Craft sellers sure know how to make an uproar on Etsy.
Three months after the fact, sellers are still clamoring about WeddingGate—Etsy’s initiative to revamp the Weddings category into a Pinterest-inspired, staff-curated subsite—to the tune of a 567-page forum thread rife with comments and complaints, active daily since May.
“They could at least defend their position on this change by presenting hard data showing an increase in sales and views for wedding sellers or at least data that indicates views and sales for wedding shops have not been hurt according to their numbers,” LaECLECTICa wrote Thursday.
Hours later, Etsy broke its silence and released internal statistics and analyses to convince wedding sellers that the redesign is in their best interest.
On the Etsy News Blog, Product Marketing Manager Laura Hood said that not only are more people browsing (37 percent more than before the redesign), but those browsers are spending 21 percent more time in the new Weddings category. Hood also addressed sellers’ concerns that fewer items were visible post-redesign:
“[V]isibility of items is a valid concern and we’ve addressed it. Where the initial pages were showing a few hundred items in each Weddings subcategory, we’re now showing up to 10,000 items per subcategory, and we’ve improved the setup to show this many items without significantly slowing down performance.”
So far, however, it doesn’t seem like the approach is working. Sellers have created a new discussion topic just to discuss the update.
“I would just like to note, OF COURSE shoppers are spending 21 percent more time browsing. It takes twice as long to load half the amount of items!!” CherryHills wrote. “I would also like to note that in my opinion, there are more people ‘browsing’ the new wedding category—because Etsy is promoting the heck out of it!”
“Isn’t the total number of shops here [on Etsy] increasing from month to month?” Natural Gorgeous added. “So if the total number of shops increases, but the number of shops selling weddings items stays the same … you do the math. I think that after all that promotion … they can’t report an increase in sales, it is bad news.”
Posts on the Etsy News Blog can’t be commented on, so it’s likely Hood or another Etsy employee will address these continuing concerns in the forums.
Photo via Etsy
