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Etsy lays off 225 workers after ‘essentially flat’ sales, says CEO | Business
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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This is one of those sites I have a love-hate relationship with. It used to be much better when it started, with actual people selling actual homemade items.
These days, there’s a lot of dropshipping shit on there, sold for way higher prices. There’s also people who run their shop like a full on commercial business. All of this means that it’s harder to find the actual, honestly handmade stuff by individual users.
I’m also not a fan of the current tax hassle they’ve got going where they collect European sales tax in advance. It was a headache when I ordered a thing and got taxed twice (refunded by seller, thankfully).
"refunded by seller" is probably why the sales have flat lined.
Its really difficult to make money with all the charges and fees one has to pay in order to sell there besides being forced to refund or else threatened with bad reviews
My particular situation was: I bought some knife scales from a guy in Australia. I'm in the Netherlands. Etsy collects EU sales tax - 12 euros in this case. Now, Etsy is supposed to send that money to our customs people and the shipper puts a specific code on it to let them know that the taxes have been paid in advance.
Now, for whatever reason, Dutch customs taxed me AGAIN when the package arrived. Even though the seller had put the correct code on there and even highlighted it with a marker. So as far as I can tell, it wasn't their fault that I got taxed twice.
But: Etsy specifically tells you to take things up with the seller first when there's issues. And the seller refunded me the second tax payment (13 euros and change). Which was of course very nice of them. But I wasn't about to take that double taxation lying down either. I'm very much in the 'import taxes are theft and extortion' camp, so I sure as shit wasn't about to pay twice.
Whether he refunded it to avoid a bad review, I don't know. But the whole thing annoyed me so much in general, I've stopped buying things on Etsy. God forbid I run into that issue if I ever buy anything actually expensive on there.
Knowing Etsy, its not worth taking up the fight with them. Even having your data deleted according to GDPR rights was almost impossible untill I Cc'ed my communication with the local data authorities.
I'm never even looking at that page again