30.1.09

Tech Updates: Relisting, Renewing & the Growing Marketplace

Etsy News

January 30, 2009

Etsians,

In the post-holiday season, we are very excited to tell you that our marketplace continues to grow. That said, there have been concerns from sellers about the viability of relisting and renewing items on Etsy, which sellers have been using to promote their work and send their items "to the top of the heap."

We want to clarify that the 20 cent listing fee buys you a page with your listing for a 4 month period. As we get more traffic, and more and more items are listed on the site (and as more and more sellers relist as a promotional tool), the engineering team has had to tweak various levers to maintain site stability and handle the increases in listings and traffic. One lever that we recently adjusted was the way that listings, new or renewed, are delivered to the site. This adjustment involved delivering items in very frequent batches rather than continuously in real time. As an outcome of this change, there is less of chance that an individual item will appear in certain ways of discovering items on Etsy, including the Recently Listed Items section of the Homepage, the Fresh Items list on the Buy Page, as part of Pounce, or in Time Machine 1 or Time Machine 2. Each of these product discovery functions works differently and the chances of sellers actually seeing their items appear in all of these places depend on many variables including listing volumes at specific times, site speed, and each user's speed of navigation.

Renewing may or may not get your item at the very top, but it will place it closer to the front in features that display listings in reverse chronological order. Nothing has changed there. That said, we think something should change. Renewing was never intended to be an advertising tool, but the way it was built – along with the emphasis on reverse chronological ranking throughout the site – allowed renewing to function as a promotional strategy.

In her Storque post in November, Maria Thomas, our CEO, touched on how we are beginning to think about changing Search. You can read it here: http://www.etsy.com/storque/article/2853/ . This work is still at a conceptual stage and nothing is changing in the short-term.

We want to keep you informed and let you know that we are working on Etsy's Search functionality as well as more ways for sellers to promote their items. Etsy is a living, growing, dynamic site and we are so thankful to your feedback as we continue to work to make Etsy a better place to discover and be discovered.

Please see Matt's post on the Etsy blog for more details:
http://www.etsy.com/storque/article/3332/

Thank you,
Etsy


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