Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Unofficial Etsy Forums



Great News! A fellow Petsjubilee Team member is the administrator of a new forum site, the Unofficial Etsy Forums.

Keith of Butterfly Bay Design is the administrator of this new site, which came about due to Etsy forum changes and the huge out cry against them.

The new owners of Etsy have rocked the world of their members, especially their forum users, by essentially doing away with nearly all Etsy forums. Rumors have it that what will be left will be a team only forum that resembles the Flickr groups. This will result in a place for team "pack" members to interact with themselves, but interacting between teams and individuals will be gone. I see this change as a way of getting members to reach outside of Etsy to promote their individual and team shops, therefore promoting the Etsy website.

These forum changes make me curious as to what other services Etsy will provide in leiu of the shutdown. When the brick and mortar shop continues to take a greater and greater percentage of your profit, you either pull your stuff from their shop or you ask what they are doing to help promote and encourage sales that are worth the changes. I believe one should pressure them to be creative and relentless in helping to sell your product.

I hope after the initial shock of these changes is past us, the Etsy community will question administrators as to what they are doing to promote our shops. I hope the future brings more advertising in print, radio, and television from Etsy.

6 comments:

makingstuffwithlove said...

I had no idea it was Keith who started the UEF! I was really, and I mean really (tears) upset at the news about the forums. That's exactly how I found all my great friends and I thought the forums were SO condusive to artistic thought and expression...

Yes, I will be interested too, to see if Etsy can come up with ANYTHING that could possibly be as advantageous as free help and experience whenever and however it is needed. That's exactly what the forums were for me. I bid them a brokenhearted farewell...

FrumsGlass said...

Etsy was started with that philosophy, but with new owners, everything changes. I don't think Keith started UEF. I found him in this thread:
http://unofficialetsyforums.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=announcements&action=display&thread=350

AngelPups said...

Excellent post! I've actually been quite confused over the whole forum thing, but this clears things up a bit~ I'm off to check out the link you gave and hope I can make more sense of it! Thanks for the info!

Anonymous said...

Hi!

Keith was brought on board on Day 3, so we consider him one of the three "founding admin" - and our Tech Guru Extraordinaire. The in-depth story of the founding of UEF can be found here:

http://unofficialetsyforums.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=sitehelp&action=display&thread=249

We're thrilled to have him on the team!

- Kathleen

(Admin as Persephone on UEF)

Christine said...

Thanks for posting this. I am so out of the loop with Etsy things right now since I've been busy with life in general. I had no idea there were new owners. Clearly I need to catch up.

Etsy is becoming more and more corporate (which I suppose is how businesses grow and make money), but it's kind of an oxymoron for Etsy, considering they are corporate and they cater to indie businesses. It will be interesting to see how these things mesh going forward.

Angela said...

I'm just stopping by from the UEF forums :-) Im loving the new site and glad to have a place to still share ideas. I look forward to following your blog!