Etsy has announced they will be closing the Etsy Wholesale marketplace over the next few months. It was a dedicated section of Etsy offering an opportunity for merchants to sell in bulk, or perhaps liquidate stock, related to crafts and creations. At the heart of the decision to discontinue the service is that the relatively small number of sellers on the site didn’t justify the resources of running a dedicated service.
We speculated whether closure was on the cards just last month. At the time there were reports that customer support emails were going unanswered and their presence on social media reduced. Subsequently it was reported that all staff in the division had either been made redundant or moved elsewhere in the business.
The blog post from Etsy and detailed timelines regarding the closure, and a video, is available below, but they say:
While the original promise of Etsy Wholesale was exciting and some sellers have had great success on the platform, what we’ve learned over the past several years is that demand for wholesale from buyers hasn’t been as strong as we hoped.
– Kruti Patel Goyal, General Manager of the Seller Services team at Etsy
Etsy say that wholesale represents a very small part the business with only 5,00 sellers out of nearly 2 million utilising it. And of those, they say, only a small fraction are enjoying much success and turnover $10,000 or more a year through the wholesale platform.
In the light of the information provided by Etsy, this does seem to be the right step: the resources invested didn’t justify the results. And whilst this won’t be a problem for many, some dedicated sellers on Etsy Wholsesale will need to change course and find new outlets. Such a move is also typical of the streamlining we’ve been seeing at Etsy since new CEO Josh Silverman took over last year with a pledge to focus on the core business. As we’ve seen from recent quarterly results that is a strategy that does seem to be paying off.
The full information about the Etsy Wholesale closure can be found here. The page includes a full timeline.
