Free Republic

Cheese pizza, anyone? A viral online rumor is spreading like wildfire, claiming that Etsy is unwittingly being used as a hub for child porn and child trafficking. It’s a very serious accusation, so we want to share the information with you and allow you to draw your own conclusions. The author, Liz Crokin, provided a lot of detailed information on the topic. Here’s what she had to say: IS CHILD TRAFFICKING TAKING PLACE ON ETSY? There are a lot of suspicious listings on Etsy that have people wondering if child porn or children are for sale for sex on the...

Etsy’s employee costs have grown even as gross merchandise sales have been near flat, CEO says.. Etsy Inc. shares fell more than 7% in Wednesday trading to place among the S&P 500 index’s biggest laggards after the e-commerce company announced layoff plans. The company intended to cut about 11% of its staff, or roughly 225 employees, as it embarks on a broader restructuring. ... We are operating in a very challenging macro and competitive environment, and [gross merchandise sales] has remained essentially flat since 2021. This means we are not bringing our sellers more sales, which is the single most...

The Philadelphia protester who torched two police cars in 2020 – and was then tracked down by investigators through the website Etsy – was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for the attack. Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, 35, pleaded guilty in March to downgraded charges of obstructing, impeding and interfering with law enforcement officers for firebombing the two cop cars outside Philadelphia City Hall as protests raged in the city. At her sentencing hearing Thursday, Blumenthal said she was high on drugs and in the throes of addiction when she torched the cars, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “My substance abuse left...

A recent easing of mask-wearing guidelines from the US government was a welcome change for many Americans. That wasn't entirely the case for mask seller Gabriela Henriquez. "I immediately called and texted my friends who were working for me making masks through the pandemic and said this wasn't good news for us," said Henriquez, who sells face masks on Etsy. LittleLadyAHomemade for her handmade masks plunged more than 70% the day after the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention announcement on May 13. The agency said that people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 do not need to wear masks or...

To make a fortune selling masks on Etsy, you needed three things. First, you needed to be familiar with the garment industry — ideally, already working in it. Second, you needed to be in or around Los Angeles. (Sorry, New Yorkers.) And third, you needed energy, because shipping tens of thousands of masks a month with a tiny crew meant working late into the night, then getting up early the next morning to do it all again, sometimes, while caring for kids in between. For those who went all in, the effort was worth it: some mom-and-pop Etsy shops became...

We Stand in Solidarity #BlackLivesMatter To the Etsy Community, The past days and weeks have, once again, shone a spotlight on the tremendous injustices in our society. We stand in solidarity with our employees and communities who are voicing their anguish, anger, and deep frustration with systems that oppress and devalue Black lives. We stand against police brutality in all forms. We stand against a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets Black Americans. We stand against the widespread disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities whose voices are silenced at the polls. Allyship with Black communities is as much a moral...

You’re going to find this very strange, but I’m more of an anti-mask person,” Laura Howard told me last week, recounting the success of her business selling “Trump 2020” masks on an Etsy store called “isewformygrandkids.” The 63-year-old grandmother of eight, a retired Walmart assistant manager from Stanton, Michigan, grumbles about Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s strict stay-at-home guidelines. She invited her kids and grandkids over on Mother's Day, telling them masks and social distancing were optional. But most retail stores around her require customers to wear masks. And so, since the start of the crisis, Howard had been sewing masks...

Hand-knit dog booties? Portraits made of gum? “Seinfeld”-themed enamel pins? Whatever objects you love to craft, no matter how niche they are, there’s a horde of consumers out there looking for your product—and most of them are browsing the Etsy marketplace. If you don’t have previous experience with the platform, opening an Etsy shop may seem like a complicated prospect. But in reality, opening an Etsy shop is relatively straightforward and can provide for an optimal home for your products—either alongside your small business website or as your primary online storefront. Here, we’ll first walk you through the basic steps...

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

I was thinking about selling my arm knit infinity scarves on Etsy. I've discovered I need to get a fed tax ID number, register my business with my state (Ohio), create a sales tax payment account on the state's tax site, get a vendors license, and potentially charge and pay local sales tax. All this for what I'd consider my "egg money"? If you sell on Etsy or know somebody who does, could you share the experience?

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday morning that Etsy is getting $5 million from New York state to stay in Brooklyn, a pretty nice sum for a company whose CEO publicly acknowledged just weeks ago that it “could only exist in Brooklyn.” “A company like Etsy could only exist in Brooklyn,” Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson said during an April 23 appearance at a Brooklyn Tech Triangle symposium. “Almost all of our employees live in Brooklyn and our Manhattan employees are treated with scorn.” Etsy, which was founded in Brooklyn in 2005, plans to add more than 340 jobs by 2019 (a...