••• pricing research
Research tool offers reality check for Etsy sellers
Etsy, an e-commerce Web site focused on individual sellers offering handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies, has exploded in popularity since its inception in 2005. It’s become a go-to resource for one-of-a-kind, customized or hard-to-find gifts, from crocheted animal ears and personalized mugs to Mad Men-esque lowball glasses and thousand-dollar estate diamond rings. And Etsy is now getting involved in research to help its sellers establish or modify their business models and pricing strategies, which are left totally to the sellers’ discretion. 
Pricing on Etsy can become a point of contention between sellers and buyers, as what’s fair to one person may seem outrageous to another. Using an example from above, an Etsy site search for “crocheted animal ears” yielded a pink crocheted headdress with pig ears for $5 and a gray crocheted hat with nondescript animal ears for $55 – similar materials and similar end product with a $50 price difference.
It’s a common problem Etsy buyers face: An item buyers perceive to be worth a certain amount is overpriced by the creator selling it. It’s possible – even likely – that the inflated value is derived from the uniqueness of a handmade item and the loving care put into it rather than an attempt by the seller to settle on a fair market price. Sellers struggle in emotionally detaching from their handmade items, allowing personal bias to convolute their judgment of worth. And Etsy users are left wondering if there’s any method to the madness.
To be fair, some sellers conduct market research to determine pricing by wading through Etsy search results, using third-party tools, sending out surveys or asking for help in the forums. Unfortunately, surface-level DIY market research doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of what is selling in the Etsy marketplace.
To address this, Etsy has developed the Market Research Tool to bring sellers more information about their markets. The Market Research Tool is designed to allow sellers to see the distribution of prices for listings that sold in the last three months via a bar graph, distinguishing tags in each price range and items that are currently for sale in that price range. Searches must currently match something that someone actually searched and then purchased; searches with insufficient data will not produce a graph. The tool is currently only available to logged-in sellers.
••• retailing
Hurricane Sandy profiteers panned
Though the ostensible goal of retailers who used Hurricane Sandy-inspired promotions was to encourage shopping from home instead of risking life and limb in the treacherous conditions, consumers were more critical – and overwhelmingly intolerant – of Hurricane Sandy-driven promotions and the firms trying to profit from the disaster.
American Apparel, Gap and Urban Outiftters all featured online discounts of questionable taste the first night of the storm with codes like SANDYSALE and ALLSOGGY.
The Twittersphere exploded in backlash: @whitneyhess tweeted, “I just received a ‘Hurricane Sandy sale’ email blast from @americanapparel. I will forever boycott their stores. RT if you’re with me.” @jontando said, “@Gap Try taking a break from being a shill for a couple of days instead of trying to tie in a life-threatening storm warning to your ads?”
Even some non-storm-affected marketing research companies took advantage of the opportunity to push their own services for projects and facilities that may have been derailed or compromised by the weather.
It remains a mystery whether these promotions did the companies any good or if whatever benefit it provided the bottom line could possibly be worth the dip in negative public opinion, as many consumers see the companies as opportunistic, greedy or even immoral.