Etsy Releases 2019 Transparency Report

Image Credit: Loveis Wise

As we strive to dig deeper, one of Etsy’s guiding principles, we know it’s important to evaluate our progress in order to make balanced and informed decisions going forward.

Today, we’re releasing our 2019 Transparency Report — a look back at our policy enforcement for the year, including our Intellectual Property, Prohibited Items and Requests for Member Information policies. We’ve shared this report annually since 2015, and we believe that publicly reporting on our enforcement efforts builds trust in our marketplace and demonstrates our commitment to continuous learning.

All members of our community agree to follow Our House Rules, and our specialized Trust & Safety teams maintain the health and integrity of the marketplace by enforcing these policies. The full report is available here and a few highlights from 2019 are below:

• We saw a 58% increase in flags for potential content policy violations, which we attribute to improvements in our automated flagging systems.
• We permanently closed 36,420 accounts for content policy violations.
• Breaching our Handmade Policy, mainly by attempting to resell commercial items, was the most common policy violation in 2019.
• We had a 16% increase in intellectual property takedowns due to increased usage of our reporting tools by new and existing reporters.
• We rejected almost 16% of intellectual property takedown notices due to insufficient information, incorrect information, or other noncompliance under Etsy’s policies.
• 75% of intellectual property takedowns were executed on accounts located in North America and Europe.
• We closed 13,906 shops for repeat violations of our intellectual property policies — more than double the amount of the previous year.
• Despite significant growth in our marketplace, the percentage of orders that resulted in a dispute remained at 0.3%, consistent with the past three years.
• We handled 17,668 member requests to permanently delete their accounts, more than double the volume in 2018, due largely to Etsy enhancing privacy controls for all users and the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect across the European Union in 2018.