Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?

The entire social commerce segment of 2008 and 2009 has shown more regress than progress. In contrast, the social web has enjoyed one innovation after the other thanks to strong players such as Facebook and Twitter.

Social commerce has a lot of catching up to do. In particular, Etsy wants to take the stage again and show what social commerce can be. Not just e-commerce spiced with bit of “social” mixed in, but specifically a social universe in which you can also happen to sell, bargain and trade.

Once upon a time, Fred Wilson (one of the early Etsy investors) decisively removed Etsy founder Rob Kalin from the CEO post due to his lack of experience.

Meanwhile however, he seems to have re-considered, perhaps due to his investments in sites such as Twitter. Now he blows the social commerce horn along with recently re-instated Rob Kalin (“Thinking About Etsy”):

"This decade we are now ending will be remembered as the time when the web became social.

It took us almost a decade once the web became commercial, but we figured out how to make people the atomic element of the web.

And now we get to build social gathering places on the web."

Although Etsy hasn’t fared too badly in the last two years from a pure commercial point of view (having enjoyed a growth rate of 100%), from a networking point of view the progress was moderate to disappointing. The expected networking effects are completely missing. Fred Wilson wrote:

"Etsy has done a good job of bringing people (real people) together to buy and sell. There are over 500,000 people who have opened a shop on Etsy and millions who have registered and bought something from a seller on Etsy. (...)

There is also a very lively community on Etsy. (...) But Etsy is not yet as vibrant and diverse an experience as San Telmo. Most people don't go to Etsy to 'stroll" or 'hang out'. Some do and (...) the people that do use Etsy in this way are starting to have a San Telmo like experience.

What Etsy needs to do next is make this kind of 'strolling' experience work for everyone. We need to bump into our friends on Etsy and we need to make new ones there."

The next big challenge in social commerce is how to strengthen social ties to create Facebook-like behavioural effects:

"And getting to that kind of scale, as Facebook has shown us, requires putting people front and center in the experience.

Rob Kalin, founder and now CEO of Etsy, prefers the words 'social commerce' over e-commerce for a reason. The emphasis is on social. Commerce is the result. An afternoon in San Telmo makes that point crystal clear."

Some realizations take a bit longer to mature and take form: "E-Commerce is about products, Social Commerce about people", has been the Exciting Commerce mantra since 2005.

We at Exciting Commerce are looking forward to many leaps of innovation in social commerce for 2010!

Related posts:

• Social Commerce: Etsy Returning To Its Roots
• Etsy Opens Office in Berlin, Founder Comes Back As CEO
• Etsy Investor Gives an Inside Peek

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Comments

[Zach Philip]

nice post.i also read http://bit.ly/aKM5NF
recently. it was of great help!