![]() You’ll see demand surge in some areas and decline in others. Silverman: We don’t prioritize, but the marketplace does. Are you deprioritizing others? Do you have sellers who are saying, “Hey, I’ve all of a sudden lost a bunch of traffic here”? Wood: Clearly, you’re prioritizing certain categories now. We’ve got millions and millions of buyers on the site every day, and they’re able to flag things very quickly for review that our team can screen those as well. We have, over the past 14 years, developed automated filters that can very quickly flag suspicious listings or suspicious sellers and then have them go over for review. I’m proud to say that all of the metrics suggest that Etsy stays a very safe and very clean marketplace. The trust and safety team is working 24/7 right now, no doubt, to keep the marketplace clean. Fortunately, the vast majority of people are really honest, but there are always bad actors. Silverman: Yeah, unfortunately, it is true that whenever there is a crisis, there will be bad actors that step in. Wood: Tell me more about that because I could imagine that this is a time when scammers and fraudsters are attempting to also capitalize on interest and in some cases, desperation. We have a large and really dedicated team in trust and safety that’s making sure that we have a really safe marketplace. We also screen the site very carefully using both automated filters and community flags for things like fraud or intellectual property violations. She’s got to earn gaining prominence in our search engine, which means that buyers have to like it, and buyers have to leave good reviews and it’s that ecosystem and positive feedback loop that allows the seller to gain more and more prominence in our search engine and then sell more and more product. For that seller to succeed, she’s got to create a really good product, she’s got to take good photos, it’s got to be a product that people want. We love having a very low barrier to entry so that we can provide economic opportunity for many people. One woman with a sewing machine from her home can create a global business and sell to the world. By the way, 86% of our sellers are women, 91% are businesses of one, working from their home. We think we are the easiest, fastest path to entrepreneurship. Silverman: Anyone with creativity and 20 cents can open a shop on Etsy. The opportunity to be able to provide meaningful income to many, many people at a time when they’re feeling a lot of economic stress is a purpose that we all at Etsy hold really dear to our hearts. We’ve had twice as many new shops open in the month of April as we did April one year ago. Is there also a lot of inbound on the seller side? Have you had a lot of people signing up to sell on the platform? Wood: Clearly, there’s a lot of inbound on the customer side. That’s one of thousands of examples of products that our sellers have created that create whole new categories kind of out of thin air. This is like a trinket that you send to someone you love to give them a virtual hug and let them know that you’re thinking of them. For example, there are sellers that are creating pocket hugs. There are all kinds of product categories that are selling really well in Etsy today that didn’t even exist a month ago. Silverman: I can’t think of a time that we’ve had a surge of demand for one specific product that was so strong that we needed to do a “calling all sellers” in this way. Molly Wood: Is there any precedent for asking sellers for something specific? Is it usual at all for you to use your incoming data to inform sellers about what might do well? Etsy could go from zero to hundreds of thousands of masks in days, just because of the dynamism of the Etsy seller base. When you buy a mask from them, you’re really helping them out. We put out a call to our sellers, saying, “Hey, if you have a sewing machine, please start making masks.” Within two weeks, we had 20,000 sellers making masks, and in fact, now we have 60,000 sellers who’ve made and sold masks. All of a sudden, we saw an explosion of demand, literally overnight, on Etsy. Josh Silverman: At the beginning of April, the CDC changed its guidelines and recommended that Americans wear fabric face masks. ![]()
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