Marketplace websites like Etsy are NOT sustainable and ruining consumer spending
Have you ever heard of Etsy? This amazing marketplace of homemade goods and clothing. Everything on there is homemade and people buy and sell their products that they MADE. Or is it?
Etsy, just like many other websites in todays era, was supposed to be this safe haven for small businesses to thrive. A place where anyone, even YOU could make a business making anything and become the next big business owner.
Not anymore.
When you traverse through Etsy, I want you to watch out for something. You will see constant repeats of the same item with bad stock photos of it. Or you will see an item that's clearly not handmade and looks like the same stuff you'd get on Amazon.
That's because of this new phenomenon, “Drop Shipping.”
Drop Shipping is when someone buys something from huge Chinese websites like Alibaba and Aliexpress and buys them in bulk. They are able to get these products for extremely low prices and resell them for usually 20–30x the price.
I just saw a TikTok the other day of a guy telling people to buy these reusable oil spray bottles on Alibaba for 10 cents each and sell them on Amazon for $10–12 per plastic spray bottle. He claimed to be making hundreds of dollars a month by doing this.
So why do I care that people are reselling cheap Chinese products on websites like Esty, it’s a free market anyways?
Well, because they are lying to you. It would be different if these products had a clear description claiming they were from China or being drop shipped. But these products on Etsy are claiming to be HANDMADE in the description.
And for the environmentally conscious people like me, this can be very problematic. We are buying things from sellers thinking that we are supporting a small business and buying a hand made item, but in reality we end up supporting some 20 year old guy who just learned what drop shipping was last month.
AND we end up supporting the cheap slave labor that was used to get that product here in the first place.
According to researchers at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, they:
“Attribute China’s high emissions intensity — the quantity of CO2 emitted per dollar of goods produced — to the nation’s antiquated manufacturing processes and reliance on coal.”
Sweatshops in China have some of the worst working conditions in the world. According to Phys.org, they have to endure “poor working conditions such as excessive and forced overtime, denial of social security rights and failure to provide employment contracts, as well as severe health risks.”
Near Hong Kong, in the Pearl River Delta area, factory workers lose or break about 40,000 fingers on the job every year.
Many sweatshops make their employees work 16 hour days or more and work 28 days a month. Many do not get breaks and can get paid as low as $2 dollars an hour.
Etsy does not seem to care about the many people reselling products with false premises and pretending they are more eco friendly.
According to Insurance Journal, Etsy was sued by investors claiming that Etsy hid products. They said, “Investors filed a proposed class action against the Brooklyn, New York-based company and its executives after an analyst said this week that more than 5 percent of about 40 million listings may be counterfeit or otherwise infringe well- known brands.”
So should you have to stop buying from Etsy all together?
You don’t have to.
Etsy still has some amazing and sustainable brands on there. You just have to be more careful when purchasing from them.
You can check if the product is duplicated and look for pictures of the same products or using the same phrases or keywords in the titles.
You can check how many items the seller is selling and how many they are selling of each. This is probably the easiest way to spot a drop shipper. They will usually have hundreds of items or be shipping out thousands of the same item in very short time spans.
The last thing you can do is search the item on common drop shipping websites and see if you can find it or even reverse image search the listing and see if it is listed on any of those websites.
Remember to keep shopping sustainably and keep and eye out for websites like these!
