Etsy Wholesale
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Etsy Wholesale was a business-to-business marketplace inside Etsy that connected the site's sellers with larger retailers such as Macy's, West Elm, and Williams-Sonoma. Those retailers could place bigger orders at discounted prices, giving Etsy's artisans a channel into brick-and-mortar stores alongside the main consumer marketplace.
02 / Etsy Wholesale FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
Buyer demand and seller participation were below expectations. The resources needed to maintain a separate wholesale marketplace were too high for its level of use.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
Etsy closed its separate wholesale marketplace on 31 July 2018.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Etsy announced the closure on May 30, 2018, and the wholesale marketplace shut down on July 31, 2018.
- 02
The product never reached the traction Etsy expected: only about 5,000 of the company's 2 million sellers used it actively, so Etsy refocused resources on its main website.