If you are a seller on Etsy.com you know what has been going on over there the past couple of weeks. What transpired recently brought with it the one thing every handmade seller has been fearing. Etsy selling out and chasing every penny it can get. Long time sellers know that ever since Chad Dickerson was made the new CEO things started to change, and not for the better.

There has always been a small problem with resellers on etsy but it soon became apparent with the increasing influx of cookie cutter shops and thousands of exact copies of items being sold that behind closed doors etsy was about to change. They have a fancy “report” feature for its sellers/buyers to use to report sellers for a multitude of infractions with the main one being “this is not handmade”. They most likely just added the report seller feature in so that honest sellers could push buttons and be distracted for a couple of minutes. They certainly didn’t care that these Chinese imported pieces were there because they were selling and Etsy was making their commission. Ask a thousand sellers how many times they and everyone else has reported an item only to see it still there days, weeks, and months later.

Still we pushed on and believed Etsy when they touted the “we are really handmade” motto.

Two weeks ago the ice broke and etsy revealed its hand. It is now within etsy’s policy to lie to buyers and claim that factory items are indeed handmade. As long as you are the original creator of the idea you can call that $5 necklace “handmade” that you had a factory in China make for you to resell on the great new Etsy. Now that Etsy has investors to answer to, who oddly enough have ties to China, instead of being truthful about the direction of etsy they pulled the ultimate bait and switch on the small time sellers that made etsy the hugely successful ecommerce site that it is.

Shortly after this announcement and many irate forum threads from sellers later, as if to rub salt in the wounds, they posted a blog saying how great this new policy is and featured 5 sellers who are already using this new machine made…I mean handmade acceptance policy. Wow that was fast! Did you have those sellers lined up and ready to go? The comment section of the blog post quickly exploded from angry sellers and they had to close the comment section. Can’t take the heat etsy?

One thing you don’t want to do is piss off thousands of artists. They are a creative bunch and will always find a way to make you regret it. Etsy has shown it’s true new colors and has taken the stance of quashing anyone who doesn’t cheer for them and their bastardization of the word handmade. 100s of treasuries have been made in the past couple of weeks showcasing lists of the same item being sold in many different shops. Etsy is quick to delete those treasuries but refuses to remove the offending resellers.

A couple of nights ago I decided to take a different route and make a new kind of statement treasury. Etsy has officially moved on from its core values, flushed its integrity down the toilet and I couldn’t just sit there and not make use of that horrible taste in my mouth. Several hours later I was finished with my best master piece to date and released it onto the net for all to enjoy. You can see my Etsy Treasury here. It soon became apparent that I underestimated how everyone else was still feeling and that my treasury would explode in popularity.

As of right the etsy treasury has basically gone viral or is at least on the verge of it. It has been shared/liked on facebook almost 600 times in the first 24 hours, has 4000 views, 352 admirers and 252 comments.

How far will this go, and is Etsy taking notice?