I think that’s a pretty good rundown. I think that b-corp is probably the most important thing, because the assessment is really comprehensive. We had to answer questions like, “What percentage of your employees live in disadvantaged communities?” We had to look at where all our employees lived and the postal codes where they lived, and the economic data.
We had to look at the ownership structure of the company, our supplier relationship, so that we understood where we were buying things from, everything from paper towels to garbage bags to pencils and all this stuff. So I think the level of transparency that was required to have a third party evaluate our values was really, really high. And that covered almost everything in the company.
Yes, we have a team that evaluates sellers in the marketplace, and we have a community of sellers and Etsy members who report possible violations to our terms. So trust and transparency are important, but we still have systems and processes in place to catch the very few people who don’t comply.
Right. So we’ve been investing in payment, and we’ve just launched a product in the US called Direct Checkout. And what Direct Checkout allows US buyers and sellers to do is to basically handle their own transaction on Etsy, so you don’t have to go off to third party payment systems, like Paypal or others. So we’re basically handling the transactions in the US.
I think the larger goal there is to make it as easy as possible for buyers and sellers to transact on Etsy. That’s the larger purpose. This year we’ll be pushing several hundred million dollars through our systems, and you have people all over the world in different time zones depending on Etsy being available and running all the time. So we’re constantly just investing and making the site more stable and faster and that sort of thing. We have over 100 software developers working for us now, constantly building new features and making the site run really well. So it’s a big technical operation.
What you see in Australia, basically having events, having a physical showroom like the Melbourne showroom, and having staff on the ground, you’re going to see that in more and more countries around the world.
Obviously, right now, we have staff in the US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Australia, Canada. So I think in the long term you’ll see Etsy in every major country around the world and in more languages around the world too.
We only really have specific countries that we’re ready to talk about right now. But Etsy’s available in French and German, so you can imagine that we’ll be adding more languages in the future as well.
But I think the important thing – and this isn’t true of all marketplaces, it’s a worldwide marketplace. So when we think about Etsy and how we’re continuing to build it, it’s always going to be a worldwide marketplace. When we launch in a particular country, the sellers in that country and the buyers in that country will always have access to the entire world marketplace.
Cara Waters is the editor of SmartCompany. Cara was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times website FT Adviser in London and has also worked for The Sunday Times.
