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Marketing
24 February
Etsy drives incremental revenue with search, advertising upgrades
The marketplace has internal "squads" focused on specific areas of improvement.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Etsy mounted a strong showing in the holiday quarter, posting “very strong” performance to close out 2022.
While a lot of talk lately is on the external factors shaping retail, Etsy executives spoke more about the internal improvements they made to the marketplace in areas such as search and advertising.
Here’s a look how the company focused the team, and the results that these initiatives drove:
Advertising
Inside Etsy, a big focus is the Right to Win. This describes focus areas where the company seeks to make marked improvements.
“Each year, we pick a select set of customer experiences where we believe we can make material improvements in ways that result in materially better experiences for buyers, more sales for sellers and better returns for investors,” said CEO Josh Silverman. “Etsy teams, often working in what we call a squad, are tasked with a single customer experience to improve in ways that achieve a specific financial target.”
In 2022, executives put a focus on advertising. In particular, they called on the team to make ads more relevant for buyers, while at the same time keeping seller ROAS above targets. The result was a better experience for customers, Silverman said. It also delivered results to the tune of over $100 million in incremental annualized revenue.
Silverman broke down how the squads function:
Squads have a great deal of freedom to test fast and learn fast and a strong bias to action. They often push more than one release per week, typically to 50% of Etsy's audience, so we can quickly measure whether that release has demonstrably lifted GMS or moved the target metric.
Importantly, we meet monthly to review the progress made by each squad. By doing this across our entire portfolio of work, we're able to understand the degree of payback we're getting or not from our investments, how they're impacting daily performance and adjust our work accordingly to ensure we're moving the ball forward to improve customer experiences and meet our targets.
For Etsy Ads, product enhancements throughout the year drove “better-than-anticipated performance,” said CFO Rachel Glaser.
“This included utilization of neural network embeddings, a type of machine learning advancement to increase ad relevance, which drove more clicks and purchases,” Glaser said. “We also launched a more visually engaging ad experience with videos on the homepage that increase conversion and return on ad spend for sellers.”
Search
Etsy also made a concerted effort to improve the search experience on the marketplace throughout the year. Results will only compound
As Silverman put it, “With about 120 million live listings, getting you to the good stuff is really important.”
Search was also an area that saw continuous cycles of testing and scaling. The search team launched 120 experiments that were ramped up.
Among those were Etsy Lens, which allows users to provide a picture in the search field as opposed to words. Etsy is also improving neuro models, which helps search make sense of meaning as opposed to words.
“In fact, the neuro models we're using use the same kind of underlying algorithms that ChatGPT uses,” Silverman said. “So we're already using some of the underlying technologies that you're seeing from great innovators like Open AI, and it's having great impact.”
Improvements bring additional opportunities to make the path to purchase easier. Search results could now have a buy button embedded, enabling people to buy items directly from the results page, rather than having to go to an additional listing page.
Going forward, the company is looking to add more multimodal search that allows users to combine pictures and words. Silverman also wants search results to become more personalized to a particular user.
The company is also focused on what search results do for the business. It pays close attention to the processing power used, and weighs the cost added versus the results that the feature drives.
“Having multiple objective functions has been very helpful. How do I do something which drives conversion rate but also drives repeat visit rate?” Silverman said. “Those two actually might not be the same in terms of search results, so training our models to solve for more than one thing at one time.”
Development of chat-like interfaces is also top-of-mind given the rise of ChatGPT, and Silverman said that type of innovation is “very possibly” a future feature.
“We are constantly testing what's on the frontier,” Silverman said. “And if it makes our experience better and it does it in a way that's profitable, we're going to do it.”
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Operations
13 March
Ecommerce feels ripple effects of Silicon Valley Bank collapse
Etsy sellers and the retailer Camp were among those affected when the bank to startups shut down.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
The swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday had far-reaching ripple effects in the startup world that extended to ecommerce platforms and brands.
Regulators shut down SVB on March 10 after the bank’s move to raise capital in the face of rising interest rates and a slowdown in tech funding left trust teetering, and gave way to an influx of withdrawals. This left depositors unable to access funds. Read a full explainer here.
SVB was a major lender to startups, as it catered to early-stage companies with financial products tailored to the capital needs of fast-moving and flexible young companies, and the investment firms that backed them. While startups remain a small segment of the economy as a whole, the closure of a bank that was synonymous with tech both in stature and balance sheet left an entire sector reeling.
While deposits up to $250,000 are insured by the banking regulatory arm FDIC, the move to put the bank in receivership meant accounts were inaccessible to many businesses that were already operating lean as they sought to prove out new business models. Those with more than a quarter-million dollars in the bank were left with serious doubts about whether they would see their money.
While the collapse left many fretting over the weekend about being able to make payroll and cover expenses, there were signs of a rescue in sight on Sunday. Regulators announced that all depositors would be able to access funds on Monday, March 13.
The marketplace Etsy was among the ecommerce companies affected, as funds it had at the bank to pay sellers appeared to be inaccessible over the weekend.
“We recently experienced a delay in issuing payments to some sellers related to the unexpected collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” the marketplace wrote. “Our teams have been working around the clock to implement a solution, and we expect to pay sellers via our other payment partners within the next several business days.”
Following the FDIC’s announcement on March 12, Etsy said it expected to begin issuing payments on Monday.
Shopify, which provides software used by emerging brands to run ecommerce stores, was also among the companies with funds in Silicon Valley Bank. The company posted an FAQ through its Shopify Capital service, which provides financial products for brands that helps provide access to working capital.
"If you have an SVB account on file for Shopify Payments, then your payouts have been temporarily paused," the FAQ stated at one point.
Shopify Capital in the U.S. was also "impacted" by the collapse, the FAQ stated. This meant offers through the program were temporary on hold.
On Twitter, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said Saturday that the collapse had a “very minor impact for us.”
“We use SVB as one of ~12 or so banks spread over mostly Canada and US. Canada has stricter banking risk regulations,” Lutke wrote. “A small portion of our US operational fund flows is tied up in SVB but we are working around it and it should be business as usual.”
After seeing the bank where its funds were held shut down, one retailer turned to the tried and true tactic of issuing a promo code to generate fast sales. On Friday, the family experience retailer Camp advertised 40% off for customers who used the code “BANKRUN.”
“Unfortunately, we had most of our company’s cash assets at a bank which just collapsed,” cofounder Ben Kaufman wrote in an email to customers.
The popup ad that greeted visitors to Camp's site on Friday captured the mood of the moment:
(Screenshot via Camp)
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