Etsy Is In Its Flop Era, and Sellers Are Fleeing
In 2017, Emily Olson, a stay-at-home mom based in Boulder, Colorado, started selling prints and custom-made puppy portraits on Etsy.
Her watercolors were simple and relatively cheap—images of saucer-eyed corgis and malamutes in mini-tuxes, which she sold for $75 to $300 each—but dog owners adored them: “They were a labor of love,” she says. In 2021, she says she made more than $40,000 off her Etsy store, and her social media following ballooned to 180,000 followers on YouTube.
But in 2022, she noticed something odd: Her sales started precipitously declining. Competitors flooded the platform, and she kept finding copies of her work on drop-shipping sites like Alibaba, where they were advertised as original creations. Then there were the AI-generated pet portraits, which were supplanting her listings in search results and selling for a fraction of the price.
The most frustrating part, she says, was that the AI-generated portraits...
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