@MaggieandRose: Yes, and I’m afraid my customers are seeing it too, and I’m getting discount codes as well. It’s like being followed round a shop by a very irritating assistant. Etsy has zero idea about true customer service.
Have been doing a lot of editing in my shop today. It's occurred after every edit, so I've lost count of the amount of times I've had to X out of it.
What's especially annoying is that it's not just happening on Etsy. I read the news on my phone, and every time I look up an article on it, every page is so saturated with ads that they're literally after every paragraph, and many pages start playing a video on the page too so you have to X out of it. The videos keep popping up as you scroll down a page as well, and some ads cover the content so you can't read the entire article.
Then there's YouTube where every video starts with not just one ad, but two, and they keep repeating the same ads over and over and over and ... zzzzz.
What I don't get is how they expect anyone to click on them when they shove so many in our faces that we're sick to death of them.
It reminds me of a time when I went into a shop years ago to browse and was asked as soon as I entered, "Can I help you?" When I answered that I was just browsing and moved to a section in the store, another assistant asked me the same thing. It happened again and again until all five of the assistants in the shop had asked me in every section I visited. I finally gave up and left and never went back again.
When you keep pushing customers to buy something, it seems like such an act of desperation, and I just don't get why they think that would work. It's as if they don't put themselves in the shoes of buyers and sellers at all which is vital when you're coming up with marketing ideas. I mean, would that method make them want to buy something?
What I find odd about this desperation to get shoppers to buy stuff when they're being driven to buy stuff online anyway because so many retail stores have closed. Just last week I found that all the Office Depots except one had abruptly gone out of business, and there are only three Staples left. Big Lots; Bed, Bath, and Beyond; Tuesday Morning; and so on ... so many have closed, and others have either stopped carrying merchandise I've bought for decades or they've replaced it with cheap Temu-like stuff. All that means that the alternative is buying stuff online, so why oh why do so many websites feel that they have to keep shoving ads on us on every page we visit? If sales are down due to inflation, do they think that annoying us consistently will drive them back up? Perhaps a better method would be to train marketing and sales employees so they don't keep coming up with ideas that will likely either drive them towards the competition or drive them to rethink whether they need an item at all? I've never been a minimalist, but these ads are making me rethink that idea.
