Open Ecommerce Protocol? A way to give small businesses a fighting chance?

Could this be a solution in democratising the ecommerce away from the big platform sites like Etsy?

Introduction

This one is bit more technical and as my technical skills are very much trained to aim a hammer onto a piece of hot metal at a very specific angle and force. You may have to excuse my limited understanding on the technical details on how protocols work.

When I am working I listen to a lot of podcasts. One that I follow is called Better Offline, hosted by Ed Zitron. If you are interested in technology and are baffled as to the current dystopian state of the tech world and enjoy listening to rant about it in a british accent (like the character Butcher from The Boys), then please check it out.

In the episode called “The Streissand Effect” he interviews Mike Masnick, the author of a article called “Protocols, Not Platforms: a Technological Approach to Free Speech” published in 2019 on Techdirt. This is essentially what inspired the new social media called Bluesky.

Go read the the article and then come back to me. Also if you have the time, make yourself a cup of tea and listen to the podcast. The part that we are interested starts at 20:50. I will wait.

Current State of things and why I think this is needed

We started as a business in 2006 and where basically restricted to selling at markets, events and through shops. We had a website, but where not able to sell on it. If someone wanted a commission, they would have to email us.

When we joined Etsy in 2012, as a business it was a game changer. Having a place in a worldwide online market allowed us access to a wider audience where those who where into our little niche could find us. From an artisan point of view, it was a revolution as significant as social media.

But like with social media, we got tied down into the platform. Years of work in building sales history, reputation, catalogue and followers are essentially tied down to one entity that can arbitrarily shut us down. For example if their AI finds out photos on sites like Alibaba, something that is out of our control, they can deactivate our shopd. It is stressful when most of our income can suddenly stop and access to all our sales history, customers, reviews, photos, descriptions can be locked out without notice or warning. Essentially we do not own any of the content we create on platform markets.

On the other hand Etsy has evolved into a direction that is no longer as beneficial or in line with us as a business. The sheer size makes it difficult to be found and we are competing in a marketplace where businesses that exist in a different economic paradigm can completely out price and out sell us.

Thirdly Etsy knows majority of us have no alternative. They are dominant and are not afraid to use it to extract more value from its sellers, without really adding any more benefit to staying on the platform. Fee structures are baroque, and the platform is taking ever more control over how we run our businesses, dictating policies, shipping times and prices.

What makes this more egrecious is that many sellers on Etsy are marginalised in the grand workplace economy, people who for reasons of caring for others, disability, neurodiversity or come from challenging economic circumstances. People who cannot work normal 9 to 5 jobs. Intense value extraction in these situaitions is morally questionable.

You have to just have a rudimentary look on social media, youtube and the critisism are plenty. Yet no other platform has in the past 10 years come near to taking any significant share from them to provide a viable alternative.

I’ve looked at the situation for 10 years and have tried alternatives. I have my own website and run that through another platform, Shopify. The sheer amount of work needed to start and operate on multiple platforms at once is prohibitive, especially for sellers that are also the manufacturers of what they sell.

A new platform will not be able to take off without having the sellers and their listings on there. But a seller is not incentivised to do the massive amount of work to transfer over and maintain multiple platforms unless the buyers are there. So both parties loose.

Masnick’s open protocol based idea could provide a solution for this. Which is why I got very excited listening to this podcast. In the next part I will follow the podcast on how the Twitter/Bluesky situaition could apply with Etsy/Folksy-BritishCraftHouse-ArtisansCooperative-GoImagine-NuMonday-ETC.

Adding to the conversation on the Podcast

00:20. On content moderation. Online markeplaces are very much like real life markets. You go to a Christmas faire to buy decorations, you go to a farmers market to buy food, you go to a Craft market to buy artisan made etc. Buyers know what to expect and buyers also have an expectation on how much they will end up spending. The organiser gain profit from fees and the sellers benefit from the organisers promoting the market.

If you suddenly have a supermarket set up a stall in a farmers market, or someone comes into a craft fair wanting to sell mobile phones, you end up in a situaition where moderation is needed. Either the organiser will suffer in the reputation of the marketplace being damaged or the sellers will face poorer sales, because they cannot compete.

