The makers of your favorite personalized pillow cases and jewelry are about to go on a digital strike to protest high seller fees. The strike will start on April 11. They are going to put their shops on vacation mode for the duration of the protest. They are calling for a boycott of Etsy products from April 11th to 18th. As of Wednesday afternoon, 17,00 people had signed an online petition in support of the strike, though how many of them were Etsy sellers was not immediately clear. The straw that broke the camel's back appears to be the company's recent decision to increase seller transaction fees. The seller fee would be raised from 5 to 6.5% on April 11. It came months after the fourth quarter revenues of Etsy. Raising fees so high, making advertising fees mandatory, and guilt-tripping sellers into offering free shipping is chiseling away every penny I could make on sales. The sellers want to kill the transaction fee increase, have a new plan for guarding against resellers, have a faster appeals process, and allow all sellers to opt-out of the fees that come with them.
When the price hike goes into effect, it will mark the second increase since the beginning of the year and will result in a doubling of fees in less than four years.
The petition takes issue with the growing use of moderation bots, which they claim are shutting down sellers for unclear reasons. The sellers believe that Etsy isn't doing enough to prevent low-quality, mass-produced copycats from making their way onto the platform.
Rather than rewarding the sellers whose hard work has enabled them to become one of the most profitable tech companies in the world, the organizers write.
One person wrote that Josh Silverman was looking to make Etsy the next Amazon because he implemented policies that prioritized buyer and seller. He became the CEO of the company in 2017, according to his page.
The petition represents less than 3% of the total seller base, and the organizers' perspectives did not match the point of view of all sellers on the site, according to an email from an Etsy spokesman.
We are committed to supporting our community of 5.3 million sellers around the world by helping them grow their businesses. Our revised fee structure will allow us to increase our investments in each of these key areas so that we can better serve our community and keep the thriving marketplace.
According to data from the group Collective Action in Tech, the tech industry saw a record number of new unions formed last year. Code for America and The New York Times are two of the new tech unions.
The Etsy sellers aren't unionized, but they are trying to use the internet and collective bargaining to their advantage. A recent poll shows that the majority of Americans support employee rights to collective bargaining.
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