With a global community of 5.3 million sellers and nearly 90 million buyers, maintaining the health and integrity of our marketplace has never been more important. Each day, our specialized Trust & Safety teams work tirelessly to enforce these policies, ensuring that we remain a trusted brand.

Today, we’re releasing our 2021 Transparency Report for the Etsy marketplace* — a look back at our policy enforcement for the year, including our Intellectual Property, Prohibited Items and Requests for Member Information policies. This report is an important way that we demonstrate our commitment to being a mindful and transparent organization. We choose to share this information annually to reinforce these values and help our community better understand how we’re working to keep our marketplace safe.

The full report is available here and a few highlights from 2021 are below:

• We registered 17 million flags regarding potentially noncompliant listings, a 325% increase in flags from 2020; breaches of our Prohibited Items Policy and our Intellectual Property Policy were among the most commonly flagged violations. This increase in volume was driven in large part by Etsy’s significant investment in technology, which allowed us to detect more potentially violating listings for review, faster.
• We saw a 129% increase in the number of intellectual property takedowns compared to 2020, which we attribute to the growth of the Etsy marketplace last year and our investment in technology, including the launch of our Etsy Reporting Portal, a central hub for rights owners to seamlessly report alleged violations.
• We rejected 18% of intellectual property takedown notices due to insufficient information, incorrect information, or other noncompliance under Etsy’s policies, a 20% increase over 2020, indicative of our increased focus on preventing fraudulent and abusive takedown notices.
• About 0.46% of orders placed in 2021 went through our Case System, slightly up from 0.44% in 2020, and we saw a narrow increase in the rate of orders with a Help with Order message. These increases were driven by product improvements that made it easier for buyers to report issues on Etsy.
• In 2021, we invested more than $40 million in Trust & Safety efforts, introducing a number of meaningful changes not only to make the Etsy community safer, but also to make our users’ interactions with Trust & Safety more seamless.
• As always, all members of our community agree to follow Our House Rules.

Looking ahead, we’re focused on keeping Etsy a trusted brand and a platform where our sellers’ creativity continues to shine. We recently shared that this year, we’re accelerating efforts to enforce our Handmade Policy and cracking down on resellers. As part of this commitment, we have onboarded a specialized team of agents who are hard at work reviewing tens of thousands of listings each week and removing non-handmade items. Additionally, this year we’re investing heavily in enhancing customer support, which includes growing our support team by more than 20% and empowering our seller community with improved tools and resources. These are just a few of the ways we’re bringing value to our community by keeping our marketplace safe.

*This report only covers the Etsy marketplace and none of Etsy, Inc.'s subsidiary brands.