This paradigm very much applies to Etsy. Recently Etsy announced they are fine with gen-AI produced work. As a result artists find that their work buried in search results due to the sheer volume of images mass produced usin gen-AI. In a similar way, when etsy allowed manufacturing on the market, people who where making things themselves where suddenly presented next to people selling things made in factories overseas, with no way to compete on price and driving the perceived value of hand made items down below a point that the artisan can make a living.

Over time Etsy sellers found themselves taking more of a hit on their profits, despite their living costs increasing. But unlike a real life market, where you can choose not to go next year, there is no other option.

You have a website, but you would be spending extraordinate amount of time promoting your website to get enough visitors, essentially doing the work of the marketplace organiser. Taking time away from production. We could throw money in to fix the problem, but in advertising we are pitted against multinational corporation’s advertising budgets. There is also very little in the way you can yourself differentiate yourself from the scam websites that copy our websites. Trust is a rare currency these days.

00:30 The email example & where is the incentive? One of the ways a seller build trust, is by having a sales history and getting reviews. This is one of the biggest reasons why a seller doesn’t want to leave a marketplace. Leaving essentially means starting over again. Comaparable to leaving a social media in the podcast example. We would leave behind customers you have spent years building relationships with.

For established platform like Etsy, there is little incentive to take part in an open prtocol, apart from maybe getting some of the customers and sellers back that lost trust in the platform. For new emerging marketplaces there is plenty of incentive. A brand new marketplace could much more easily populate their website with shops and items that fit their’s and their audiences vision on what the marketplace is like. The organisers position would more be like a curated search engine or an advertiser. There also would be less pressure to grow leaving you free to have your site be as exclusive as you want. If you provide value to your sellers, you can also charge for your services better, much like exclusive high end markets do.

00:38 Can we find our own Jay Graber? Or can we borrow you? I hope I may have inspired one of you reading to maybe pass this onto someone who sees the value in this. Someone who may be able to take it further. Create an environment where creatives, not just restricted to artisans like myself, but artists, authors, musicians or any one who lives by the work their own hands can easily access a diverse array of markets more suitable for them and where they don’t get locked into extractive systems where they have little or no agency.

What can we do?

This article is very much written from the viewpoint of an individual maker trying to make a living manufacturing and selling their work. It is by no means a comprehensive idea and needs a lot more work, especially from the technical side. The main reason for framing it from the small microbusiness and solo-manufacturer point of view is that we have very little agency in the current system and need a way to access a wide variety of markets, without the extra work currently needed.

We are not work shy, but as our income directly depends on how many hours we can spend in our workshops in the manufacturing part, any extra time needed in the marketing and selling part decreases our productivity. We need marketplaces that do that work for us in exchange of a commission or fair rent. But we also need the freedom to move if that marketplace no longer works for us or the rent becomes paretian in nature.

Without this freedom we risk becoming the latest casualties in the gig economy and little more than micro sweatshops, with the illusion of being self employed, when in truth any content we create is ulitmately owned and controlled by the platforms, they decide our pricing and control our visibility as punishment.

If an open protocol is built with indvidual makers in mind, it will be a shoe that fits. Instead of us trying to wedge ourselves into Google Shopping’s or Amazon’s private protocols built for mass-production and dropshipping, we can have a protocol that automatically excludes these middlemen.

Transparency of origin can be built into it. We could protecting the copyright or intellectual rights of the images and designs uploaded to it, using NFT like blockchain technology. Makers could choose who they process payments through on an item by item basis, as well as choose which geographical regions they sell in. You could even have a registry of all sellers and participating markets to make it easier for customers and marketplace owners to find suitable items.

In Summary

This is a call to action. I want this idea out there and I want those with the technical skill and those with the organisational skill and will to make it better for all of those people who choose or have to earn a living by creating. If you like shopping on Etsy and get frustrated by not being able to find work made by artisans or if you want want you purchase to directly support individual artists or if you want to create a marketplace, then please share these words.

Dear Substack…Why is there no spell check feature in this editor??? Sod it. Leaving some 1spelling errors, so you can see its not written using GenAi