newnew team meeting with etsy!...

....was really interesting. I went to my first meeting with the new new etsy team- lots of people and lots of worth while information was shared. We were luck enough to have Maria Thomas, etsy's Chief Operating Officer and Sarah Hicks, Vice President, Product Management at etsy and Matt from the Community & Labs there as well.

It was great to hear them talk about their work with etsy and they took time to answer questions and asked alot themselves. They all seemed so dedicated and passionate about their work and truly inspired by the work their doing.
I was impressed by their dedication- they are visiting team meetings up and down the east coast to talk with sellers, ask them questions, hear their concerns and address them. So glad I was there to hear it.

I thought this might be of interest to others...They are working to improve many things on a list that Maria joked was always "119" items long. Mainly the top priorities are registration, search and checkout. Creating an easier registration process, would ultimately bring more people to etsy. Search is a real issue with etsy for me. It is often irrelevant. Items that are inappropriately tagged, or items that come up on the top of searches because they are recently listed are for the most part not what interest me as a buyer, so I'll spend so much time sifting through useless listings.

There were many things discussed as possibilities for the future, there were just so many things they'd like to improve upon. A few mentioned were:

-changing the initial search tool on the front page, from the drop down menu to something more intuitive. For example, when I first made a shop and wanted to show my mother, she could not figure out the drop down menu. From what I heard at the meeting is a real concern.
-creating a different type of Favorites system. Makiing sub categories, like wish lists, and even registries. I'd love this!!!
-incentives for adding favorities/hearting, like a recently hearted page akin to the just sold pages
-in house statistics were mentioned
-in house check out system was mentioned. Right now buyers are turned over at checkout to Paypal, which complicates both the checkout process and ability to offer discounts, coupons and gift certificates. Easing this process would make it easier for the buyer to make a purchase and for sellers to offer rewards to customers.

This was just some of the things discussed. I just felt really empowered by the meeting their goals were clear- to grow etsy and to grow all our businesses. They believed in etsy and it made me happy to hear. I work so hard on my shop and it felt really good to see the CEO and VP working just as hard.

Read more here...