Hi everyone, my name is Corinne and I lead the Trust & Safety team at Etsy. My team works to protect the marketplace by enforcing our House Rules and combating fraud.
We’re committed to keeping Etsy special, unique, and safe as our community grows, which is why we currently plan to again invest over $50 million in our trust and safety efforts in 2023. We’ve also heard from you how important policy enforcement on Etsy is. This year, some of our key areas of focus will include:
- Making it clearer what can and can’t be sold on Etsy, and enforcing our policies so we can better highlight the special, unique, and well-crafted items you sell.
- Removing counterfeit items and listings that don’t follow our Handmade Policy. To do this, we plan to expand and improve the accuracy of the automated technology we use to quickly identify and remove listings that don’t belong on Etsy, while also investing in the teams and people who review violations. We’re also committed to ensuring that shops that repeatedly violate our policies are removed from the platform for good.
- Making it easier for sellers to appeal policy decisions and get a quick resolution. While we’re confident in the tools we use to identify listings that violate our policies, on rare occasions we make mistakes. Earlier this year, we launched an updated appeals center where sellers can ask our Trust & Safety team to review and reconsider eligible account suspensions. Since introducing this new process, we’ve seen a 17% increase in seller satisfaction with the appeals process.
- Communicating quickly and transparently with shops that violate our policies so they know what actions we’re taking and why. We’ll also work to proactively share more education to help sellers better understand Etsy’s policies.
- Making it easy for sellers to review and update their personal and business information so we can keep our community safe and reduce fraud.
All of this work helps to ensure that Etsy remains a marketplace where creativity, authenticity, and diversity thrives. You can read more about our plans for 2023 in our recent Seller Handbook article.
This year we’ll build on years of continued investment in and focus on Trust & Safety. Read more about the progress we made in 2022 in our 2022 Transparency Report. It gives our community a look into our content policy enforcement, intellectual property takedowns, order issues, and requests for member information or account action.
Read the report here.
Here are a few highlights:
- Investments in new automated technology helped us remove more than four times as many listings for violating our Handmade Policy in 2022 than in the previous year. We've heard from you how important it is that we work to remove items from the marketplace that don't belong on Etsy. The vast majority of listings that were removed were identified by our automated systems.
- We made it easier for Etsy sellers and brands to report alleged intellectual property violations. In April 2022, we launched the Etsy Reporting Portal to make it easier for rights owners and their representatives to report potential intellectual property infringement.
- Fewer cases were opened in 2022 and they were resolved more quickly. In 2022, cases were resolved by our team in just 14 hours, on average. That’s down from around 4.5 days in 2021.
- We invested in our support teams to help sellers get the help they need, when they need it. In 2022, we launched new live support options like live chat in Etsy’s Help Center. As of November 2022, any Etsy seller with a listing has access to 24/7 live chat in Etsy’s Help Center for most support topics.
Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share updates on the progress we’re making together.
