this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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My wife has been selling handmade crocheted stuff on Etsy for a while and I am constantly catching her going through listings and getting infuriated about designs that look awesome in the photos but are unrealistic or impossible in execution, and yet people keep buying them
This is where a challenger could easily dethrone etsy, taking away their first mover advantage by creating a maker's marketplace with a strict no-AI policy and heavy human moderation.
Etsy is flooded with slop, it's awful. If you search something like "crochet bracelet patterns" you will get pages and pages of straight slop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/search?q=crochet+bracelet+patterns
I used to make fine silver chains by hand and sell them on Etsy, and did quite well with it. Then it got flooded with drop shippers despite that being against terms of service. But you could see the biggest and most successful jewellery sellers all had identical products and if you search their product titles on Ali express or Temu it was the first result. I went from 5-10 sales which was a couple grand a month to zero the instant they stopped policing it.
I can only imagine how bad it is now with ai. I tried to browse Etsy for something recently and there was literally pages of ai slop. I don't think I saw a single real product.
I bought a 50 € "silver ring" that was made out of copper on Etsy. After it started changing it's color and painting my finger black i searched for it on Ali and found it for 1,10 € there.
I couldn't revive the 5 Star rating i gave the shop, nor did they or Etsy get back to me after inquiering. After that i stopped using Etsy completly.
How long was it? Most banks let you do a credit card charge back for at least a year after purchase.
Not in the us, not paied by credit card. Besides, it's more than three years past that point. But thanks anyway for pointinit out
Yep. Etsy stopped caring completely when they realised how much revenue drop shippers were bringing in. There was no way I could compete with silver plated copper from China with personalised engraving for $15 when the chains took 8+ hours to make and were made with pure silver. This was back when silver was $30/ounce. Now it's $91. And the chains were 2-3 ounces by the time I was done.