In an article published yesterday on Fortune that highlights some of the changes the company went through over the last 9 months, there was one interesting piece of information that may be music to Etsy sellers.
Mentioning an internal discussion about Amazon and eBay, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said he brushed off Amazon and eBay stating they “map to a catalog.”
This sounds like Etsy will continue to innovate on the strength of having unique products and not go down the catalog route.
In the recent earnings call, the company mentioned it had about 50 million listings with 15 million unique products. Clearly, that metric alone confirms that Etsy as it operates today, is not a natural fit for a catalog style marketplace such as Amazon and eBay.
And now it appears Silverman has confirmed that such a catalog is not on the horizon.
Structured Data
However, not adding a catalog doesn’t mean there will not more emphasis on structured data.
In the same earnings call there were hints about the company improving upon structured data and that Etsy will add more machine learning and artificial intelligence to its search technology.
Image search may also become more prevalent on Etsy over time. But again, this is another area that will work well for a company specializing in unique products as shoppers may use image search to find unique products.
The rest of the article is an interesting read about how Etsy simplified the company’s organizational structure and focused on the key metric to move forward. One cannot argue with the success they have seen so far.
What do you think about Etsy staying true to a listing format instead of going the catalog route? Head over to our Facebook Discussion Group or use the comments section below.
