Bye Bye Etsy

It's official Etsy, I'm breaking up with you. All of my items have expired and I'm outta there.

I'm sorry Etsy, I tried, but it's not me, it's you. No really, it's you.

I know we never had the most involved relationship. I was there and I posted items and even sold a few. I didn't really bother you and you never bothered with me. You kind of just left me to my own devices. I was never featured. Never noticed. I was a member and yet it seemed like there was a whole other community living there that had no interest in me whatsoever. Why was I never one of the in crowd?

I liked your chat rooms, until I got bored watching people promote themselves.

I read your forums if the topic interested me. It rarely did. The admins weren't ever really heard from except to say "you're calling out, I'm shutting this thread down". Problems never really seemed to be addressed. EVER.

Problems would just go on, and on, and on with no idea of when they would be fixed. A bug here, resellers there. But anytime anyone tried to talk to you about it, they either got ignored, a form letter, or shut down for causing trouble.

I really don't understand how you can select a reseller to be featured. I would understand if it were a randomized computer program that selected the items, but the front pages were hand selected by the admins. Clearly they wanted to promote those people who would bring in the most money and mass produced items bring in a lot of money.

Isn't that kind of the opposite of your mission statement? I would understand if that was what you advertised yourself as, but it's not. You advertise yourselves as handmade and yet I can plug in just about any copyrighted fad and find plenty of mass produced items or out and out copyright violations. Copyright is a law by the way and violations are illegal.

Lately the problem seems to be that payments are going to the wrong seller. How on earth is this happening? Hypothetically, if someone wanted to buy a mug from me, how does their payment go to a jewelry artists in Zimbabwe? And the fix that you recommend is for me to talk to my customer and work out a means of payment? How can you not be taking the site down for maintenance to fix this egregious problem? And now (hypothetically) that artist in Zimbabwe has my paypal information which might enable them to clear out my bank accounts.

I could handle being ignored. I could handle a bunch of cliques that turned their noses up at me. What I can't handle is complete and utter incompetence at the single thing you're supposed to be doing for me - providing a working shopping cart for my potential customers.

I could go on. If I get started on a comprehensive list of ways that you have failed and have pissed me off, we'd be here all night.

So goodbye Etsy. I'll be at Artfire if you need me. I don't think you'll notice my absence though. But I'll be watching you implode from a safe distance, reminiscing about what could have been if only competence had been a part of your vocabulary.