by Corinne Pavlovic

Apr 20, 2023

Etsy connects nearly 90 million buyers with 5.4 million creative sellers from nearly every country in the world. As our community continues to grow, we’re as committed as ever to protecting what makes our marketplace special. We focus on maintaining and strengthening the integrity of our marketplace, so our users can focus on their craft and the connections they build on our platform.

Today, we’re sharing our 2022 Transparency Report, which we voluntarily publish each year to provide our community with an overview of the range of enforcement actions we’ve taken to keep our marketplace safe. We made immense progress in 2022, with an expanded team that focuses on day-to-day enforcement while developing solutions to further improve our internal automated controls, and our manual review processes and operations. Highlights included:

  • In total, we removed 1.9 million listings for violating our policies in 2022, a 16% increase from 2021. To do this, we reviewed 36 million potentially problematic listings, a 112% increase from the previous year. Approximately 95% of these listings were flagged by our internal automated systems, while 5% were reported by our member community. This increase in volume reflects expanded enforcement across key focus areas including counterfeit, product safety, and handmade, and our investment in automation which allowed us to even more quickly detect problematic listings.
  • While the number of flags more than doubled year over year, we reviewed 80% of flagged listings within two working days and all flags within four working days, on average.
  • We removed more than four times as many listings for violating our Handmade Policy in 2022 than in the previous year. The vast majority of listings that were removed were identified by our automated systems, which we are continuing to make more precise, and reviewed and removed by specialists on our team.
  • Our new Etsy Reporting Portal helped thousands of rights holders more easily report alleged infringement, and we published the Ultimate Guide to Intellectual Property, an educational resource designed to help sellers better understand IP rights.
  • We removed approximately 468,000 listings in 2022 for suspected counterfeiting violations through flags generated by our internal automated systems, a 35% increase compared to 2021, reflecting enhancements to our proactive controls to combat potential IP violations and counterfeiting.
  • Just 0.37% of orders placed in 2022 resulted in a case, down from 0.46% in 2021 – and we resolved these cases more quickly. In 2022, cases were resolved by our team in just 14 hours, on average. That’s down from around 4.5 days in 2021.
  • We expanded live chat to help sellers get the help they need, when they need it. As of November 2022, any Etsy seller with a listing has access to 24/7 live chat in Etsy’s Help Center for most support topics.

We are proud of our progress over the past year, but recognize that keeping our marketplace safe is an ongoing journey. That’s why we are intensifying our enforcement efforts in the year to come.

In 2023, we currently plan to invest over $50 million in Trust & Safety, growing our team that conducts manual reviews while expanding and improving the accuracy of our automated controls. Key focus areas will include:

  • Enhancing and expanding our seller verification processes for new and existing sellers, ensuring we know more about who our sellers are, which helps us promote trust across our marketplace.
  • Doubling down on policy enforcement in key areas, such as Handmade, anti-counterfeiting, and prohibited products that are unsafe or inappropriate for some users.
  • Improving seller support around policy enforcement, including more transparent communications when issues arise, a now-live updated appeals center for sellers whose accounts have been suspended, and additional educational resources to help them protect their own IP and brand.

We look forward to keeping our community updated on our progress throughout the year, as we work diligently to keep Etsy a platform where creativity, authenticity and diversity can thrive.