Inside Etsy's product, growth, and marketplace evolution

Really trying to lean into, well, what does it look like in a buyer's hand, in a buyer's home? Maybe that gives the next purchaser a bit more confidence that it's the right size, it's the right color, whatever it might be.

I think that it maybe misses the point in some changes or some areas where you are working towards a bigger net new thing or this specific change won't really be indicative of the greater whole you're building towards.

We have the insight into information, into data, that an individual seller won't. And so we can help them make hopefully better decisions that lead to sales, leveraging the insights that we have.

What are you focused on this week? And then reflecting on, did you get done the things you were focused on last week? Seems super simple, but just the exercise of thinking about what matters, writing it down, and having a little bit of social proof or articulating it out to others creates some degree of accountability.

We don't subscribe to this idea of PM as the mini CEO. You're up there directing from on high that we're going to build that feature and we're going to do that. And that's just not the type of culture that we have, and generally speaking from what I've seen, doesn't lead to good decisions or the best features or product being built.

We did something that far as I know we've never done an Etsy's past, which is we put out a call to our sellers to say, 'Now's the time. Now's the time to make face masks if you can.'

Having that be part of the day-to-day conversation, it seems like such a small thing, but it adds up to having clarity on goal, the KPI point, and then clarity on why, the narrative point. If you can marry those two things, I think that's an incredibly powerful combination.

You still need to understand the provenance of your item. If you are saying, 'I have this design, I'm just going to throw it over the fence to a manufacturer that I've never met, that I don't know. I don't understand their processes, I may not agree with them,' that doesn't meet our criteria.

We had one example where we added some text to the cart experience, and we just saw huge uplift that we really, really didn't expect. It was more us communicating our values as a business, and it was something that really seemed to resonate with our buyers.

The text change was in our cart where we call out Etsy offsets carbon emissions from every delivery. And just adding that simple line of text was something that, like I said, really resonated with our buyers and the type of customer that comes to Etsy, and really drove conversion.

So what can we do with that information? We can then say, 'The seller put it on sale. You should come back and check it out. This is selling out. There's only one of this item left. You showed some intent, you might want to come back and get it.'

Tim Holley is discussing Etsy's marketplace strategy, explaining how they prioritize attracting qualified buyers to help sellers make sales.

We really see it as paramount that we have a qualified set of buyers who are looking for the items, the type of items our sellers are selling, and that we can help them make a purchase decision, and therefore a seller maker sale.

GMS stands for Gross Merchandise Sales, Etsy's primary revenue metric tracking the total dollar value of items sold on the platform.

One thing that is just such a standout is having... And I mentioned GMS as our north star KPI, just having that, being absolutely front and center, being the drumbeat that we talk about in every meeting, the measuring stick that we measure the success of launches against.