsy special, and we do, too.

On that note, I wanted to talk a bit more about expectations for behavior in the Etsy community, because I think experiences like this can help us all communicate better in the future. Our DOs and DON’Ts say: “We expect all members of Etsy (including Etsy’s staff) to treat each other with respect and kindness. Remember that behind every username is a real person with feelings.” Etsy has always been about the human element in commerce, and always will be. Real people make mistakes (I know we have made our fair share) and there will be misunderstandings and sometimes bruised feelings along the way. None of this excuses personal attacks on other members, or Etsy staff, like we have seen over the past week. We will not allow or encourage that behavior on Etsy. I want to make that crystal clear. I know that our admin and the vast majority of members love the strong sense of community that Etsy provides. It’s a rare thing, and we all have to work together to protect it.

I know our post from Wednesday is not the end of our work to clarify our policies. As many of you noted, some of these questions have been around since the beginning of Etsy. Our answers don’t yet satisfy all of the questions. While the policies have evolved over time to address some of the questions, they are still a work-in-progress. In the past nine months, we have made substantial progress in our review and enforcement process (cutting down the time it takes to review reports from many days to hours in most cases) but we need to do more on the policy side. To that end, we’re doing a top-to-bottom review of Etsy’s existing marketplace policies, and I’ll continue to give the process a high degree of personal attention. We won’t achieve perfect clarity immediately, but we will continue the dialogue with you over the next months. Thanks, and please share your thoughts.

Photo by JackSlomovits 

Hello to the lovely Etsy community! My name’s Brittany. I’m the newest member of our Product Team, and I’ve been known to eat bangers and mash on occasion. We have some big news today for all our Etsians with those beautiful accents from the Australian Outback, Canadian Rockies, and British Isles. We’re excited to continue expanding our language capabilities to include British English, making Etsy more comfortable for our English-speaking members from outside the U.S. This is just one more step in our commitment towards making Etsy a truly global marketplace.

How will this language update improve your day to day on Etsy? Sellers can now tag listings in their native English and have them show up in search results for both the British and American words. Likewise, buyers are able to search for items using their native tongue and see more relevant results. Tag that “watercolour” painting you just finished and rest assured it’ll automatically pop up in search results for “watercolor” as well. With easier-to-find listings, we think the whole community will be even happier come tea time.

We’re growing leaps and bounds in Australia, Canada, and the UK and are busy helping you build up those markets. Come spend time with us at our Seller Symposium in Sydney, our Community Meetup in Vancouver, and at the Queen’s Jubilee Festival and Clerkenwell Design Week in London. And make sure to get to know our fabulous community managers: Angela in Australia, Nada in Canada, and Amity in the UK.

It’s all cracking news. We agree!