Etsy will start pushing sellers to include free shipping

Etsy, the home and craft products website, announced Tuesday that it would begin taking action later this month with the aim of strongly encouraging its legion of sellers to offer free shipping. This operation is Etsy's latest effort to match the practices of his rivals online.

The Brooklyn-based e-commerce company hopes its sellers, which represent a turnover of 2.2 million euros, offer free shipping from $ 35 free order from the end of the year.

Etsy's general manager, Josh Silverman, calls the free delivery "table stakes" that the site has to offer to be competitive. While the uniqueness of its products protects Etsy from some competition, Silverman notes that customer expectations are influenced by what they see among their competitors.

"Buyers hate having separate shipping charges and rubbed in the face," says Silverman Fortune. The irritating additional shipping costs makes them less likely to come back. Currently, about 30% of what Etsy sells comes with free shipping.

In addition, Etsy's internal research estimates that when a transaction includes free shipping, buyers are 20% more likely to finalize the purchase of an item from their online shopping cart. than to abandon their basket.

Although sellers are not required to waive their fees or incorporate them into their overall selling price, they may actually have little choice. From the end of July, the Etsy search engine will favor free shipments, a particularly important factor when 80% of items purchased through an online search on Etsy appear on the first page of search results . The company will begin marketing free shipping to buyers in September.

The effort to increase the number of purchases is ending as Etsy attempts to expand its customer base and get existing customers to buy more often. The site has about 41 million customers that it considers active, which means that they have shopped for at least one day in the last year. The challenge for Etsy is that 60% of these people actually bought only once during this period.

The push of free shipping, a major priority for Etsy, comes about a year after the market operator has increased its commission on items sold through the site. (The total value of what was sold on Etsy last year was $ 3.9 billion.)

This decision has worried many sellers and the free delivery mandate will likely provoke anger. But Silverman, who became CEO in 2017, considers this to be essential for improving and standardizing customer service, arguing that a bad experience with a vendor was undermining other vendors and Etsy as a whole.

"The expectations of buyers have changed," he says. "To be successful, it's important for sellers to meet buyers wherever they are."

To ease the transition, Etsy said it would provide sellers with ways to facilitate free shipping, including a digital tool to update prices more quickly.

During its last quarter, Etsy's sales reached $ 169.3 million, up 40%. Gross sales of merchandise, or the value of what was sold on the site, increased by 18.9% to exceed the $ 1 billion recorded in its last strong performance.