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Etsy sellers 'ripping off' customers over 'handmade' products

Some Etsy sellers are "ripping off" customers by charging up to seven times more than other websites for items falsely presented as "handmade".

This has come from a review by the consumer magazine Which? - which discovered many of these items could be found for cheaper from retailers such as Amazon, Asda and B&M.

How was the research conducted? 

Which? analysed the first page of items in a selection of categories on Etsy in March, including furniture, toys and clothes - all under the filter of "handmade".

It found that 23 handmade items out of the 192 looked at were also available on other online platforms or retailers, and all but two had a higher price on Etsy.

Nine items cost more than twice as much on Etsy than the cheapest price elsewhere.

Examples...

A free-standing "handmade" bookshelf was £59.99 on Etsy, six times the price of an identical item available for £10 on Alibaba.

One "star seller" on Etsy sold a "handmade" rustic bedside night stand table for £128.31 on the site - nearly three times the price of the same item on Amazon where it was found for £43.99.

Which? found an industrial coffee table from the same seller available on Etsy for £146.10 but much cheaper on Wowcher (£59.99), Manomano (£84.99), Wayfair (£89.99), Aosom (£99.99) and eBay (£131.99).

Rocio Concha, Which? director of policy and advocacy, said: "Our research shows some Etsy sellers are brazenly ripping off customers by making misleading claims about their products."

How have Etsy responded?

Etsy states that everything listed for sale on Etsy must be handmade, vintage or a craft supply.

To be listed as a handmade item, sellers must have been involved in the making or design of the item and must be open about anyone else involved in the process.

Etsy has removed some of the sellers from its platform since Which? notified it of its findings.

A spokeswoman said: "Etsy is proud to be home to millions of unique, handcrafted, and customised goods, and protecting the integrity of our marketplace is critical to our business.

"Our policies prohibit counterfeit and resold merchandise on Etsy, and we use a combination of automatic controls, manual review, and user flags to continuously monitor the marketplace and identify policy violations. Etsy users are also encouraged to report potentially violating listings via our site-wide flagging tool.

"Since 2018, we've quadrupled our investments in the trust and safety of our marketplace and, in 2022 alone, we put 50 million dollars towards these efforts.

"Specifically, we are intensifying enforcement of our Handmade Policy, and we have expanded our team of content moderators and strengthened our automated detection systems to steadily increase our removal of resold content."

-sky news