Etsy shoppers could face being 'ripped off' by some sellers making false claims that their products are handmade - and end up paying several times more than they should.
Consumer experts at Which? warned customers that it had discovered some Etsy pages advertising items for sale and claiming that they were "handmade", when the products in question were actually available for a much cheaper price at other retailers. These product listings were found to be charging shoppers up to seven times the price of items from the likes of Amazon, B&M and Asda.
Which? analysed the first page of items in a selection of categories on Etsy in March, including furniture, toys and clothes, filtering the results to only show "handmade" items before using a Google image search to see if any of the products were on sale elsewhere. The research found that 23 handmade items out of the 192 looked at were also available on other online platforms or retailers, and all but two had a higher price on Etsy.
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One of the products being falsely advertised as handmade were a free-standing bookshelf priced £59.99 on Etsy, six times the price of an identical item available for £10 on Alibaba, while on Amazon the same product was £28.88 and on eBay it was £28.90. Another "star seller" was found to be selling a "handmade" rustic bedside night stand table for £128.31 on the site – nearly three times the price of the same item on Amazon where it was found for £43.99.
Which? found an industrial coffee table from the same seller available on Etsy for £146.10 but much cheaper on Wowcher (£59.99), Manomano (£84.99), Wayfair (£89.99), Aosom (£99.99) and eBay (£131.99). And another highly rated seller was offering a "handmade" shabby chic chest of drawers for £175, plus £25 for delivery - Which? found the same product on B&Q marketplace at £72.99 with free delivery, a £102 difference on the price of the item or £127 if delivery costs were included.
One Asda side table was being sold as handmade on Etsy for £42.99, while on Asda it was £22 – meaning it was being sold on for nearly double the price. A bee print shower curtain that was £7 at Asda was three and a half times the price on Etsy at £23.99.
Etsy rules state that everything listed for sale on Etsy must be handmade, vintage or a craft supply, and sellers must have been involved in the making or design of the item. Etsy has removed some of the sellers from its platform since Which? notified it of its findings.
Rocio Concha, Which? director of policy and advocacy, said: "Our research shows some Etsy sellers are brazenly ripping off customers by making misleading claims about their products. Etsy needs to up its game in tackling these dishonest practices, which serve as an example of why a crackdown on dodgy claims and advertising online is long overdue.
"The Government must put a statutory regulator in place to ensure platforms have sufficient processes to prevent misleading advertising. This should include the ability to issue fines against platforms that flout the rules."
An Etsy spokeswoman said: "Etsy is proud to be home to millions of unique, handcrafted, and customised goods, and protecting the integrity of our marketplace is critical to our business. Our policies prohibit counterfeit and resold merchandise on Etsy, and we use a combination of automatic controls, manual review, and user flags to continuously monitor the marketplace and identify policy violations.
"Etsy users are also encouraged to report potentially violating listings via our site-wide flagging tool. Since 2018, we’ve quadrupled our investments in the trust and safety of our marketplace and, in 2022 alone, we put 50 million dollars towards these efforts.
"Specifically, we are intensifying enforcement of our Handmade Policy, and we have expanded our team of content moderators and strengthened our automated detection systems to steadily increase our removal of resold content."
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